The Gendered Mind

[Music: 'Boys Will be Boys', Marlene Dietrich]

Lynne Malcolm: Hi, it's All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm. Today, our gendered minds; is testosterone still king?

Marlene Dietrich, early 20th century Hollywood movie star and singer, with the ironic and entrancing 'Boys Will be Boys'. Throughout her long career, she was known to defy gender stereotypes, one of her many noted quotes being 'I am at heart a gentleman'.

The idea that there is a clear and biological distinction between female and male brains which drives our different behaviours remains a powerful belief. For example, aren't women better socially, and men better at spatial relationships? Men more competitive and women less promiscuous? Not necessarily, according to my guest today. It's essential to re-examine the science and to consider culture as a vital player in shaping us as individuals.

Dr Cordelia Fine is a Professor of History and Philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne, and author of a number of books on the mind, including A Mind of its Own and Delusions of Gender. Her latest book challenges the pervasive stereotypes that still exist around sex, gender and our minds.

She's called her book Testosterone Rex.

Cordelia Fine: Yes, I chose the nickname Testosterone Rex to refer to that very familiar and popular idea that risk-taking competitiveness is a masculine trait that increased reproductive success in males and is therefore wired into the male brain and is fuelled by testosterone. And the reason it seemed like an appropriate nickname to me is for two reasons. One is that it refers to Rex or King, and this Testosterone Rex story seems to offer us an explanation of why it is that even in our contemporary western societies men still have much more power and wealth than women overall. And secondly because the science on which this story is based has really moved on a great deal in the past two decades, and the Testosterone Rex story is actually scientifically extinct.

Lynne Malcolm: Cordelia Fine. In her book Testosterone Rex she says it's time to move beyond the nature vs nurture debate when it comes to sex, gender and the brain. She starts with debunking some myths from the field of evolutionary biology.

Cordelia Fine: So I think there are two really important ways in which changes and evolutionary biology need to update the stories that we have about sex differences and how persistent they necessarily need to be. So one is around this idea that competitiveness is a sort of exclusively male trait. So some decades ago biologists were very focused on the fact that reproduction is cheaper for males because a single sperm is cheaper than an egg, a large juicy egg, and particularly when we talk about mammals because of course female mammals have to gestate and lactate. So reproduction is cheaper and often quicker for males. And the chain of reasoning from this is that, well, for this reason it's really the cost benefit ratio of competing for resources, for status, the territory and for mates is going to be much more favourable for males than for females because females simply aren't going to have the same reproductive advantage from having those kinds of competitions as males are.

And so the idea here is that it's just a sort of intrinsic aspect of maleness throughout the animal kingdom, with a few well defined exceptions, that it's only to the males' benefit to be competitive. But it has turned out over the past decades that the biological economics of reproduction are quite a bit more complicated than this, and as a result of all sorts of other factors that weigh in, there is a lot of diversity in the animal kingdom. So this old idea of male competitiveness certainly does characterise some species extremely well, but less so for others.

And what has been overlooked until recently is, for example, the importance of competition for females, for their reproductive success. So rank and resources, particularly in female mammals, it turns out, can be an important part of female reproductive success. So, for example, high ranking female chimpanzees are able to reproduce at a faster rate than low ranking females, and their infants are more likely to survive. And this seems to be because those high ranking mothers have access to richer feeding sites than low ranking females. So the point here is not to say, well, we are closely related to chimpanzees so we must be just like them, but it's just to point out that that sort of old story, 'sperm are cheap so males compete', has been complicated a great deal and it's revealed a great deal of diversity and the importance of the number of different factors in competition in males and females.

And the second thing it's shown is that these sex roles, as biologists refer to them as, can be quite dynamic. So one example is a species of field cricket. So in the normal course of events the females are actually competitive for mates, and this is because their males provide them with this nutrient rich sperm packet, so the females compete for that. But it turns out that when their environment is rich with pollen they actually kind of sit back and relax and take the more conventional role and let the males compete for them. And this shows that whatever sex is doing in the brains of female field crickets, it's not fixed in but it's actually responsive to environmental conditions. And this is really important when we think about humans because, of all the species across the animal kingdom, I think it's fair to say that we humans have the most diverse arrangement of ways of bringing the next generation into being, and we also have the greatest capacity to change the social, economic, material, environmental, cultural conditions in which we do that.

Lynne Malcolm: One prominent behavioural stereotype is that men are more likely to take risks than women, and it's often linked to men's higher levels of testosterone. Cordelia Fine says that this is a myth.

Cordelia Fine: Well, risk-taking is a really nice example because we tend to think, well, men are risk taking, women are risk averse. Men have more testosterone, women have less testosterone. And it seems really intuitive and plausible to think that men's high levels of testosterone is what drives them to take more risks. But when we start to look more carefully at the breakdown of who takes risks and when, what we see is a much more nuanced pattern in which men are more likely on average to take some kinds of risks but women are equally likely to take other kinds of risks or maybe more likely to take particular kinds of risks. So we tend to overlook female forms of risk taking.

