What do you say to someone who doesn't believe in feminism because "men and womens brains are wired differently"?

[LittleWhiteWolf]

I can't get my head around it. The friend in question is intelligent and educated and not stupid at all, yet spouts this as the reason why feminism, why equality doesn't work. Where she sees scientific and historical evidence to support this, I just see opinions. Apparently because men are the typical hunter gatherers and women the nuturers, we should just accept that. I'm just getting so sad listening to this.

Anyone got any tips one what one says to someone so mired in this belief???

LRD - I agree a lot of media reporting of this stuff, as well as Men Are From Mars type books are woefully simplistic and draw unsupported conclusions from the research evidence.

But I think leaping from this to calling all research on evolutionary psychology 'pseudoscience' (as many do) I think is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I think people do it because conservatives use evidence of difference to argue against feminism. But I don't think we have to buy their argument.

If rigorous and indisputable scientific studies showed that there really were innate, fundamental differences between men and women in line with stereotype, it would slam the door in the face of equality for women. Or at least put it right right back to the beginning and call for a huge rethink. How could women ask to be paid as much as men for doing the same job if it had been proven that men were better at it? How could women without the vote demand it if they are proven to be less rational than men? How can women successfully fight for the right to freedom from street harassment if it is proven that it is deep seated "normal" male behaviour?

And so on. Enough people believe these things already with no basis which makes things difficult for women, if they were proven to be true, in the world that we live in, then things would pan out very badly for women I'm sorry to say.

Also interesting that people who think of these studies and ponder the outcome if they could be done (we are a long way from being able to separate out effects of conditioning I think) always seem to assume there will be statistically significant differences between men and women. Never seems to cross their minds that there might not be.

But most people working in related sciences have a low opinion of evolutionary psychology and think it is a pseudoscience.

'There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise.'

That is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It is bringing biology, ecology, anthropology and evolutionary biology in particular into disrepute to try and pretend that evolutionary psychology is widely accepted as a science.

Conditioning is what causes measurable brain differences between men and women.

Baron Cohen is trying to measure difference before conditioning takes place. I think it is part of his neurological research into autism - I don't think he has set out to prove the superiority of men or anything

cognitive psychology needs people like Cordelia Fine willing to challenge assumptions and orthodoxy of science and show the holes in methodology and interpretation.

Because in the end you think you have a scientifically proven theory - but it's a theory dependent on the questions you ask
And how you interpret them.

Why focus on gender?

I must admit I haven't read the cordelia fine book.

Why focus on gender is interesting. If you focussed on anything else you would get accused of all sorts.

A few general background points about science, theories and "proof":

Scientific theories are not proved. Scientific theories are either supported by evidence (verified) or contradicted by evidence (revised, falsified or disproved).

Much of science is really the study of uncertainty rather than certainty.

SQ - why would you expect studies to confirm stereotypes, couldn't they equally find out surprising things?

At any rate I don't think these studies are looking at anything that directly measures "being better at a particular job" - it is stuff like spacial awareness, ability to 'read' faces, propensity to take risks etc... The findings are things like men score an average of 65 on this test with a standard deviation of 20, while women score an average of 50 with a standard deviation of 12 i.e. not all men are better than all women at whatever it is and vice versa.

Think about height - men are on average taller than women, but there are plenty of tall women and short men and most adult men and women in Europe fall within the same range of 5-6 foot. No one says that tall women or short men are "unnatural".

Answers to your Questions-

Q1. How could women ask to be paid as much as men for doing the same job if it had been proven that men were better at it?

• because apart from jobs where being a man or a woman is part of the job description there are no jobs where all men are better than all women (or vice versa) People should be recruited, paid and promoted according to how well they do the job, not how well the average of half the population to which they belong could do the job.

Q2. How could women without the vote demand it if they are proven to be less rational than men?

• there is no rationality requirement to voting, and again no study is going to show that all men make better decisions than all women.

Q3 - How can women successfully fight for the right to freedom from street harassment if it is proven that it is deep seated "normal" male behaviour?

Because they are human beings with equal rights.

Aggression which can result in murder are clearly deep seated human attributes, common in every society - this is normal. Still it doesn't give anyone the right to murder others.

