Are there really brain structures devoted singularly to "sex" and "aggression"? If so, can I move some cells from the agression center over to the sex center?
Sadly, I think one of the reasons people like David Brooks are so invested in promoting ev-psych and the idea of sex-based neurological differences is that people will believe any damn thing if you tell them its neurologically derived. We have to lock women in the kitchen to bake cakes while the menfolk boink cheerleaders? Well, if that's how it was laid down in the Upper Paleolithic, then I guess that's how it has to be...
To summarize, there are five empirically testable claims in this passage:
1. Until eight weeks old, every fetal brain looks female -- female is nature's default gender setting.
2. If you were to watch a female and a male brain developing via time-lapse photography, you would see their circuit diagrams being laid down according to the blueprint drafted by both genes and sex hormones.
3. A huge testosterone surge beginning in the eighth week will turn this unisex brain male by killing off some cells in the communication centers and growing more cells in the sex and aggression centers.
4. If the testosterone surge doesn't happen, the female brain continues to grow unperturbed. The fetal girl's brain cells sprout more connections in the communications centers and areas that process emotion.
5. because of her larger communication center, this girl will grow up to be more talkative than her brother. Men use about seven thousand words per day. Women use about twenty thousand.
#1 and #2 are more or less true -- except that (a) the research Brizendine cites says that there may be some differences in gene expression in neural tissues from the beginning of fetal development, not necessarily mediated by testosterone and AMH; and (b) the brain's "circuit diagrams" are not laid down once and for all as the embryonic brain grows, but continue to develop for a long time after birth (and in some ways throughout life) .
As for the striking claims #3 and #4, none of the references that Brizendine cites in support of this passage provide any empirical support for them at all.
And claim #5 appears to be a scientific urban legend. There's apparently no evidence that it's true, and some reason to think that it's false.
#1 and #2 are more or less true -- except that (a) the research Brizendine cites says that there may be some differences in gene expression in neural tissues from the beginning of fetal development, not necessarily mediated by testosterone and AMH; and (b) the brain's "circuit diagrams" are not laid down once and for all as the embryonic brain grows, but continue to develop for a long time after birth (and in some ways throughout life) .
What, specifically, is your basis for saying #2 is true? I may be missing something, but I don't see it.
Of course, broadly speaking, there are differences in the brains of men and the brains of women. That tells us jack shit about how men and women behave in the world, however.
Any good structural accounts of the phenomenon? The phenomenon of trying to find a physiological basis for gender differences in behavior, other than the obvious ones anyone can see. Ehrenreich & English's For Her Own Good, had a historical survey but was more narrowly focused.
Seems this recurs often enough to reward study as a pattern, to say nothing of its potential for social criticism.
People like us tend to assume it's bunk, because it always has been and doesn't meet our needs, but the need and desire for it might be worth studying.
7: That is, the part of #2 claiming that differences in sex hormones have a known significant effect on gender differences in embryonic 'circuit development'. I'm not sure if you meant #2 to claim that, or if the mention of hormones was just "Hormones probably have some effect here, they effect lots of stuff."
People like us tend to assume it's bunk, because it always has been and doesn't meet our needs, but the need and desire for it might be worth studying.
I assume that it's attachment to gender stereotypes, and a resulting desire to show that they're ineradicably determined by our physical natures.
12: Duh, I'm an idiot, I didn't notice your link, and didn't recognize the passage out of context. And in context, Language Log is not saying that there's research showing gender differences arising out of the differing hormonal environments of the male and female embryonic brain.
I could have told you that the book was worthless just by looking at the cover - the "M.D." after the author's name.
Not that having an M.D. makes you a bad writer, but if an author puts it on the cover of her book, it's a sign that she's trying to use credentials to substitute for substance.
The same applies to any author who puts "Ph.D." after his or her name on the cover of a book.
I assume that it's attachment to gender stereotypes, and a resulting desire to show that they're ineradicably determined by our physical natures.
I do too, but it'd be nice if somebody tried to find out. Considering the kind of funding devoted to testing what seem to me obvious platitudes in say, rational choice, I would hope somebody would do it. Might turn up a non-obvious pattern or two.
Moreover, I'd add that supposing even some of the macro-level differences are true, Brizendine's societal conclusions don't necessarily follow. People don't pop out of the womb fully formed: take the predisposed-to-be-talkative girl child and beat her every time she speaks, and I'll bet she won't be talkative when she's older.
