Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (25 page)

It seems far too early, to me, to make assumptions about what girls on average and boys on average would be interested in if they were growing up free from these expectations. Far from being in a position yet to judge whether men and women would have equal aspirations to work involving maths and science in
an equal world, we are still living with attitudes that make it surprising women are making the strides that we can see. In the US, women were 8 per cent of the science and engineering workforce in 1973; in 1999 they were 24 per cent.
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So it is clear that those who would see our working patterns as biologically determined have their work cut out in stating that women’s minds are unsuited to working in scientific careers. In order not to trammel the dreams of the next generation, perhaps it is better not to peddle ideas of what women are naturally suited for before they have shown us what they can actually do.

D: Hormones

Writers who look to biological explanations for all sex differences tend to see hormones as having an irresistible power to mould our behaviour. Hormones are indeed what make us male or female. Information encoded in the genes begins the process of physical sex differentiation, but it is the production of testosterone and the response of cells to testosterone that turns a foetus fully male. For instance, if a boy foetus has a rare condition that means his cells do not respond to testosterone (Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome), he will look exactly like a girl when he is born even though he is genetically male; testosterone is essential to make a boy a boy.

The promoters of biological explanations for sex differences are keen to establish direct links not only between hormones and physical sex differences, but also between hormones and those differences in intelligence and behaviour that they believe are innate to men and women. If those links didn’t exist, or were tenuous, then we might have to look again at the influence of society and parents and friends. I would have thought that nobody would want to deny that our personalities and our moods, as well as our physical being, are affected by the
hormone environment in the womb or the levels of our sex hormones during our lifetimes. But current theories of how sex hormones act tend to gloss over all complexities. While many scientists suggest that we are only at the beginning of understanding how hormones can interact with one another and with other physical experiences, we often hear from the media and some popular writers that certain hormones simply pull the strings of our personalities. For instance, a television programme called
Battle of the Sexes
that aired on ABC in Australia in 2002 laid out its agenda from the start. ‘Program one presents men and women as two separate species with radically different evolutionary agendas…. The film then takes the hormone-fuelled rocket journey to puberty to show that many of the differences between the sexes are pre-programmed.’
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More than one hormone has been implicated in the creation of feminine behaviour. For a long time the spotlight was on oestrogen, and it was suggested that men who were exposed to elevated levels of oestrogens would have no choice but to fall in with feminine patterns of behaviour. There was a time when women were prescribed a synthetic oestrogen (diethylstilbestrol) in an attempt to prevent repeated spontaneous miscarriages, so studies were then carried out to find out whether this had any effect on the behaviour of the babies after birth. According to some writers, the observed effects were clearcut, as Simon Baron-Cohen explains: ‘Boys born to such women are likely to show more female-typical behaviours – enacting social themes in their play as toddlers, for example, or caring for dolls.’
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Yet such a categorical claim is not supported by much of the evidence, as Melissa Hines shows in her book
Brain Gender:
‘Information on boys exposed to DES or other estrogens prenatally … suggests a general lack of influences on childhood behaviour,’ she states.
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For instance, one large study confounded the expectations of the researchers. They tested 140
adult subjects whose mothers had taken female hormones during pregnancy, asking them about their childhood play behaviour and running various cognitive and psychological tests on them. One key finding was that, ‘The DES [diethylstilbestrol] exposed subjects had the most conventionally “masculine” childhood behaviours.’
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More recently the idea has taken hold that the hormone responsible for femininity is oxytocin. Many scientists and media commentators have turned to this hormone for the explanation for women’s apparently innate abilities to empathise and nurture. For instance, both the ABC series
Battle of the Sexes
and a very similar BBC series
Secrets of the Sexes
showcased the same ‘experiment’, in which a little girl was left alone on a street to see who would stop to offer help, men or women. Women stopped far more often; which is what one would expect in a society in which to be suspected of interest in pre-pubescent girls is likely to lay men open to intense criticism. But only one explanation was offered – as the Australian series put it: ‘There is a chemical reason for empathic behaviour in women,’ the narrator told the viewers. ‘Women produce more oxytocin, which is a brain chemical stimulated by childbirth. Oxytocin is designed to help mothers nurture their offspring, and it also gives women a greater ability to empathise with others. Why do men not share this natural ability?’
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The writer John Gray has also embraced oxytocin as a catch-all explanation for feminine behaviour. As he puts it, oxytocin creates the need in women to invest a great deal of energy in loving and being loved: ‘Oxytocin creates a feeling of attachment. Levels increase when women connect with someone through friendship, sharing, caring and nurturing and decrease when a woman misses someone or experiences a loss or breakup or feels alone, ignored, rejected, unsupported, and insignificant. To feel good in a relationship, a woman needs to trust that her partner cares for her as much as she cares for him. This kind of support directly affects her oxtyocin levels, which in
turn will lower her stress. Messages from him of caring, understanding, and respect can build trust and nourish her soul while stimulating higher levels of oxytocin.’