The other interesting aspect of risk-taking is that when we look more closely to see who's taking what kinds of risks we see that there isn't such a thing as an across-the-board risk taker on the whole. So psychologists used to think of risk-taking as this sort of single, domain-general personality trait. So you are either a risk taker or you're not or you're somewhere in the middle. But it turns out that people are quite idiosyncratic in the kinds of risks that they are willing to take. So some people might be very willing to take physical risks but much less willing to take financial risks, and that's why we have to be careful about saying, well look, boys and men are more likely to take certain kinds of physical risks, therefore they are always going to be the ones who are more likely to take financial risks, career risks, business risks and so on, the kinds of risks that are necessary to succeed in a competitive world.

But also when we look more closely at why there are differences between people in the kinds of risks that they take, you see that it is not due to a love for risk per se, most people don't really like risk that much. It's to do with differences in the perceived benefits and risks of a particular situation. So what's the cost-benefit ratio that you perceive? And we can easily see that in a gendered world, that kind of cost-benefit ratio may actually be objectively different for women versus men. So, for example, there's a lot of talk about women shying away from competition, needing to lean in.

But a really interesting research study by Michelle Ryan at Exeter University, when she looked at a large number of men and women who worked as consultants in a major consultancy firm, she found that it was true that women were less willing to take career risks and make those kinds of sacrifices for their career that are necessary to get ahead, but the reason for that was that they perceived less benefit of doing that. They didn't think it was going to work out as well for them as the men did, and the reason for that wasn't that they found that they didn't care so much about their careers but that they perceived the organisations to be less meritocratic, they didn't have the same role models that the men did, and they didn't feel that they had the same levels of support. So they were making these sort of calculations about what kinds of risks it was worth taking in a different environment to the men.

Lynne Malcolm: So there's a lot of research over the years looking at whether there is a male and a female brain, as distinct. Our brains are affected by hormones, so why wouldn't the brains of males be affected by their higher levels of testosterone?

Cordelia Fine: Yes, so there are sex differences in the brain, and I think until recently the debate has been very much on, well, which ones are robust and how big are those differences? But things have really started to shift a bit in the science talking about sex differences in the brain. So one shift is that we've moved away from models that see prenatal testosterone, which is much higher in males on average than in females, as being this sort of sole cause of sex differences in the brain. So the old idea was that testosterone rushed through the male brain, masculinising and de-feminising certain circuits, so creating quite distinct male and female brains.

It is now understood that that process involves many more factors, so various genetic and hormonal components of sex interacting with epigenetic factors and environmental factors. And what this creates is not discreet male versus female circuits but mosaics that are quite idiosyncratic across individuals. And what this means in terms of the concept of a male and female brain is that those sex differences that we often see reported in scientific studies, for example, the natural tendency is to assume that these sex differences, they add up and they add up and they create two quite different kinds of brain. But actually, as a study showed last year, when you look at the human brain you do find sex differences, but when you look at the largest sex differences in the brain you find that they don't add up in individuals in this internally consistent way. So people have a mixture of brain characteristics that are more common in males compared to females, some that are more common in females compared to males and some that are common in both. And so the number of people who have a brain that has only male typical characteristics or only female characteristics is actually very rare.

Lynne Malcolm: Cordelia Fine.

Did you happen to catch the YouTube clip of a little girl in a toy shop aisle in the US having a very angry rant about the sexist way toy companies market to boys and girls? Here she is:

YouTube video audio: The companies who make these try to trick the girls into buying the pink stuff instead of stuff that the boys want to buy, right? Yeah, so then why do all the girls have to buy princesses? Some girls like superheroes, some girls like princesses, some boys like superheroes, some boys like princesses. Why do all the girls have to buy pink stuff and all the boys have to buy different coloured stuff?

Lynne Malcolm: You're with All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm, and I'm with Cordelia Fine, author of Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of our Gendered Minds.

Cordelia Fine argues against the commonly held belief that testosterone is the essence of masculinity and that biological sex is fundamental to the development of our natures. But how are some of the popular ideas explained, like men are better at map reading, and women are better in the social realm, with brains that are wired for nurturing?

Cordelia Fine: Well look, I think it's important to move away from generic statements of 'women are like this' and 'men are like that'. So when you look at the basic building blocks of cognition, so personality, cognitive ability, social abilities, you tend to find that sex differences, you certainly can see them often at the average level but they tend not to be that large. And the other interesting thing about sex differences is that, like the brain differences, they don't add up in this internally consistent way. So you can't locate someone on a line from femininity to masculinity, everyone has their own idiosyncratic array of characteristics. And this starts to tell us something important about what's causing those differences, because if you think it's something like testosterone makes men masculine, when you are thinking of masculinity as a kind of package deal, so you've got promiscuity, risk-taking, competitiveness, map reading, whatever it is, if you think of that as a package deal, you go, okay, more testosterone, more masculinity. Or less testosterone, in the case of women, less masculinity.