What bothers me about this type of argument is just that 'science' is used as the magic wand to support the claim that some contingent social practice was hardwired in the Pleistocene era. And if you deny that, you're denying science.
What infuriates me about this argument is how it is often dishonestly applied. If "science" discovers that boys have a shorter attention span, we will rush to revamp the curricula so they can succeed in mathematics and science even as their testosterone-addled brains spin. If "science" discovers that girls don't do as well in mathematics once they hit puberty, we'll put it down to hormones and the fact that girls just aren't as gifted, but never move to change the way we teach to them.
I thought that the attempts to find physical causes for women's (assumed) intellectual inferiority was a Francis Galton thing, but it appears to have been more of a focus of Broca's. The books I'd check are at home, though, and Googling is mostly turning up people trying to smear evolution with spurious Darwin quotes.
13, 19: That Language Log link in 5 suggests that people will accept statements that they'd otherwise find horribly retrograde if you add a disclaimer that "neurological studies tell us that...". I don't think this is just a happy coincidence for promoters of this sort of research in the non-scientific press.
10: Back on the savannah, pre-agricultural men used to spend all the time they were out on the hunt complaining to each other about how women acted irrationally, and trying to think of why that was.
I assume that it's attachment to gender stereotypes, and a resulting desire to show that they're ineradicably determined by our physical natures.
Note the comments on CT yesterday, that Brooks was making this latter claim implicitly, simply by talking about the book, as a way of explaining why he didn't seem to be making any claims nor drawing any conclusions.
I assume that it's attachment to gender stereotypes, and a resulting desire to show that they're ineradicably determined by our physical natures.
Note the comments on CT yesterday, that Brooks was making this latter claim implicitly, simply by talking about the book, as a way of explaining why he didn't seem to be making any claims nor drawing any conclusions.
"Yup. Especially the ones that don't recognize that the brain is plastic, and forms structures in response to external stimuli."
This is not infinitely true, and investigating exactly how and in what ways the brain is plastic is a hugely interesting ongoing area of research. The vast majority of which doesn't concern itself at all with between-group differences (we just don't know nearly enough to even begin talking in a useful way about that sort of thing, which is why Brezendine is full of it).
I suspect people know this, but its good to highlight (as is BPHD's #8) so that no one ends up saying silly things when rightfully dissing the type of work that people like Brezendine are presenting.
Sure. People have certainly found gender-linked differences, on average, in brain structures. They just haven't linked them to human behavioral differences.
to 30: Yeah, part of what sucks so badly about this sort of nonsense is that it tends to make one reject anything said about brain structures and behavior as bullshit, because the interesting stuff is so often bullshit. I end up relying on the fact that when something interesting and well supported shows up, someone I think is credible will probably point it out to me so I can take a second look.
My point was more that issues of brain difference and plasticity extend far beyond these types of between-group difference discussions.
So no one should assume that simply talking about brain-behavior relationships necessarily has anything to do with work like Brezendines. That's where I thought #1 was being far too broad.
I do think it will take some work for such research and popular books to effectively be used to promote theories of the inferiority of female brains when the female/male college enrollment ratio stands at about 60/40.
Sure. People have certainly found gender-linked differences, on average, in brain structures. They just haven't linked them to human behavioral differences.
This is the problem regarding most pop-science references, isn't it? In many fields, our knowledge of questions we're super-curious about is limited, and particularly limited among lay people. But we still feel compelled to make claims on the basis of it, because decisions need to be made, and scientific knowledge allows us to push our own views forward with the patina of unbiased truth.
This stuff drives me nuts: it's not clear to me that, even if Brezendine's claims are correct, it matters. Even imagining that for every girl, there was a boy who was ten perecent better than her in math, why would we care? Do we really think that 10% is going to make any difference in the unbelievably vast majority of cases that require math skills?
34: This is me being bitter and cynical, but I'm expecting social factors to preserve male predominance at the highest level of achievement in a lot of fields for quite a while yet. To get to the very top of any field, you need, on top of a great deal of ability, a lot of support and breaks going in your direction, and no catastrophic breaks going against you. Your ability is a large and necessary part, but the contingent path you take, dependent on other people's response to you, is also necessary. And that's not going to be absolutely level for a while yet.
And as long as the highest levels of math and science are predominately male, people are going to say it's innate.
