Delusions of Gender (31 page)

And then, the baby is born.

It’s a Boy!
‘Rob and Kris are thrilled to announce the safe arrival of Jack Morgan Tinker. Proud grandparents are Hollis and Marilyn Clifton of Ottawa and Larry and Rosemary Tinker of Montreal. Welcome little one!’
It’s a Girl!
‘Barbara Lofton and Scott Hasler are delighted to announce the birth of their lovely daughter, Madison Evelyn Hasler. Grandparents are both joyful and overwhelmed.’

You can learn a lot from birth announcements. In 2004, McGill University researchers analysed nearly 400 birth announcements placed by parents in two Canadian newspapers, and examined them for expressions of happiness and pride. Parents of boys, they found, expressed more pride in the news, while parents of girls expressed greater happiness. Why would parents officially report different emotional reactions to the birth of a boy versus a girl? The authors suggest that the birth of a girl more powerfully triggers the warm, fuzzy feelings relating to attachment, while the
greater pride in a boy stems from an unconscious belief that a boy will enhance standing in the social world.
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Parents may also be slightly more likely to place a birth announcement for a boy than for a girl, discovered psychologist John Jost and his colleagues. Male births make up 51 percent of live births, so one would expect the same percentage of birth announcements to be for boys. However, in their data set of thousands of Florida birth announcements, more were for male babies than one would expect: 53 percent. It’s a very small (although statistically significant) difference, it’s true. (And it only held for traditional families, in which the mother had taken on the father’s last name.) But as the authors point out, ‘[t]he fact that gender differences show up at all for a family decision that is such a clear and significant reflection of parental pride is both surprising and worrisome. We suspect that most parents would be shocked and embarrassed to learn that they might have publicly announced the birth of a son, but not a daughter, and this suggests that the effect is subtle, implicit, and yet powerful.’
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Not so long ago in Western societies, males were quite openly valued over females (and this is still the case in many developing countries). Today, we don’t think one sex better or more valuable than the other – and yet, at an implicit level, could we still be holding males in higher regard?

A close look at the names given to the babies in this data set suggested that we might. Jost and his colleagues also analysed the thousands of birth announcements to see how often sons and daughters were given a name that began with the same letter as either the father’s or mother’s name: for example, Russell and Karen calling their son Rory versus Kevin. How, you may well wonder, does this exercise reveal anything at all about the machinations of the implicit mind? The reason is that, remarkably, not all letters of the alphabet are equal in the eye of the beholder. People unconsciously place a special value on the letter that begins their own name. With this phenomenon in mind, Jost and colleagues looked for evidence of ‘implicit paternalism’ in the names that parents chose for their children. They found that boys were
more likely to be given names that began with the paternal first initial than the maternal initial, but girls were equally likely to share a first initial with their mother or father. (And this wasn’t because of sons being named after their dads; kids with exactly the same name were excluded from this analysis.) In other words, parents seemed to be unconsciously overvaluing fathers’ names and perhaps also boys, who were more often bestowed the higher-value male initial.
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Clearly, naming a child is a highly personal, multifaceted process. It’s impossible to know for sure what is behind these surprising findings. But as Jost and colleagues point out, contemporary manifestations of sexism and racism are often ‘indirect, subtle, and (in some cases) non-conscious.’
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In modern, developed societies, males and females are legally – and no doubt also in the eyes of most parents – born with equal status and entitled to the same opportunities. Yet of course this egalitarian attitude is very new, and it’s poorly reflected in the distribution of political, social, economic and sometimes even personal power between the sexes. It’s a ‘half-changed world’, as Peggy Orenstein put it
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and here, in the naming of children and composing of birth announcements, are little strands of evidence of parents’ half-changed minds. Without meaning to, and without realising it, we may be valuing boys and girls differently, and for different qualities, within hours of birth.

From this starting point, unequal even before conception, parenting begins.

W
hen psychologists run experiments in search of differences between boy babies and girl babies, they do not order in unused babies still in their shrink-wrapped packages. Even newborns show a preference for their native language, presumably from hearing, in utero, the intonation and rhythm of their mother tongue.
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Babies are button-nosed little learning machines. For example, developmental psychologist Paul Quinn and his colleagues found that babies just three to four months of age prefer to look at female, rather than male, faces.
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The researchers wondered whether this might be because the babies had spent most of their time with female caregivers and that greater familiarity with female faces was the reason they liked them more. And so they tested a small group of daddy-reared babies and found that
this
rare breed of baby preferred male faces. (A further experiment suggested that babies’ preference for faces of the more familiar sex stems from acquired expertise with those kinds of faces.) Likewise, although they have no preference at birth, by three months of age, babies look more at same-race faces than other-race faces.
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Babies are also, even in the first year of life, sensitive to the emotional reactions of caregivers. They use facial expressions and tone of voice as a guide to what toys, for example, should be approached and, especially, what should be avoided.
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Interestingly, infants find mixed messages – even those that include some sort of positive expression towards a toy – somewhat off-putting.
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These sorts of discoveries mean we have to take babies’ environments and experiences seriously when we try to understand any differences between even very young boys and girls. Of course, if parents provide a truly gender-neutral environment for their babies, then this won’t matter. But do they?