Norman Tebbit "Conditioning is what causes measurable brain differences between men and women. "

How can you be so sure? Many other species have measurable behavioural differences between males and females -bees, deer, cats, to name but a few. Why would humans be alone in having completely plastic male and female tendencies?

Himalaya - did you mean 'brain' rather than 'behavioural' when you were talking about animals? Behavioural differences between, say, a male finch and a female finch don't tell us much about the legitimacy of claims that human 'men and women are wired differently'.

Edam - the human ability to see, notice and be pleased by the colour pink is inate to our species.

It is inate that humans can detect the range of wavelengths we call pink (apart from colour blind people). It is inate that rosy colours are noticeable and pleasing (e.g red and pink are some of the first colours to be named in many cultures, and one of the first colours that children like). It is inate to many fruit producing plants that they produce pink/red/rosy tints when ripe (berrys are different colours - but the colors indicating ripeness are all the same family of chemicals - anthocyanins. None of this is a coincidence, as berries producers and berry eaters are in a symbiotic relationship.

(similarly it is inate for bees to be attracted by the colour 'bee's purple' which we can'tii see, and it is inate for bee-pollinated plants to have helpful landing stripes on their petals marked in bee's purple)

Are females relatively better at being attracted to pink? I have no idea.

But if they are then the berry connection would not necessarily be ridiculous.

It would be pretty ridiculous, himalaya - because you'd be positing that women evolved to pick pink berries (like what, exactly?) to the exclusion of blue berries, and that society buried this evolutionary trait until the mid-20th century, at which point it suddenly resurfaced with women liking pink again.

I'm not a scientist, but my issue with evolution here is that I get totally lost when someone comes up with something so tenuous - 'ah, women like pink. Our modern society markets pink to girls and women overwhelmingly. I conclude therefore that evolution must be why women prefer pink. Shurrup about all the blue berries now!'

I mean ... am I missing something?

Incidentally - and this is very sad and an excellent reason not to gender stereotype - people do just tall women and short men as unnatural. Just look at agonizingly painful leg-lengthening surgery (which is also a race issue). I've read about women in the US wanting their tall daughters to receive treatment so they don't grow too tall.

Like it or not, there are many people who do think men being short and women being tall are 'faults' that need correcting.

Of course people notice and think a range of things about very tall women or very short men. Even men who are at the short end of average get ribbed about it and women at the tall end of average get various comments and so on.

"At any rate I don't think these studies are looking at anything that directly measures "being better at a particular job" - it is stuff like spacial awareness, ability to 'read' faces, propensity to take risks etc"

Spacial awareness = pilot, jobs involving computer modelling or CAD etc etc loads of them

Ability to read faces = experts in behaviour - counselling, caring, childcare etc

Propensity to take risks = dealing / trading (stock market), design and innovation, leadership roles etc

It is short-sighted to say that the things that they study have nothing to do with jobs. And while our society is constructed to reward things that men do more / better on average (whether "naturally" or through socialisation) and undervalue things that women do more / on average (whether "naturally" or through socialisation), studies "proving" that women are "naturally" better at X or predisposed to enjoying it etc will only be bad news for the womens movement.

I think TBH the motivation of a person doing this research needs to be looked at.

And I think that the ways the results which appear to support what people believe in the first place are presented to the public are very problematical.

Good posts SQ, agree with them wholeheartedly. My earlier post didn't come across as it was meant I think, often the case with such a one-dimensional mode of communication I'm afraid. And I did mean to add in the nurture/nature thing but forgot.

In my current workplace, if a colleague pops in with their young baby/child in tow, I can guarantee that quite soon there will be a huddle around them making the right noises and saying the right things, asking for a hold etc. and they will all be of the same gender...
I'm a man who likes children which is just as well as I have two. And I like sweets! Just seem to express it in a very similar way to my male friends and colleagues as it happens, and quite differently to my female ones.

FWIW I think we often say and do things a certain way because we think we are expected to do so, and have learned to do so, rather than it's in our genes so to speak. So nurture probably, but I don't mean any offence when I say the 'wired differently' thing.

Have a good Christmas all.

Agree with that.

When babies used to be brought into offices I have worked in I would always find it annoying, strange and pointless. Why? Still, if it was someone I knew well I would go and huddle around and make the right noises and all the rest of it. Why? Courtesy. Men are not expected to do this - so they don't. I expect some of them would like to - I know plenty of men who like nothing better than cooing at a small baby. But they can't really can they as it's not the done thing.