I think you nail the biggest weakness in a huge number of studies of this type, which is a massive asymmetry between the effect size observed at the level of experiment or empirical investigation and the inferred impact of the effect on a vast range of behaviors and phenomena in the world.
It's not unique to studies of gender difference, etcetera. I see the same sleight-of-hand through almost all of the "media effects" literature. But it's especially obnoxious here. Differences which just barely clear the threshold of statistical significance are then given singular and primary causal responsibility for extremely substantive divergences in consciousness, behavior, expression and so on.
Or they're going to wring their hands about how the system is failing boys, because more women than men are choosing science/succeeding in college/etc, and everyone knows were the system working properly, the men would be outnumbering the women because of some crap ev-psych argument.
Still, I'd love to see an article like that, just once: Women are more naturally suited to run English departments at top universities because of our greater natural ability with language. Certainly, there are many talented male writers, but isn't it reasonable to assume that at the highest levels of perfection, the innate tendencies will win out, and that's why no men ever advance beyond adjunct?
Still, I'd love to see an article like that, just once: Women are more naturally suited to run English departments at top universities because of our greater natural ability with language.
Yeah, but if that happens, the next step will be an only slightly more sophisticated form of, "And that's why English departments don't matter." That's also part of the answer to 34, I think: insofar as there is a "power imbalance" (whatever we decide that means), standards themselves can be subject to it. So if there's a power imbalance in favor of men, and women outcompete them in some endeavor, that endeavor will be devalued. How quickly and decisively this happens could be a good way to assess how much of an imbalance there is.
30, 32 and 19 all make good points. I am extremely hostile to the viewpoint espoused in the post and in 1. Biology shapes our minds and capabilities in significant ways. The fact that science has been used lazily by others to reach unpleasant conclusions does not justify being dismissive toward the possibility of real differences between male and female brains. You've only got to look at the reported differences in qualitative experience for men and women on hormone therapy to get a sense of the extent to which biology can shape our minds. While it's also anecdotal evidence this article also makes a strong case, I think.
I say all of this hesitantly — last time it came up I found myself in the unpleasant position of sort-of-defending Larry Summers' asinine remarks. But the kneejerk reaction that No, of course there couldn't be a difference! is simply wrong, based on everything I learned as a wee cognitive science major.
Cala is certainly right that one cannot read policy prescriptions off of gender differences in any obvious way. Let us stipulate that men are, on average, stronger than women. Hard to know what policy recommendations fall easily out of that fact.
So that's absolutely true. And it is likewise true that 99% of gender science, like 99% of all pop science, is worthless. What is emphatically not true is that the default assumption about gender differences on quality X should be "there are none," or "any that exist will be swamped by the effects of culture." Whenever these topics come up on unfogged, however, I get a very strong sense that this is the default assumption some think appropriate. But it isn't the appropriate assumption. Nor should the standards of proof for the 'no difference' conclusion be different than the standards of proof for the "differences" conclusion. It's actually quite hard to find really good evidence from a controlled clinical trial about the effects of testosterone on aggresion. Yet I hope we are willing to accept that relationship.
I think there's some pretty decent evidence for brain structure differences between gay and straight men, although I'm not sure if they sorted out whether that could possible have been feedback from behavior or not. I think the differences were pretty big, though. Been a while since I looked at it.
And it is likewise true that 99% of gender science, like 99% of all pop science, is worthless.
My point is that pop science on gender differences consistently makes strong claims about the existence of gender difference that are not sourced to actual research.
What is emphatically not true is that the default assumption about gender differences on quality X should be "there are none," or "any that exist will be swamped by the effects of culture."
Sorry, that was supposed to link to a page of all randomized studies done looking at the effects of testosterone on aggression. Really, there's not much direct clinical evidence -- small n studies, conflicting data, etc. If instead of testosterone, it were "random small molecule X", people would say: "there's not much evidence there." Nonetheless, my understanding of the scientific consensus is that testosterone influences aggression. It was meant to be a point that if one raises burdens of proof high enough, even points most people will stipulate become dubitable.
The support is: setting the default claim is a way of increasing the oppositions' burden of proof without justice. The sex egalitarian doesn't get to set the default claim as no difference. The sex difference supporter doesn't get to set the default claim as difference.
"there are none," or "any that exist will be swamped by the effects of culture" are strong claims about the existence of gender difference that are not sourced to actual research.
