INVITED REVIEW ESSAY

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Create Difference. By . New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences.ByREBECCAM. JORDAN-YOUNG. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Letitia Meynell

“…we’re only trying to find the biological roots to gender inequality, so why be fussy, right?” (Fine, 108).

That the search for dimorphic cognitive, affective, and behavioral sex differences con- tinues is no doubt a source of anxiety for those who have long embraced a feminist or progressive ideal of equality for all postnatal humans, regardless of their sex/gender (or other) identities. Indeed, the prevalence of media reports and best-selling accounts of scientific findings of fundamental neurological, psychological, and behavioral sex dif- ferences, in addition to the studies themselves, may give the most ardent feminists among us occasion to suspect that there might just be something to it: Putting aside the many queer, trans, and intersexed exceptions—for which some biological explana- tion must also, presumably, exist—a rational consideration of the mountain of evi- dence surely suggests that our natural history really has produced two fundamentally different types of people: men and women. Or so one might suppose. Feminists strug- gling with this haunting doubt would do well to take a look at Cordelia Fine’s Delu- sions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference and Rebecca Jordan-Young’s Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences as effective remedies. These recent books join a now extensive literature by feminist aca- demics, both within and outside the biological and mind sciences, that meticulously and critically dissect empirical claims about human sex differences as they pertain to cognition, emotions, and behavior. Depressingly, though both address current as well as recent research, the heart of their criticism is familiar to feminists: much of the research on sex differences is, by ordinary scientific standards, bad science. Further- more, hopes for the future rest on proper controls for sexist bias and a successor science that adequately reflects the diversity of our (and, indeed, other) species.

Hypatia vol. 28, no. 3 (Summer 2013) © by Hypatia, Inc. Invited Review Essay 685

Although they address much of the same material and draw some of the same conclusions (at least about the sciences), the two books have quite different approaches and virtues and will appeal to somewhat different audiences. Important to note is that neither author advocates abandoning the scientific study of human sex differences. Rather, both encourage the adoption of more nuanced, careful, and meth- odologically robust approaches to the subject. Neither denies average differences in the embodiment or behavior of various populations of human males and females— including, but not limited to, chromosomal differences, differences in hormonal pro- files, or differences in sexual behavior. Care, however, is required to parse such claims. Variability within female and male populations along any given measure, the interconnections and causal relations of the relevant physiological, psychological, and social systems, and the contingency of their development are complexities that any credible scientific study of sex differences must address. Fine and Jordan-Young target the inadequacies of some of the methods and practices found in recent research on sex differences. Moreover, they clearly reveal the looping effects among these meth- ods, the results of this research, and the present (if disavowed) in our society. Feminist theorists will find that, though it revisits familiar territory, is still worth reading. Eminently readable and accessible to nonacademic audi- ences, Fine’s book pulls diverse threads together into a clear, concise, and compelling account. She divides her book into three parts—thefirstprovidingasocialcontext, the second exploring the weaknesses of various research programs, and the third look- ing forward to how this research and related ideologies can be expected to shape our children. The first part, “‘Half-Changed World,’ Half-Changed Minds,” relates the folk and popular science of sex differences to the multiple delusions and contradic- tions that arise in a society that is convinced of its own sexual equality while still being, along almost every social measure, clearly unequal. Here Fine relies heavily on social . Her sources include studies revealing the sexist decisions and actions that are consistently made by individuals who are nonetheless sincerely com- mitted to sexual equality, the role of associative memory in the production of sexist assumptions, and the role of threat in women’s underperformance and play-it-safe strategies. She then brings these tools to the home front and the work- place to show how double standards and subtle, exclusionary messages keep even the most successful women working double days, while generally relegating women to less desirable social positions. Though sobering stuff, this part does highlight the social construction and profoundly contextual nature of sex differences in cognitive and affective performance, capacities, and behavior, thus providing ample reason for thinking that those group differences that are found are consistent with a largely social explanation. In the second part, “Neurosexism,” Fine turns to the various scientific programs that attempt to offer biological explanations for sex differences. She develops a his- torical theme, begun in the previous section, showing how contemporary sexism (in science and society at large) repeats the errors and injustices of the past. Clearly, Fine favors breadth over depth here, identifying multiple types of putative sex differences and various research programs, from fetal hormone testing, preference tests in 686 Hypatia