I think separating out anything that might be "hard wired" and measuring it is nigh on impossible when the pressure to behave correctly (for you gender / culture etc) in any given situation is so strong.

Now that I have had my own babies, BTW, I am a lot more cheerful about cooing at other peoples! Plastic brain thing maybe - it's a behaviour and actually an emotional response that I have learnt.

And happy xmas to you too!

"It would be pretty ridiculous, himalaya - because you'd be positing that women evolved to pick pink berries (like what, exactly?) to the exclusion of blue berries, and that society buried this evolutionary trait until the mid-20th century, at which point it suddenly resurfaced with women liking pink again."

LRD - No I'm not saying that at all. I am saying that i dont think it is at all ridiculous to think that the human (both male and female..) ability to notice and be attracted to pink/red hues might well be an evolutionary adaptation for finding ripe fruit (ripe blueberries/blackberries are rosier - their ripeness is signalled by the same pigment as red ones). Dogs and cows, for instance that dont eat fruit don't find pink interesting.

Meanwhile for plants, producing their seeds inside a capsule of chemicals that reflects light at just the right wavelength to attract certain animals to eat them at the right time that they need to get "planted" for the next season is also an evolutionary advantage.

... And isn't that amazing?

I am sure that girls in the 21st century choosing pink clothes is largely a result of marketing, thats not a mystery.

As I've said I have no idea if women are inately marginally better at picking out pink objects than men, but if soneone found they were then considering a link to food that humans evolved eating would not be so obviously ridiculous.

As far as I can work out when people say that this cant possibly have anything to do with colour vision because argument "the favoured colour for girls used to be blue" they are referring to European/ American 19th century fashion trends -- which is a bit narrow a lens for thinking about human evolution.

But that's a straw man, isn't it?

No one ever suggested humans aren't adapted to pick berries - obviously we are. We're hunter gatherers. It's not 'amazing', it's primary school science, or was when I was little.

I'm not trying to be harsh to you, just genuinely mystified as to what point is being made.

The way I see it, European/American 19th century fashion trends aren't a 'narrow lens' for thinking about human evolution - they're surely utterly irrelevant. Evolution takes millenia - it makes no sense to think that fashion trends from only a century or two ago could have made us 'evolve' differently, nor (IMO) does it make much more sense to trace such trends back to a posited 'evolutionary' cause. That just muddies the waters. If there's a genuine tendency in humans to prefer x over y, it will show up in research. It might possibly then be linked to the success or prevalence of certain social trends ... but not really the other way around, surely?

Huh. I like my own optimism there. Instead of saying 'it will show up in research', I should have said 'it could be tested for without reference to fashion trends being used as the 'lens' for observation thereof'.

There is lots of research into what colours people prefer in certain situations, the influence colours have on mood, what colours symbolize to people and so on. I don't see how evolution adds any extra interest to that research.

I remember reading an interesting theory about people in different countries might be seeing different colours as 'pure white' (which apparently we do; in the UK we think a slightly blue white is 'whiter' and in bits of Africa - I forget where they said - they tend to identify a red-toned white as 'whiter'). It was suggested that this might be to do with the quality of light you've grown up seeing.

The thing is, any suggestion is only 'interesting' and no more until you can put some evidence behind it. I don't really understand how you could do that if your suggestion is that evolution is responsible - these examples seem to be doing a 2+2 =92 kind of leap, to me anyhow.

Himalaya, the issue with the pathetic 'research' was that they claimed girls have an innate preference for pink, and attributed that to gathering berries. They didn't stop to check whether pink for girls is a modern phenomenon. It is. In Victorian and Edwardian times blue was for girls, pink for boys - because blue was calm and quiet, pink a pale red hence active. So it is very clear that the meanings society ascribes to colours are culturally determined - evolution cannot have anything to do with something that has done a complete about turn in the past 150 years. (Well, apart from certain species of moths during and after the Industrial Revolution, but that doesn't tell us anything about gender roles in humans, either.)

To play devil's advocate ... it would be perfectly possible that evolution led women to prefer pink, and that this was overlaid by social conditioning in the eras where women were meant to prefer blue. I can cope with that possibility. What I can't believe is that we could ever hope to know one way or the other.