59: So, you're saying that it's wrong to have any default claim? That seems hard to manage.
Sorry, that was supposed to link to a page of all randomized studies done looking at the effects of testosterone on aggression. Really, there's not much direct clinical evidence -- small n studies, conflicting data, etc. If instead of testosterone, it were "random small molecule X", people would say: "there's not much evidence there." Nonetheless, my understanding of the scientific consensus is that testosterone influences aggression.
This is really weird thinking to me. I don't have strong opinions about what's known about testosterone and aggression, generally. But what you seem to be saying is "The scientific consensus is X. The evidence for X is really weak. Therefore you only need really weak evidence to make a scientific consensus." I'd think a stronger conclusion would be "Therefore, either I'm mistaken about there being a scientific consensus, or there's something questionable about the consensus on this point."
59, 60: Okay, howzabout for the default claim: We have no strong evidence for any differences in human behavior caused by innate physical differences between the sexes.
50: Yeah, I saw that. It's providing a caveat to a default assumption that isn't justifiable, however. As baa points out, there isn't a good default position to take on these issues other than "we'll have to look at the evidence, and should be skeptical of the significance of the stated effect." And to consider the source, of course.
Isn't the default claim in these sorts of questions usually no difference? Isn't that how hypothesis testing is supposed to work? Or is it different because obviously there are big differences at the output of the developmental chute, so we're looking for the source?
These nature-nurture debates remind me of early QM - "It's a wave!" "No, it's a particle"! People tend to be only enthused about their side of the question (though sort of aware there are arguments on the other side), and the middle-wayers are as mushy as in politics.
I think it might help to remember that we're lay people, and ought to be thinking of standards for lay people, and let the scientists, and their peer review, take care of their studies. As a lay person, I'm much more inclined to side with B and LB here, not because I don't think there are innate differences between the sexes, and that those differences don't have significant real-world effects, but because 1) science at this point has very little to tell us about the behavioral effects of physical differences--if 99% of the pop science is crap, that's a good argument for a default assumption that it's crap and 2) because the rhetorical / political landscape on this issue really is dominated by ill-meaning hacks who want to use any perceived difference to reinforce cultural norms.
Shorter comment: if I were a scientist, my working assumption would be "There have to be differences, and I wonder what they are." As someone involved in public discourse about this, my default position is "Bullshit. What difference? Prove it. So what?"
(cont'd from 64)... none of which, I hasten to add, say anything about behavior. But if we're taking the reductionist line that I assume we all are, it'd be pretty silly to imagine that everything will just magically shake out to work precisely the same between men and women, despite the fact that the biology clearly differs in some ways.
59, 60, 64: Look, anyone whose hypothesis is that an effect exists has to take as a control hypothesis the possibility that it doesn't. The post did not intend to, and in fact did not, state that for research purposes the hypothesis that there are no differences in human behavior caused by innate physical differences between the sexes should be privileged over any other hypothesis. If you understand the post to make that statement, look back and check to see if your reading is supportable; I do not believe that it is.
What the post said is that, as matter of my experience, pop science claims that such differences have been established by research have uniformly been bullshit. And that therefore, I, as a matter of practice, assume that future such claims will be bullshit, unless someone who I trust tells me that it's worth checking the science out behind this one.
Shorter comment: if I were a scientist, my working assumption would be "There have to be differences, and I wonder what they are." As someone involved in public discourse about this, my default position is "Bullshit. What difference? Prove it. So what?"
Exactly. Scientists should be going ahead and doing the research. It's a fascinating field. But don't expect me to take claims about what science shows about the innateness of the behavioral differences between men and women seriously until the research has been done.
I can't speak to the particular book referenced, but the view espoused by its title is decidedly NOT a mushy middle approach.
It's reminding everyone that genes all exist in an environment. While we think of "environment" as being your parents and your school, its actually relevant all the way down to the surrounding fluid that your genes are floating around in.
This is often overlooked but important to remember.
From now on I am proceeding everything I say with the phrase "neurological studies show..." I'm going to start practicing now:
Neurological studies show, quite definitively, that you should give me [a job/a MacArthur fellowship/oral sex]. In the Pleistocene in was vital to the survival of the species that individuals like me were correctly identified and given [a job/a MacArthur fellowship/oral sex]. As a result, innate modules evolved that program people to seek me out and give me [a job/a MacArthur fellowship/oral sex]. Something very unnatural and wrong is happening in society if I do not get [a job/a MacArthur fellowship/oral sex] right now.
