Sex on the brain - gender prejudice disguised as science

Cordelia Fine

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IN 1873, a Harvard professor by the name of Edward Clarke wrote a bestselling book called Sex in Education, in which he called on the latest scientific research to prove excessive intellectual labour exposed young girls to ghastly ailments of the ovaries and uterus, not to mention hysteria and neuralgia. American girls, Clarke lamented, were spending so much time with their dictionaries they had become "an exhibition of monstrous brain and aborted ovarian development".

But that was the bad old days. A century-and-a-half of social change and "girls can do anything" inclusivity has seen off this kind of sexist nonsense. Hasn't it?

Not quite. According to British psychologist and author Dr Cordelia Fine, recent advances in the science of the brain have led to a curious resurgence of prejudice disguised as science.

Fine, who will next month deliver a lecture at Dunedin's International Science Festival on the phenomenon she has labelled "neurosexism", realised something was up when she was wading her way through parenting books after the arrival of her two sons (now three and five). She was particularly intrigued by Why Gender Matters by influential US educationalist Leonard Sax, a vigorous advocate of public-funded single-sex schools who was in New Zealand last month, delivering lectures and giving interviews.

Subtitled "What parents and teachers need to know about the emerging science of sex differences", Sax's book says cutting-edge brain-imaging experiments have revealed such profound differences between boys' and girls' brains that they need to be taught in significantly different ways.

"I found it very interesting," recalls Fine. "But as I was reading it I kept thinking, `Gosh, if that's really true then that's quite extraordinary.' Being fortunate enough to have access to the scientific research being cited, as well as a background in cognitive neuroscience, I started checking out some of Sax's claims."

She was alarmed by what she found. "Sax claims, on the basis of a neuro-imaging study, that in the male brain there is a disconnection between the emotion part of the brain and the communication part, which makes it very difficult for boys to talk about how they're feeling."

But Fine says the study demonstrated no such thing: it was merely an experiment in which children had a few areas of their brains scanned while looking at pictures of faces with negative expressions. Some parts of the brain associated with emotion weren't scanned, and there is no reason to believe the gloomy faces generated negative emotions in the first place. "Yet Sax recommends, partly on the basis of this study, that parents should use different discipline techniques with boys and girls."

Looking around, she realised misguided interpretations of brain science were feeding a torrent of books claiming to explain gender differences.

American Louann Brizendine's 2006 bestseller The Female Brain describes the stress of working mothers as a consequence of the competition in the brain between "maternal circuits" and "career circuits".

Allan and Barbara Pease, in their relationship book Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps "self-importantly show a picture of the male brain and the female brain and the areas that are involved in processing emotions, but the study they cite is actually a study of volume sizes of a part of a brain that can't even be seen in the diagram".

And then, of course, there's the pernicious silliness put about by John Gray, author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. In his latest book, notes Fine, "he claims that things like clearing the dishes and cleaning the toilet are oxytocin-boosting for women, whereas for men it's testosterone-draining and it can be really very exhausting for men to be asked to help".

Fine is on the phone from Melbourne, but you can still tell that she's rolling her eyes. "The message of the book is that women just need to adjust to accept substandard behaviour in relationships, and men can get away with giving a hug every now and then."

Fine is in the pop science market herself, having just published A Mind of Its Own (Icon, $24.99), a quirky survey of experimental cognitive psychology. She is writing a second book about gender and neuroscience.

She says although there are indeed some physical differences between the brains of men and women, neuroscience is a long way away from understanding what they mean. For most mental tasks, variance between individuals is far greater than the difference between the average man and woman.

Fine believes there are real dangers to neurosexism. Last month Sax told the NZ Herald "areas of the brain associated with maths and geometry mature about four years earlier in boys than girls". If teachers believe Sax's bad science, says Fine, "it would not be surprising if they lowered their expectations of girls in those subjects... when in fact girls are similar in mathematical abilities to boys".

Neurosexism is a cop-out, too, says Fine. "It's easier to say there are differences between girls' and boys' brains than to look at what pressures in the classroom might be affecting boys and girls." Swallowing Brizendine's notion of the "maternal circuits" makes it easier for a struggling working mum or her partner to accept the status quo "without too many difficult questions about why things are the way they are in terms of inequality in relationships".

If anyone were to claim now, as Clarke did in 1873, that too much book learning was bad for the ovaries, they'd be laughed out of town. But "people who subscribe to gender stereotypes like to have their views vindicated", says Fine. "And if you can have your views vindicated with the help of neuroscience, all the better."

Cordelia Fine appears at the NZ International Science Festival, Dunedin, on July 5 and July 6. Details: www.scifest.org.nz

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