What You Can Change . . . And What You Can't*: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement (28 page)

Layer IV: Sex Role: Social Behavior, Personality, and Ability

Are men different from women? Are boys different from girls? Can sex differences be narrowed?

These are loaded questions, fraught with political overtones. To the feminist, they evoke impatience. They are just scientific code for attempts to claim that women are inferior and to justify continued male oppression. To the sexist, also, they evoke impatience—for the opposite reason: They are part of the long history of left-leaning scientists’ manipulating evidence to bolster their pet social theories—touting whatever congenial evidence they can muster, for example, against capital punishment, for abortion on demand, against IQ testing, or for school busing, while ignoring uncongenial evidence. In this incarnation they are attempts to justify narrowing the huge differences between men and women that do exist and should exist, because these differences are at the very foundation of the social order.

Whatever these questions are politically, substantively they are questions about sex
role
. There are a large number of sex differences: anatomy, health, brain makeup, and life span, to name a few. But only three kinds of differences are directly relevant to sex role: the social differences, the personality differences, and the ability differences. The existence or nonexistence of some of these alleged differences is too shrouded by conflicting evidence for me to foist off on you my own opinion. Other differences, however, are clear—based on hundreds of studies and thousands of subjects. So I will present those that are clear and about which most workers, male and female, in these fields agree—however uncongenial to someone’s politics the differences might be. There is, in fact, surprising consensus about sex differences.

One point of agreement is that there are huge sex-role differences between very young boys and girls:

• By age two, boys want to play with trucks and girls want to play with dolls.
  

• By age three, children know the sex stereotypes for dress, toys, jobs, games, tools, and interests.
  

• By age three, children want to play with peers of their own sex.
  

• By age four, most girls want to be teachers, nurses, secretaries, and mothers; most boys want to have “masculine” jobs.
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In most cultures, young children categorize the world according to sex and organize their lives around the categories. No one has to teach them sex-role stereotypes: They invent them spontaneously. This is hardly a surprise, and the pat explanation is that they learn sex roles from their parents. After all, parents behave differently with daughters than with sons. For example, parents decorate the rooms of girls in pink and put dolls in their cribs. Boys get blue cribs and toy guns.

What is surprising is that kids reared androgynously retain their stereotypes as strongly as kids not so reared. Young kids’ preferences bear no relationship to their parents’ attitudes or to their parents’ education, class, employment, or sexual politics. Kids’ play is strongly sex-stereotyped, regardless of their parents’ attitudes or their parents’ own sex-role behavior.

It is not that boys are simply indifferent to their parents’ lessons about
androgyny
(from the Greek for “both male and female”). Boys don’t just ignore their parents’ telling them it’s okay to play with dolls; they actively resist. Having a teacher try to persuade a child to give up a “sex-appropriate” toy produces resistance, anxiety, and backlash, particularly among boys. (Remember how devastating the label “sissy” or, worse, “queer” was?) Watching videotapes of other kids playing joyfully with “sex-inappropriate” toys doesn’t work. Intensive home programs of androgynous toys, songs, and books with mother as the teacher produce no changes. Extensive classroom intervention produces no movement toward androgyny—outside the classroom.
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These findings should be particularly disturbing to those of you who staunchly hold that social pressure creates sex roles in the first place. If social pressure creates them, intense social pressure by committed parents and teachers should diminish them. But it doesn’t.

Since social pressure does not play a measurable role in creating sex roles, the determinant might just be fetal hormones, at least in part. There are two lines of evidence: In one study, conducted in the 1970s, seventy-four mothers had taken prescription drugs during their pregnancies to prevent miscarriage. These drugs had the common property of disrupting the masculinizing hormone androgen. The games their offspring liked to play were compared to those preferred by matched controls when the children were ten years old. The boys’ games were less masculine and the girls’ more feminine. Similarly, there is a disease (congenital adrenal hyperplasia [CAH]) that bathes girls with extra androgen as fetuses. As young children, these girls like boys’ toys and rough-and-tumble play, and they are more tomboyish than matched controls. These findings are tantalizing. They suggest that one source of boys’ wanting to play with guns and girls’ wanting to play house reaches into the womb.
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You might be tempted to conclude that sex roles are deep and unchangeable. You would be wrong. As children grow up, stereotypes weaken and are easier to defy. In late childhood, children begin to have stereotypes about crying, dominance, independence, and kindness. But they are much weaker than the early-childhood toy and job stereotypes. In fact, the only really consistent difference between the behavior of boys and girls as they mature is aggression, with boys much more aggressive than girls. As children grow up, even the difference in aggression gets smaller. The greater aggression in boys may come from socialization (boys are more rewarded for aggression and competition than girls are). But it might also have its origin in fetal hormones: Both the sons and daughters of mothers who took the androgenizing antimiscarriage drugs are more contentious and combative than their unexposed sibs.
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Ironically, while pressuring kids to become androgynous does not work immediately, it may have a delayed effect. As children mature into adults, sex-role stereotypes begin to disappear. When children grow up, those raised by androgynous parents tend to become androgynous themselves. Supporting intellectual interests for daughters and warmth and compassion for sons, exposing children to a range of roles, may work, but only in the long run.