What do you mean you don't believe me? Are you anti-science? Do you doubt that the biological methods that have done so much to explain other organisms can't also unlock the mysteries of the human mind. I can't believe so are so bogged down in superstition that you won't give me [a job/a MacArthur fellowship/oral sex].
There's evidence of innateness - smiling is universal, babies who develop with sex hormone oddities have a higher rate of gender role issues, animals we're closely related to have many in-built behaviors, matriarchy is rare-to-non-existent. There's evidence of culture - try dressing a baby boy in pink and see how strangers react, try functioning in a foreign country, etc. etc. One has to cast a cold eye on everything, but since people care so much about these matters it's better to cast two cold eyes.
What's funny is that the nature/nurture argument has such a complex relationship to politics - is homosexuality plastic?
76 - was being sarcastic - I like that book, esp. because Ridley was more of a nature guy previously judging by his earlier work. I was reacting to the quote in 1. It's gotta be less taste or more filling.
Hey, where did the David Reimer link come from? It's open in a browser tab. That is so tragic. If I were a conservative and I wanted to write a melodrama with a liberal arch villain, that would be my source material.
78: I've had something exactly like what LizardBreath talked about in the linked comments happen, back when I was an undergrad and the Internet was so new and all.
LB and ogged: If we're just taking a stance against pop neuroscience, then fine, I'm completely behind you. One only has to go back and read Dragons of Eden or Astonishing Hypothesis — books written by people considerably smarter than the average pop science writer — to see how bad and instantly-dated it tends to turn out.
You're right, the post is focused -- I ended up reading more into it than I should have. Most of the dismissive attitude toward the possibility of sex differences came in at the comment phase.
I'm sensitive to the need not to make life easier for people keen to produce pseudoscientific justifications for sexism. But they'll keep bringing up scientific justifications for their conclusions anyway, and the field is sufficiently complicated and well-developed that simply dismissing them out of hand is probably not a completely reasonable strategy for responding. Pointing out the specific holes in the arguments (the way LB did in this post) is really the way to go, I think.
What's funny is that the nature/nurture argument has such a complex relationship to politics - is homosexuality plastic?
Extremely. This is actually very well known, and is familiar to anyone who has studied classical Greek culture, prisons, boarding schools, etc.
You actually have to do a lot of conceptual analysis-- distinguishing situational sexuality from basic sexuality, identification from orientation from practice, etc--before you can arrive at something you can even begin to call fixed.
I fail to see what the problem with my comment #1 is. The more detailed comment on brain plasticity in 30 is of course true, but I didn't, in fact, say that there are no significant sex differences in the brain other than those that are learned. I merely said that given that we know that the brain's plasticity is far greater than we assumed even a few years ago, I for one am not really inclined to trust statements about innate sex difference in the brain that don't take this into account.
What is emphatically not true is that the default assumption about gender differences on quality X should be "there are none," or "any that exist will be swamped by the effects of culture."
In fact, these *are* the appropriate assumptions. I wish to point out, however, that in fact no one here, including myself, has said that there are *no* inherent differences between the brains of men and the brains of women; quite the opposite, in fact. I'm sure there are. I'm also sure, as a matter of fact, there our knowledge of these matters, at this point, is not well-developed enough to draw any conclusions about the actual behaviors of men and women.
Lacking that ability, therefore, and knowing that such conclusions are based in wishful thinking and/or stereotype, the only proper response to such speculation is to place the burden of proof on the person who is arguing for the existence of such distinctions. I say this because I presume as an article of faith that we assume that people are essentially equal unless we have actual proof or evidence that that isn't the case.
Yes, exactly. I'm not sure what work 'default assumption' is doing in the criticisms above, exactly. Scientists should be approaching their research with the hypothesis that some effect exists, and the control assumption that it doesn't. In the policy arena, I think the interests of justice require an assumption that the innate capacities of all demographic groups are equal until and unless convincing research demonstrates otherwise.
And in the "sitting around and talking out your ass" arena, which is where we are here, assuming innate gender differences without a half-decent reason for doing so gets you thrown into the "reactionary toad" category.
Assuming that people like me deny the existence of gender difference, however, just puts you in the "poor reader" category, but only because I'm feeling generous today.