Certainly, the physical environments of baby girls and boys are not identical. Without doubt, your typical baby girl has a lot more pink in her life, and a baby boy a great deal more blue. And they may also have different levels of exposure to dolls and trucks at even a very tender age. Alison Nash and Rosemary Krawczyk inventoried the toys of more than 200 children in New York and Minnesota. They found that even among six- to twelve-month-old infants, the youngest age group they studied, boys had more ‘toys of the world’ (like transportation vehicles and machines) while girls had more ‘toys of the home’ (like dolls and housekeeping toys).
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We can also justifiably wonder whether baby boys’ and girls’ psychological environments are the same. Psychologists often find that parents treat baby girls and boys differently, despite an absence of any discernible differences in the babies’ behaviour or abilities. One study, for example, found that mothers conversed and interacted more with girl babies and young toddlers, even when they were as young as six months old.
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This was despite the fact that boys were no less responsive to their mother’s speech and were no more likely to leave their mother’s side. As the authors suggest, this may help girls learn the higher level of social interaction expected of them, and boys the greater independence. Mothers are also more sensitive to changes in facial expressions of happiness when an unfamiliar six-month-old baby is labelled as a girl rather than a boy, suggesting that their gendered expectations affect their perception of babies’ emotions.
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Gendered expectations also seem to bias mothers’ perception of their infants’ physical abilities. Mothers were shown an adjustable sloping walkway, and asked to estimate the steepness of slope their crawling eleven-month-old child could manage and would attempt. Girls and boys differed in neither crawling ability nor risk taking when it came to testing
them on the walkway. But mothers underestimated girls and over-estimated boys – both in crawling ability and crawling attempts – meaning that in the real world they might often wrongly think their daughters incapable of performing or attempting some motor feats, and equally erroneously think their sons capable of others.
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As infants reach the toddler and preschool years, researchers find that mothers talk more to girls than to boys, and that they talk about emotions differently to the two sexes – and in a way that’s consistent with (and sometimes helps to create the truth of) the stereotyped belief that females are the emotion experts.
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It seems, then, that gender stereotypes, even if perhaps only implicitly held, affect parents’ behaviour towards their babies. This is hardly surprising. Implicit associations don’t, after all, remain carefully locked away in the unconscious. They can play an important part in behaviour and may tend to leak out when we aren’t thinking too much, or
can’t
think too much, about what we are doing – perhaps in our tone of voice, or body language. Implicit attitudes can also take the upper hand when it comes to our behaviour when we are distracted, tired or under pressure of time (conditions that, from personal experience, I would estimate are fulfilled about 99 percent of the time while parenting).
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Is it possible that parents’ implicit attitudes about gender might be subtly transmitted to their children?

Here is a transcript from a video clip shown to three- to six-year-old children, by psychologist Luigi Castelli and his colleagues:

ABDUL
[black adult male]: Hi, my name is Abdul and I come from Senegal which is an African country.

GASPARE
[white adult male]: Hi, my name is Gaspare. I come from Padova. I’m Italian. I have nothing against the fact that people from other countries and, possibly, with a different colour of the skin, come and live in Italy with us. I’m happy if you come to live in our city. I believe we must be tolerant and welcome everyone in the same way, and I do not really care about the colour of the skin. For instance, if my
child would become friends with a child whose skin is black I would be very happy. In order to live in a better world we must overcome the differences between us.

When it comes to holding a generous, open-armed policy towards people with different skin tones Gaspare, I think we can all agree, cannot be faulted. Psychologist Luigi Castelli and colleagues showed two groups of preschoolers a video clip in which Gaspare expressed these egalitarian, colour-blind opinions, and then asked the children questions like
Would you like to play with Abdul?
or
How much do you like Abdul?
A third and fourth group of children were asked the same questions after seeing a slightly different clip. In this alternative clip, Gaspare steered clear of race politics altogether, and talked only about his work in a dress shop.

So, which group of children felt most warmly towards Abdul? Was it, as you might expect, the children who heard Gaspare’s positive, moving words about our common humanity? In fact, no. It made no difference. But something else, unspoken, did.

In half of his positive speech clips, Gaspare’s nonverbal behaviour matched his words: he shook Abdul’s hand with enthusiasm; he spoke enthusiastically; he sat near Abdul, leaned towards him, and regularly looked right at him. But in the other positive speech clip, Gaspare’s actions belied his verbal sentiments: his handshake was flaccid; his voice was slow and hesitant. Gaspare also kept an empty seat between himself and Abdul, leaned away from his African acquaintance, and avoided eye contact. Likewise, in the verbally neutral clip, sometimes Gaspare’s body language was positive, and sometimes it was negative. It was these nonverbal cues the children picked up on. To them, the nonverbal actions spoke louder than words. Children who saw the enthusiastic physical behaviours – regardless of what Gaspare actually
said
– felt significantly more friendly towards Abdul than children who saw Gaspare’s body express unease.
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To the researchers, this was no surprise, just another piece of the puzzle of children’s racial attitudes. It’s natural to assume
that children, at least to some extent, pick up their views about other ethnic groups from their parents. And yet when you canvass parents and their children on this subject, their answers simply don’t match up. More (or less) prejudiced parents don’t have more (or less) prejudiced children, particularly at younger ages.
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But that’s when you just ask outright. Recently, however, Castelli and his colleagues found that white mothers’
implicit
race attitudes
do
match the racial attitudes of their offspring. Their consciously expressed attitudes seem to have no influence on the children. But the stronger the mother’s implicit negativity towards black people (measured using the Implicit Association Test), the less likely her child is to choose a black child to play with, and to rate a black peer in a positive, charitable fashion.
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