neonates, intersexed children’s play behavior, and nonhuman animal studies, to studies on adult humans. It is upon this latter project that Fine turns her most detailed and damning critique. Fine’s case is built from the numerous ways in which neuroimaging studies of cognitive and affective states and capacities are fraught, from the much derided reverse inferences (151–52) to shockingly small sam- ple sizes and built-in tendencies to find and report differences rather than similarities (135). In this way, Fine not only introduces her readers to neurosexism, but also to the larger problem of neurononsense (154). Fine concludes this section with disturb- ing studies that link the reading of reports of essential sex differences with a tendency “to be more confident that society treats women fairly, and to feel less certain that the gender status quo is likely to change” (185). Part III, “Recycling Gender,” narrates, through child psychology and the study of parental behavior, the ways in which children are shaped from birth to constantly present their own gender and police the gender of others. With children’s gender identity and sexual expression being molded by adults, other children, clothing, chil- dren’s programming, advertising, toys, and books, no parent in the societies of the contemporary global north can pretend to offer a nongendered upbringing for their children. Fine was inspired to write the book upon discovering “[her] son’s kindergar- ten teacher reading a book that claimed that his brain was incapable of forging the connection between emotion and language” (174). The take-home message—that the science of sex differences tends to essentialize social norms underlying sexual inequality and reifies them for our children’s futures—leaves one with the urge to make Delusions of Gender required reading for kindergarten teachers everywhere. Whereas Fine has written a popular science book, Jordan-Young has written a technical academic book that is fundamentally about scientific methods and their vulnerabilities to the ideologies of sex difference and, concomitantly, sexuality and sexual orientation. Jordan-Young’s book exemplifies a certain kind of science-studies project, providing an exhaustive survey of a research program (more than 300 indi- vidual studies [xii]) to uncover its history, methods, commitments, and, in this case, a variety of devastating flaws. Rather than the familiar contemporary ethnographic approach, she takes a more traditional stance, identifying herself as a scientific insider who is offering a kind of peer review of a particular research program (10–12). Unlike Fine’s polemical and political approach, Jordan-Young limits herself to an epistemo- logical analysis of the science that is consistent with uncontroversial scientific stan- dards. Although she acknowledges the relevance of the science of sex differences in constructing larger sex/sexuality/gender norms, she does not, by and large, discuss it. Jordan-Young focuses on brain organization theory (BOT)—thetheorythatdraws together the variety of human chromosomes, hormones, brains, and genitals into a sex-dimorphic system. This theory implicitly underlies much of the research that Fine criticizes, making the two books interesting companion pieces. Proponents of BOT believe that just as humans develop sexually dimorphic genitals in utero, they also develop sexually dimorphic neurological and psychological characteristics. There are exceptions for whom genital development (intersexuals) and psychological develop- ment (intersexuals, transsexuals, and homosexuals) are ambiguous, but they are the Invited Review Essay 687

exceptions that are thought to prove the rule; by studying their differences it is sup- posed we can better understand how sex hormones produce sex-dimorphic behaviors among more typical human populations. As Jordan-Young points out, this paradigm has become the dominant view of the development of sex/gender/sexuality (1), so her book is, in effect an extended argument for a paradigm shift. At the heart of Jordan-Young’s book is method and measurement. Indeed, the sec- ond and third chapters can be read as primers on scientific method. As she explains, a central limitation of BOT is that “true experiments,” where experimental and con- trol groups are genetically identical (or relevantly similar) and develop in identical environments with only the hypothetical causal factor—that is, hormones—varying, cannot be performed on humans. Not only would any such study rival Mengele’s atrocities in rights violations, but it would fail to produce humans who were in any sense psychologically normal. Instead, “quasi-experiments”—cohort and case control studies—are used. In cohort studies one identifies a group with an anomalous causal factor (in BOT, typically some kind of hormonal anomaly) and looks for a particular result (in BOT, some kind of psychological trait associated with some aspect of sex/ gender/sexuality) to compare with the prevalence of the result in a “normal” control group (that is, with a species-typical hormonal profile). Case control studies work in the opposite direction, as it were, starting with the result—some psychological trait (for example, being a gay male) and comparing a group with this trait with a control group (for example, straight men) to find if the trait in question correlates with some hypothesized cause (various hormonal profiles, or at least putative indicators of such profiles, for example, digit-length ratios). Because it is impossible to be sure that one has controlled for all confounding factors and for all possible biases, these types of studies are never conclusive. As such, they must be considered together. Of course, it is the apparent mass of evidence that makes BOT seem so compel- ling. But Jordan-Young emphasizes that it is consistency—particularly in definitions and measurement standards—that matters. For example, two studies may seem prima facie to be mutually supporting if both find that girls with a particular congenital hor- monal disorder (for example, congenital adrenal hyperplasia [CAH]) on average have abnormal sexual desires. However, if one study identifies normal female sexuality as having a weak libido and a romantic orientation, and the other identifies it as having a strong libido and a genital orientation, the studies clearly do not actually support each other and may in fact be contradictory (see chapter 6). On the face of it and when treated in an abstract and additive fashion, BOT studies appear to be highly consistent, finding umpteen sex differences that appear to be hormonally explained. However, “a more systematic evaluation yields a very different picture: once studies are grouped to reflect similar inputs and outputs, it is clear that there are very few behavioral domains where there have been even marginally consistent findings” (66). As it is consistency, not mere quantity, from which the validity of BOT follows, Jordan-Young’s critique is devastating. Though Brain Storm is mostly a scathing critique, in the final chapters Jordan- Young sketches the basic framework of a possible successor science. She begins with what BOT leaves out. She considers the case of girls with CAH, an intersexed 688 Hypatia