I think there's some pretty decent evidence for brain structure differences between gay and straight men
Possibly. What about the bisexuals? I've no doubt that brain structure and genetic pedigree influence who/what we find desirable, but most of the arguments I've read on this topic seem so essentialist.
A very dear friend who occasionally reminds me of you, dear Ogged, except that he's far less sexist, tells me that men's humor is broader and more competitive, while women's humor is dryer and more self-deprecating.
It's been years. It wasn't one study; it was lots of stuff; I read a couple of reviews. I know there are different ways to even understand what it means to be gay--is it practice? What changes in blood flow when you watch which porn? etc. And I can't remember how the studies defined it. Since I can't really remember whose work I'm talking about, I'm not that invested in defending it.
I get the distinct feeling that the magazine has a surplus of rejected "extremely large/small human" comix, and is foisting them on a reading public of thousands of men who think themselves hilarious.
107: I don't know a damn thing about brain differences in gay men, and what Tia said is perfectly natural and reasonable, and what I'm about to say is probably perfectly obvious to everyone.
107 is exactly why shit like the book I criticised (or, rather, linked to eriudite criticism of) makes me insane. Reasonable well educated people read this stuff, and then they're wandering around thinking that SCIENCE! has proven it's true. And they look at you funny when you say that no, it hasn't, and ask what you have against SCIENCE!.
Not that Tia did anything like that. Just that she seems to be wandering about with an intitially firm opinion on a scientific matter that doesn't seem to be based on much, like most of us do all the time. But when people purposefully inject nonsense into the discourse, it's really hard to get it back out.
Just, you know, for clarity, the reviews I read were quite scholarly, even though I can't remember what they were. I'm not defending them, but I didn't get them from a magazine.
baa, I can only assume that you're responding to me since you started out quoting me, but I don't mean to imply super-plasticity of all neurological traits. I'm willing to bet that some will certainly be more malleable than others, and some could turn out to be wholly determined by genes sort of like eye color.
But that's really neither here nor there. Societies are wonderfully flexible contingent things. What we will do in response to new information about what's innate just isn't fully determined by how hardwired the trait is. And what we'll do in response will depend on society's values, resources, technology, and all of that sort of thing.
Take the testosterone example. We could just shrug and say, that's men for you and mock the weak. We could medicate those with extra testosterone because we believe they're dangerous. We could institute a system of weregild. We could do lots of nifty things in response.
Now, if you want to claim -- and I'm not sure you do -- that these hardwired traits are unmalleable, and that the costs to society would be too much to deal with it in any way except one particular prescribed way, that's a much, much harder claim to make, one that would require a lot more scientific proof (more than rats.) and a boatload of political/philosophical arguments. That is a high burden of proof, but it's not an artificially high one.
There are sex-dimorphic behavioral differences. That's a given, isn't it?
The question is "What causes those differences?"
It's a scientific question. It doesn't matter whether the researcher who attempts to answer that question is a social theorists or a neurobehavioralist. In order to support their theory they need solid research and sufficient empirical support.
If the social justice issue is a moral one (as I believe), it is independent from the answer to the question of what causes behavioral differences. The answer, however, does affect the form that the solution takes to get from inequality to equality of the sexes so it is an important question.
It is wishful thinking to assume that social scientists have already answered the question and it is unfair to demand a level of scientific support from the neurobehavioralists that is not demanded from the social scientists. Both sides make a positive claim each that demand a rigorous body of research.
So far, there is weak support from both sides so the likely answer is that there is a genetic and a cultural component to behavior.
114: It's okay, though. While I abominate 80, if science says that it's fun, it must be funny. Clearly B needs amend her claim to say that she is 100% always correct, as demonstrated by game theoretical studies performed by cognitive psychologists at UCSD.
No, b/c if I amend my statement as advised, it implies that I require outside confirmation of my obvious rightness. When really, the point is that it's entirely self-evident.
And here's a paper showing that two potential human pheromones, 4,16-androstadien-3-one (AND), and estra-1,3,5(10),16-tetraen-3-ol (EST), activate regions in the nuclei of the anterior hypothalamus, and that the activation differs with regard to sex and compound. From the paper, "In contrast to heterosexual men, and in congruence with heterosexual women, homosexual men displayed hypothalamic activation in response to AND." In other words, homosexual men responded to the pheromone produced by other men.