This is important, it makes sense, and it is good news. Young children see the world in black-and-white terms: “I’m either a boy or a girl. There’s nothing in between. If I like dolls, I’m a sissy. Everyone hates a queer.” These are deeply held convictions. Young kids seem to play out a sex-role program fueled by a drive to conform that may have its roots in the fetal brain. As a child matures, however, considerations of morality, of justice, of fairness, come into play, and tolerance can start to displace blind conformity. He or she now
chooses
how to behave. Decisions about androgyny, about unconventionality, about rebellion, are conscious decisions based on a sense of what is right and what an adolescent wants for the future. As such, the choice of androgyny requires a mature mind and a conscience; it is not a product of simple training.

Spatial, math, and verbal abilities
. In addition to the clear personality and social-behavior differences between males and females, there are ability differences. The huge amount of information about scholastic ability has yielded three generalities upon which all investigators agree:

• Males are better at spatial and math tasks.
  

• Females are better at emotional tasks and, perhaps, at verbal tasks.
  

• There are more males with extreme (very low or very high) scores.
  

There have been at least two hundred studies of sex differences in these three basic components of “intelligence.” The spatial score derives from rotating three-dimensional objects mentally, and the like; the math score from arithmetic, algebra, and geometry; the verbal score from vocabulary, analogies, and reading comprehension. There is near unanimity about spatial and math scores: Males do better on average, but the difference is only moderate. To calibrate what a “moderate” difference is, assume that to become an engineer you should rank in the top 5 percent of spatial ability. The scores show that 7.4 percent of men and 3.2 percent of women rank this high. This means that there should be about two male engineers for every female engineer in the real world. The actual ratio is twenty to one.
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Females might be better than males on verbal tests. Based on 165 recent studies, there is a small but fairly consistent difference. Twenty years ago, there was a clear female advantage, but based on recent SATs, males have closed the gap.

On average, females are clearly better at emotional problems than males are. They judge emotion in the face more accurately, they decode nonverbal cues better, they recognize faces better, and they express emotion with nonverbals better. They also have more expressive faces. All of these differences are moderate in degree (the degree is somewhat bigger than that between males and females in spatial abilities). You should keep in mind that even the largest sex differences in ability are smaller than the average height difference between the sexes. Those who believe that the superior math and spatial scores of men suggest that men should dominate engineering and science must be prepared to accept the reverse argument for psychiatry, psychology, and personnel management.
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Perhaps the most intriguing difference between the abilities of men and women is a subtle but, I believe, important one. Usually, when scholars compare ability differences, they look at average differences: for example, the average woman is better than the average man at decoding emotion. For the most part, average sex differences are not large. How about the extremes, however? If you want to know who is likely to be very good or very bad—a great scientist or a great poet or a violent criminal or a person profoundly retarded—average differences won’t tell you. Extreme scores will, and there is a startling difference between the sexes in extreme scores. The ability scores of men tend to lie at the extremes more often than do the scores of women. The distribution of ability scores is bell-shaped for both sexes, but the women’s scores bunch up in the middle, while the men’s scores spread out with long tails at each end. Put another way, the average score for reading comprehension on the California Achievement Test, for example, is quite similar for girls and boys, with a small female advantage. But if you look way out in the tails, there are many times the number of boys at both ends.
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People often puzzle over why there are so many more men who are math geniuses, CEOs, Nobel Prize winners, champion chess players, great violinists, and world-class chefs. The answer may be that there are more men at the extremely high end of the relevant skill distribution. When we wonder why there are so many more retarded boys than girls and more male school dropouts, the answer may be because there are many more males at the extreme low end.

This answer, while describing the facts accurately, hardly ends the debate, however. Some say there are more men at the extremes because of social learning, with talented men receiving more special attention from mentors while talented women have competing domestic responsibilities or are ignored or discouraged. This may be, but it doesn’t explain why there are more retarded men. Others say biological evolution can explain the difference: Women have been selected to be stable and reliable, whereas men have been selected for the potential of being different. This explanation collapses when one looks across cultures, however. There is more male variability in the United States, but more female variability in such countries as the Philippines and South Africa.
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If variability is an evolutionary trait, it should be the same worldwide. I believe the explanation for this difference at the extremes remains the single most important unanswered question in the study of sex differences.

Can these ability differences change? My answer is a qualified yes. At an individual level, verbal, mathematical, and spatial skills are trainable. This is what school, as well as
Sesame Street
, is about. Any girl’s spatial skill can be boosted with good teaching, as can any boy’s verbal skill. Emotional skill is trainable also. This is what I do as director of training in clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Our aim is to take talented young psychologists and train them to be much better at emotional problem solving—for their own benefit and for that of their future patients.

But can
group
sex differences be shrunk? Will women, on average, catch up with men at rotating three-dimensional objects in their head? Will men catch up with women at detecting masked anger? I don’t know. But there is a hint of change. Many of the skill differences between the sexes have narrowed in the last twenty-five years, and this coincides with our society’s treating boys and girls more similarly.
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To summarize Layer IV: Sex roles can change—within limits. The sex roles young boys and young girls adopt differ radically. They are fixed and stereotyped. Raising boys to be more like girls, and vice versa, is fruitless—in the short run. In the long run, however, it may work. When they mature, children raised with parental examples of tolerance for a range of sex roles become more androgynous. There are some clear ability differences between the sexes: On average, girls are worse at spatial and mathematical tasks, but better at emotional tasks. With teaching, however, all these skills can be markedly upgraded, and there is some evidence that the
group
sex differences shrink when we treat boys and girls more similarly.