But once you start to see these as being not coming together but kind of breaking apart, everyone having these arrays of masculine and feminine attributes, that kind of explanation starts to seem much less plausible, particularly when you start to look at the size of sex differences in behaviour compared to the size of sex differences in, for instance, testosterone. So sex differences in testosterone are much larger than sex differences in behaviour. So what that means is there can't be a simple relationship between absolute level of testosterone differences and behaviour. And this actually makes sense with what we know about testosterone. The level of testosterone in the blood is just one part of a very, very complex system in which many factors can influence what testosterone is actually doing in the brain.

But I think just to step back from that nitty-gritty as well, I think this brings us to this really important point, is that people think, look, it just makes sense that in our evolutionary past it would have been reproductively advantageous for girls and women to have nurturing skills so they could take care of the babies that they had to breast feed and care for, and it just would have been advantageous for reproductive success for males to have the kinds of predispositions that would have made them want to have sex with lots of different partners and hunt or whatever it was.

Now, those assumptions are a bit problematic in themselves, but even if we take them at face value, there's an assumption going on here which is a really natural one which is that if something is adaptive, if it's behaviour that has developed because it was really important for our reproductive success, then it just must be built into some sort of in inalterable aspect of our biology. But it turns out that just isn't necessarily always the case.

So for development to happen you need all kinds of resources, not just genetic resources. So you need social resources and environmental resources and material resources. And what developmental biologists have realised is that if these resources, particularly if they can be reliably inherited by an animal along with its genetic inheritance, then that can be part of the package that they draw on to develop those adaptive traits, however important that particular characteristic is. A really striking example of this is sexual imprinting.

So, for example, if you cross-foster a baby lamb, particularly male lambs, and baby goats, with a mother of the other species, so a lamb raised by a goat mother and a little baby kid raised by a sheep mother, by a ewe, you actually find that when those babies grow up they prefer sexual partners of the other species, and that's quite a robust and persistent preference.

Having an attraction to the right species is really important for reproductive success. I don't think anyone would deny that, it's just not going to happen with the wrong species. But, bar a disaster, if you're a mammal you're going to inherit a mother who is going to take care of you in the early years of your life, so that's a reliable resource that you inherit that the evolutionary processes can recruit in the development of those adaptive traits.

Again, that's not to say this must be the case for humans. It's generally not a good idea to generalise willy-nilly from one species to another, but it serves just to illustrate this really important point that things that can be really important adaptively for reproductive success aren't necessarily built into our genes.

Lynne Malcolm: You've coined the term neuro-sexism when it comes to studying the brain in relation to gender. What do you mean by neuro-sexism and what are the implications of it?

Cordelia Fine: Well, I think one thing that's really important to say is that when I coined the term neuro-sexism I was explicit that it was not to say that there was something intrinsically sexist about studying the relation between sex and the brain. There are important reasons to look at sex influences in the brain, particularly because there are certain kinds of psychopathology of brain and mind that are more common in men versus women and vice versa. And I think this sort of new complex understanding of how the genetic and hormonal components of sex influence the brain are certainly important to study and investigate.

What I meant by neuro-sexism was it was a reference to both academic and popular tendency to refer to neuroscientific claims that justifies and reinforces old-fashioned gender stereotypes in ways that are not scientifically justified. So if you've got scientific literature that has a large number of studies that are likely to be throwing up false positive results because of small sample sizes, if you have speculations about what a sex difference in the brain means for behaviour that is not substantiated in any way with looking at actual behaviour, perhaps because of assumptions that women are more empathic than men, even though you don't show it in your particular sample, then that doesn't really lend itself to strong scientific progress.

Another tendency I noticed in the literature is to just take single snapshots of sex differences in the brain. So while neuroscientists certainly understand that 'in the brain' doesn't mean hardwired, it's interesting to observe that if you only ever study a single population in a single context and then leave it at that, you can't produce any data that can challenge the idea of those sex differences being fixed and universal and timeless.

So I think looking carefully at how implicit assumptions about sex differences, both from the behaviour and brain, influence how the experiments are designed, how the data are analysed and how the data are interpreted, and then of course how that feeds into popular often misrepresentation is really important. But I think it's also obviously socially important to be having rigorous science in this politically sensitive and important area.

Lynne Malcolm: Cordelia Fine believes strongly that culture and environment play a major role in the development of our gendered minds, but she suggests it's time to move beyond the social vs biological or the nature vs nurture debates.