With regard to how a genetic component for homosexuality can be maintained when homosexual men reproduce less than heterosexual men, there are studies that indicate "female maternal relatives of homosexuals have higher fecundity than female maternal relatives of heterosexuals and that this difference is not found in female paternal relatives." and "We found increased fecundity in the relatives of gay men and this is one explanation of how a genetic influence might persist in spite of reduced reproductive fitness in the gay phenotype."
(b) I have a friend who asserts that almost every New Yorker cartoon that appears in the caption contest (and perhaps almost every New Yorker cartoon that appears in the New Yorker) can be profitably captioned "Fuck you." I haven't tested this rigorously myself, but my informal ventures suggest that he's onto something.
I was only partially responding to you, Cala. I think your 19 is correct: 1. Drawing moral and political conclusions from natural facts is a mug's game. 2. Isn't it convenient that natural facts are always cited in support of the status quo?
There's a second strand here -- one which I don't associate with you -- which seems to suggest that certain positions should get to be the default hypothesis, have the presumption of truth, whatever. Briefly, these are hypotheses which posit the equality of men and women on variable X, and also hypothesis that posit that any differences we do observe derive primarily from cultural conditioning. I think that move -- politically valuable as it may be -- is an intellectual error. There are lots of qualities on which men and women differ on average, and lots on which they don't. Pick some quality out of a hat (natural aptitude for juggling), and I have no idea whether the group means will be the same. Asserting a priori that they are or are not seems unfounded. Once we've found a difference with supporting evidence we believe (randomized study: females juggle better), we can ask, is the primary cause of this difference social or natural. And here again, we will look to evidence (do female gorillas juggle better, what about female infants, what about rates of female juggling proficiency across time, across cultures, have men been discouraged from juggling). Predicting how this comes out ahead of time, again, seems illigititmate.
Predicting how this comes out ahead of time, again, seems illegitimate.
Sure. As long as no one else is out there saying "Science has demonstrated that innate differences between the sexes determine behavioral differences between men and women", I won't claim that science has determined there aren't any differences. Hell, I won't make that claim regardless of what anyone else says -- it wouldn't be true.
But when I read, or hear, someone talking about what science has established in this regard, unless they have a fair amount of reputable and relevant research to show me, I'm going to point out that they're making it all up.
138 is the sort of compliment that makes my heart soar, and that I live for.
Although a bit too close to the kind of comment found in Bob Shaw's Fansmanship Lectures (yes, a pastiche), back in the day when I was doing this sort of thing in mimeographed form, when a fanzine reviewer would pick up a fanzine to review, inspect it closely, carefully rub a page or two between his or her fingers slowly, and then pronounce with great deliberation: "nice paper."
Anyone read yesterday's article by Cornelia Dean on women & bias in science?
Women in science and engineering are hindered not by lack of ability but by bias and “outmoded institutional structures” in academia, an expert panel reported yesterday.
We make even better quarterbacks. Especially against Farber. And we look much better in pantyhose than Joe Namath.
145: Ogged actually sent it to me to be blogged, and I've been dawdling. What do you say about it? A bunch of people say women are held back from the highest positions in math and science by sexism? I think this is very probably the case, but I can't say that Shalala's endorsement of the proposition gets me any further.
One interesting thing was that most of the people on the panel were women, which seemed right up your "women in positions of power make a big difference" alley. (That, and the fact that even to a noted hater of women and equal rights such as yours truly, the kind of discrimination that the report is mainly concerned with--mostly subtle and fairly pernicious--is worth calling attention to.) But hey, if you think imaginary fat men are more important, far be it from me....
I'm in a sour mood and have been for a while -- work's been irksome, but the problem with this: "that most of the people on the panel were women", is that I can already hear the response from those not poised to agree with the conclusions of the report. After all, why should anyone listen to a bunch of women claiming that women suffer subtle discrimination and should be better treated?
I think the report is probably accurate and interesting (a shame it's not free -- I can't see paying $50 for a pdf), but I doubt it's going to change anyone's mind.
Sorry, didn't mean to impugn anyone here. I just meant that for anyone it convinces, it's preaching to the choir; for anyone not singing from the same hymnal already, it's going to be "Look at teh Feminists asking for special treatment for women again."
153: This is a variant of the She Who Cannot Be Named argument:
Instead, it says, extensive previous research showed a pattern of unconscious but pervasive bias, “arbitrary and subjective” evaluation processes and a work environment in which “anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a ‘wife’ is at a serious disadvantage.
