Enough with the Gender Essentialism
Gender essentialism is a pet peeve of mine. You know, when one woman will confide in another a secret about how “men think”? How Psychology Today and Cosmopolitan are constantly headlining the essential differences between men and women, and how to make relationships between the two function (and lead more often to sex)? How even the scientific literature is strewn with studies that try to assign any disparity between the genders directly to simple hormone fluctuations and our apparently simple-minded hunter-gatherer ancestors? *
An article in Scientific American Mind, May/June 2010, caught my attention with its title, “The Truth About Boys and Girls”. They introduce the topic thusly: “Brain differences are indisputably bioloical, but they are not necessarily hardwired. The crucial, often overlooked fact is that experience itself changes brian structure and function… Most sex differences start out small — as mere biases in temperment and play style — but are amplified as children’s pink- or blue-tinted brains meet our gender-infused culture.” There follows much useful information, despite the rest of the magazine being about as bad as Psychology Today, and despite the fact that they kept referring to “sex difference” when they mean “gender difference”.
This begs the question, though: When does “sex difference” become “gender difference”? If gender is in the mind, then it comes into play as soon as an infant engages the gendered world outside the womb. Even though very young children are not aware of their assigned gender, most other people in their lives are. Do baby girls make more eye contact, or do we engage their eyes more?
Research into the ability to mentally rotate objects, a measure of spatial reasoning, shows that while the average man can outperform 80 percent of women, the average four-year-old boy outperforms only 60 percent of four-year-old girls. The article suggests that “sporting gear, vehicles, and building toys tend to exercise physical and spatial skills, whereas dolls, coloring books, and dress-up clothes tend to stimulate verbal, social, and fine-motor circuits”, leading to a greater gender dichotomy later in life.
When psychologists Karin Frey and Diane Ruble studied peer influence, they found that “elementary school-age boys and girls both opted for a less desirable toy (a kaleidoscope) over a slick Fisher-Price movie viewer after watching a commercial of a same-sex child choosing the kaleidoscope and an opposite-sex child choosing the movie viewer”. As children form their identities, their cultural personas, they define themselves in socially understandable ways and glom onto activities that those “like them” care about. We all try to simplify the complex world through generalizations and categories (sound like my thesis yet?), including ideas about ourselves. If my identity is Girl, and the category Girl is constantly lumped together with Pink and Plastic Baby Dolls, then those become part of my identity, too.
Physical fitness is something we think of as definitively testosterone-driven, but a meta-analysis by Warren Eaton and his colleagues showed that “the average boy is more active than about 69 percent of girls”, leaving “31 percent of girls who are more active than the average boy”. That’s not a statistic I would go betting on. “The sex [sic] difference in physical activity continues to widen during childhood, despite the fact that sex hormone levels do not differ between boys and girls from six months of age to puberty.” The article blames parenting for this growing disparity, but there are many other, more subtle cues that kids pick up on, such as the aforementioned gender-specific advertising.
This widening of the gender divide through socialization can also be seen in the oft-overstated case of empathy:
The sex [sic] difference in empathy is smaller than most people realize and also strongly dependent on how it is measured. When men and women are asked to self-report their empathic tendencies, women are much likelier to endorse statements such as ‘I am good at knowing how others feel’… When tested using more objective measures, however, such as recognizing the emotions in a series of photographed faces, the difference between men and women is much smaller… [and] the average woman is more accurate than just 66 percent of men. In children, the difference is tinier still, less than half that found in adults, reported psychologist Erin McClure.
The real difference is not in our hormones, but in how we think of ourselves and how we shape others through our expectations. What little sex difference there is at birth is amplified and suppressed and endlessly molded by society. Gender difference, a product of history, is the more accurate subject of psychological and sociological study.
The distinction between “sex” and “gender” is an important one to make because we view culture as mutable and biology as unchangeable. For us, genes are fate, allowing us to all-too-easily stereotype and give up on thinking critically about why the world is as it is and how we want it to be. Genetic fate and gendered statistics feed the pop psychology that ships men off to Mars and women to Venus and leaves the two halves of humanity puzzling over each other instead of acting like fellow human beings.
- The evo-psych explanations of gendered behavior are also problematic because they assume in advance that these behaviors are genetically coded, and that they increased our ancestor’s fitness in an environment we really know little about. One theory of human evolution, that we evolved to run long distances, suggests that gender differences diminished our species as men and women, young and old, traveled together. Modern ultrarunning put women and the elderly, even nursing mothers, on equal footing with the usual athletic young men (McDougall, Born to Run). Contemporary hunter-gatherers, too, show less gender dichotomy than agricultural and industrial societies. Once again, gender is more informed sociohistorical movements than biological differences.