Cordelia Fine: I think maybe a different way of thinking about it is how does a particular sex difference or gendered behaviour develop, because we all understand that biology and environmental aspects are part of the development of everything. Nature and nurture are always involved and they always interact. So the question is how did this particular sex difference or gender trait develop, and could it have developed differently in different circumstances?

So one example of this is research looking at the effect of masculine norms, for instance, on how young men respond to a perceived slight. This is a classic study done by Dov Cohen and colleagues, and they took participants who were either southerners in the US or northerners, and the reason being that southerners have a sort of cultural legacy of having to be a kind of tough man, and so it's very important in that culture to have a reputation of just not being someone that you should mess with.

And what they found is when they set up this quite infamous experiment where supposedly the participants were going to the real experiment but in fact on the way to the testing room they were jostled by a confederate of the experimenter who referred to them in a derogatory way. And what they were interested in is how did the southerners and the northerners respond to that situation. And what they found is that in the southerners there was a more aggressive response to that situation, and also their testosterone levels rose. And so this raises an interesting question, because you think if they respond aggressively in a particular situation, well, it's the testosterone. But stepping back a bit, the testosterone increase seemed to have something to do with that sort of masculine norm that was in play.

Lynne Malcolm: One of Cordelia Fine's previous books A Mind of Its Own looked at the way the brain distorts and deceives us. Does she think self-delusion plays a role in thinking about gender?

Cordelia Fine: One of the phenomena that I talked about in A Mind of Its Own was this idea of confirmation bias. So we interpret evidence or look for evidence in ways that is in keeping with the beliefs that we already hold or conclusions that we would prefer to reach. And there was actually a lovely study showing that scientists are prey to the confirmation bias, so they're much softer on a study that has results that are in keeping with their own preferred conclusion. This is important in relation to the debate because I think throughout Testosterone Rex there are just so many examples of female scientists saying, actually, let's re-examine this assumption, I'm seeing something that's not really fitting with the data. And it has often taken a long time for those insights to penetrate the rest of the field.

There can also seemed to be a tension between…feminist critiques of science can sometimes be seen as being anti-science or anti-difference, and it's simply not the case. It's actually just bringing the insights of gender scholarship into the scientific process. And so it's actually part of improving the quality of the science.

Lynne Malcolm: So you've looked very closely at the science, and you've come to this conclusion. Why then do you think that a counter to the Testosterone Rex concept is so slow to catch on?

Cordelia Fine: I think that's a really interesting question. In many ways the Testosterone Rex story scientifically was a story of its time. So it's in keeping with the ideas and assumptions of last century science. So our understanding of femininity and masculinity has changed, it's changed from this idea that masculinity and femininity are opposites, it's the idea that, okay, you can be both masculine and feminine or neither, to this idea that actually it's a real mix or a kind of gender pick and mix.

And again, in evolutionary biology this focus on the role of genes in development has shifted away to take account of the role of other resources. So in fairness to the Testosterone Rex story, it's sort of based on science that was current. The question is why is it taking so long for these changed understandings within science to be updated into our understanding of sex differences?

And I think one potential explanation is that we are still in a bit of a shift about thinking about the influence of sex on the brain, on development, away from this idea that it's a really powerful predominant cause of sex differences in brain and behaviour, to seeing it as one of many factors that is interacting in very complex ways. The society we live in now is nothing like the society that our Flintstone ancestors lived in. But I think there's a real shift happening in this sort of science of sex differences.

Lynne Malcolm: So how important or even urgent is it that we change our old assumptions and update our understandings of the basis of gender differences, that we bust this Testosterone Rex myth once and for all?

Cordelia Fine: I think from a scientific point of view, to me this seems like a really exciting time in the science of sex. We are starting to explore different ways in which sex actually works, that it doesn't just work directly in the very tight route from genes to hormones to brain, that it's much more complicated, and it's recruiting resources in the outside world to kind of do its developmental work. So I think it's quite an exciting time scientifically, and it would be exciting to see what comes out of that research program that I think we seem to be moving towards a little bit.

But I think from a social point of view it's also really important because if you think in the Testosterone Rex way that, look, it's just evolved that men seek status, compete, and women tend not to, and it's in our genes and it's in our hormones and it is therefore fixed, then that obviously has implications for what kind of society you think it's possible to see. So we know that having these kinds of 'boys will be boys'/'girls will be girls' beliefs do have a host of psychological effects on how we prefer to arrange our lives and how comfortable we feel with the status quo and our feelings towards progressive gender policies.

Lynne Malcolm: Dr Cordelia Fine, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne, and author of Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of our Gendered Minds.

Head to the All in the Mind website for details from today. Production by Diane Dean and sound engineer Judy Rapley.

I'm Lynne Malcolm. Thanks for your company, until next time.

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