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Oxytocin is indeed released during childbirth and during breastfeeding, when it stimulates the contractions of the womb and the let-down reflex of breasts, and for both sexes it seems to be released at orgasm. At these times it certainly does correlate to the moving sense of being connected and in love with another being. There has also been interesting research carried out which suggests that if individuals’ levels of oxytocin are artificially raised they may be more ready to behave in a trusting manner. But if you search for the evidence to prove that higher levels of oxytocin are behind women’s greater investment in their social and family lives, you will be a long time looking. Most research on oxytocin has been carried out on other animals, especially rodents, and one recent review of all the human and animal studies on the effects of oxytocin could only conclude that the evidence for the influence of oxytocin on human behaviour seemed ‘contradictory’ and open to ‘competing’ interpretations.
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At times elevated levels of this hormone correlate with loving and unstressed behaviour in humans, but at times they correlate with the opposite. For instance, when scientists at the University of California investigated the relationship between older women’s social networks and their oxytocin levels, they found the opposite result to the one that the popular narrative would predict. Oxytocin was actually higher in women experiencing chronic problems in their social relationships, including ‘decreased contact with friends and family and an unrewarding partner relationship’.
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These researchers had to conclude that far from being John Gray’s straightforward hormone of love and understanding, ‘Oxytocin levels may be a marker of relationship stress.’
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Similarly confusing for the idea that oxytocin is behind women’s feminine, empathetic behaviour was a recent study which found that when couples kissed, oxytocin levels
went up for men, but down for women; which was in the opposite direction to that predicted by the theory that women look for love in order to boost their oxytocin levels.
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It is often assumed that typical femininity is created not just by the presence of some magical pink elixir, but also by the absence of a magical blue elixir. As we all know, the hormone testosterone is thought to create the mythical masculinity of aggression and competitiveness, and women’s low levels of testosterone are often assumed to lie behind their poor showing in masculine traits. That BBC1 series
Secrets of the Sexes
presented the idea that men are innately better at logical thinking and competing because of their testosterone, and in a driving competition in which men did better than women the voiceover intoned: ‘Women can be competitive, but they don’t have the edge that testosterone gives men.’
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There is nothing new about the reliance on testosterone as the explanation for everything we associate with masculinity. Connections have been made between testosterone and all kinds of power-hungry, aggressive, competing behaviour everywhere in the media, in fiction, non-fiction, journalism and broadcasting. As one typical commentator in
The Times
put it, ‘My sons charging around, competing, building, climbing and fighting, are run on that human rocket fuel, testosterone.’
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Testosterone has been implicated in men’s greater reliance on logic, on their supposedly greater sense of humour,
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apparently greater artistic abilities, and perceived advantage in systemising and spatial skills.
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To find evidence for this picture of the effects of testosterone, scientists over the years have been particularly interested in those people who were exposed to high levels of testosterone as foetuses. In the rare condition called Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, foetuses, male or female, are exposed to excessive levels of testosterone in the womb. We know what many writers would assume would be the results of this deluge of testosterone for girls: they will lose their femininity and become more aggressive,
less empathetic, and better at systemising. Many writers would also assume that it means they would have better spatial skills, so Simon Baron-Cohen tells us: ‘As one would predict, girls with CAH have
enhanced spatial systemising
, compared with their sisters or other close female relatives without CAH … Girls with CAH
score as well as normal boys
, and
dramatically better than normal girls.’
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Helena Cronin, the Darwinian philosopher, writes in the
Guardian:
‘females exposed to “male” hormones in the womb are typically “tomboyish” and
surpass the female average in spatial skills
– and vice versa for males’.
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Steven Pinker in
The Blank Slate
says that girls with CAH ‘grow into tomboys, with more rough and tumble play, a greater interest in trucks than dolls,
better spatial abilities.’
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Susan Pinker, in
The Sexual Paradox
, says, ‘They have
better spatial skills
and are more competitive, aggressive, and self-confident than other girls.’
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[My italics all through.] However, if you look at the evidence, this has simply not been proved. Melissa Hines analysed all the available studies in her book
Brain Gender
, and found that of seven studies assessing spatial abilities in females with CAH, only three found evidence that females with CAH perform better than unaffected females, and the largest studies showed no such result – indeed, the study with the second largest sample found that females with CAH performed worse than matched female controls.
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Similarly unpredictable results are seen throughout the literature on the effects of testosterone. Far from bringing us a clearcut story of how testosterone sets up stereotypical masculinity, we find a very muddled picture about how this hormone affects behaviour. Some studies go in the right direction for the biological narrative. For instance, Simon Baron-Cohen’s team at Cambridge University tested samples of amniotic fluid from women who had given birth at Addenbrooke’s Hospital and then observed their babies as toddlers. They found that toddlers who had been identified as having been exposed to less
testosterone in the womb had ‘higher levels of eye contact and a larger vocabulary’.
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Other studies have also shown a relationship between pre-natal testosterone and whether children will fall in with stereotypical masculine behaviour. For instance, one large recent study has suggested that high levels of testosterone in the womb correlate with masculine play behaviour for girls.
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These are two studies that do show a role for testosterone in creating masculinity along the expected lines, and you can find others.
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But as I trawled through some of the literature I found there is also a lot of research that has failed to reinforce the expected narrative, and that gives us a much more complicated picture of the effects of testosterone in the womb.