syndrome that has been a favorite model for females with a male-type hormone pro- file and for which consistent, if relatively small, differences in behavior have been found (228–29). Despite BOT researchers paying lip service to the importance of the interaction between the biological and the social, Jordan-Young contends that almost no research has been done on the experiences and socialization of CAH girls and women, and thus little effort has been made to control for them. In addition to sometimes severe health problems, CAH girls not only endure the onslaught of sex- essentialist messages that pervade our society, but also their own parents’ ambivalence about their sex identity and often multiple genital surgeries, medical interventions, as well as ongoing medical surveillance. Such an upbringing is far from typical and must be expected to influence the behaviors and identities of CAH girls (chapter 9). More generally, our gendered experiences cannot simply be seen as social and psy- chological complexities that somehow sit atop some biological essence. Social, biologi- cal, and psychological processes are not mere attributes but are constitutive of the person. As Jordan-Young notes, this is consistent with the developmental turn in con- temporary biology, which rejects any robust ontological distinction between nature and nurture (270–71). In sketching a new possible paradigm for sex-difference research, Jor- dan-Young introduces the idea of gendered norms of reaction, which describe how from any given point in a person’s development—from conception to old age—there are a range of possible sex/gender/sexuality outcomes, depending on a person’s experiences, activities, and environment (271–86). Although this developmental turn is increasingly mainstream throughout biology, it has particular traction in where brain plasticity is of central interest (286–88). In effect, the end of Brain Storm is a call for sci- entists to abandon BOT and begin to study sexual development and variation as a psy- chologically complex, physiologically and phenomenologically embodied, socially located, lifelong journey of becoming, using methods that are careful and systematic and do not presuppose an essentialist two-sex model. Fine and Jordan-Young do comment on how to do science better—consider Fine’s memorable advice, “don’t make stuff up” (155)—but more tangible and specific norms wait to be developed. At a high level of abstraction it is obvious that to do better, nonsexist science researchers need to add feminist analysis to control for sexist bias in their studies’ designs—as the Biology and Gender Studies Group noted well over twenty years ago (1988). In light of the accumulation of evidence for the existence of sexist bias in the life and human sciences, to object to feminist controls for research projects on sex differences is simply irresponsible. It is akin to refusing to employ controls for the placebo effect in a drug trial—it is irrational to expect accurate results without them. Of course, the real difficulty is articulating and imple- menting appropriate and effective controls that can be systematically employed in the lab and in the field, indubitably a thorny methodological question with many context-specific answers. Moreover, as Jordan-Young’s analysis makes clear, such con- trols must not only address single studies, but also whole research programs, mediat- ing the ways in which studies are taken up by others. But when scientists are investigating the biological roots to gender (in)equality, they should be held to the highest standards; we have good reason to be fussy. Invited Review Essay 689

NOTE

These comments were developed in conversation with Andrew Fenton, whom I thank for his insight and advice.

REFERENCE

Biology and Gender Study Group. 1988. The importance of feminist critique for contem- porary cell biology. Hypatia 3(1):61–76.