I'm not sure anyone would disagree, particularly as it doesn't seem to be specifically gendered, but gender-associated-characteristics.
Yeah, and of course that's not a reason not to do the report, and it should be publicized. I'm just not in the mood to listen to "Isn't it possible that the report itself is biased? Betcha didn't think of that! And really, shouldn't the people working in the field themselves be the best judge of who deserves promotions? Intangibles are important!" Not that anyone here was necessarily going to go there, I just can't take it this week.
I just meant that for anyone it convinces, it's preaching to the choir
This is where I disagree, and why I thought it was worth blogging. And I've decided I'm not going to blog it, because I can't do it without needling people--let's just discuss it here. Here's an example:
The Ex got a PhD in science from a prestigious and liberal institution. There were definitely some straight-up sexists in positions of power, and they caused plenty of problems. But the people in her lab were younger, liberal, well-meaning, and wouldn't be helpfully described as sexist.* Nevertheless, to take a trivial-seeming example that ends up being fairly important, all the social planning of the lab was done by the women. When you add up the birthdays and the outings, and defenses and celebrations, it adds up to quite a lot of social planning. In a competitive department where people have to do labwork that can't be rushed and takes at least X amount of time, being the social planner becomes a real impediment to getting one's work done. But once you've done some social planning, begging off seems uncooperative, and you're in a bind. That's a real, material disadvantage to the women but not something that even well-meaning, not notably sexist administrators would necessarily notice. It's also something that can be remedied very easily, by instituting rotating assignments for planning department socials.
Anyway, I have no idea if that example is in the report, but I get the impression that things like that--specific and concrete--are. That's the kind of stuff that people respond to.
*Of course the effect I'm describing flows from sexism, but--we've had this discussion before--I don't think it's helpful to call it "sexism," because you can get your point across without making people defensive.
*Of course the effect I'm describing flows from sexism, but--we've had this discussion before--I don't think it's helpful to call it "sexism," because you can get your point across without making people defensive.
I'm just going to curl up under my desk and weep softly for a while now.
Can we not, ogged? It's weird to put LB in the position of feeling a responsibility to respond when she's said she's not up for it at the moment. Also, this--"But once you've done some social planning, begging off seems uncooperative, and you're in a bind"--is freakish.
LB doesn't have to respond. Hell, she's been blowing me off for days. And I don't know what's freakish about it. That kind of thing happens all the time, and not just with social planning, and not just with women. Isn't one of the great lessons of working life that if you do something, even if you're not strictly speaking responsible for it, people will come to think of it as "your" job, which means that you can't just up and stop when you feel like it?
How is it sexism if science has proven that females are hard-wired to prefer party-planning to intellectually challenging scientific work? It's just nature at work.
Isn't one of the great lessons of working life that if you do something, even if you're not strictly speaking responsible for it, people will come to think of it as "your" job, which means that you can't just up and stop when you feel like it?
Yeah, that's true. Right up until the point you grow up. Does something like, "I can't do it because I'm really busy doing X. What about Person Y? I don't think he's done it yet," really not work? Here we're talking about something that isn't even remotely connected to work as such, so it's hard to see it fitting under the rubric of "area of expertise."
A friend of mine does a lot of planning for a high-prestige university science department, and her job explicitly includes this sort of thing. People who don't have somebody who is paid to do it, but are relying on the women who work there to humanize the place on their own time, are getting it on the cheap and should be challenged.
But it seems to me (this is so redundant) that not calling it sexism, so as to not make people defensive, makes it impossible to address. You say, "hey, it seems like the women are responsible for all the social planning" and then the non-defensive person says, "oh yeah? They really shouldn't volunteer to do that." And that's the end of the conversation, and nothing gets done. Without the label, there's no real *reason* to change the thing, is there?
Also, this--"But once you've done some social planning, begging off seems uncooperative, and you're in a bind"--is freakish.
No, it's totally the norm in academia, maybe because the jobs are so ill-defined to begin with. Once you become the guy (or gal) who did the thing so well, you're the guy (or gal) who's always going to be expected to do the thing so well.
This is especially murder on junior faculty, who know they need to please their senior colleagues, but don't exactly know how. What, exactly, is "collegiality"? How much service is enough? For chrissakes, isn't it enough to publish and teach with exemplary evaluations? Under such circumstances, a conservative bettor would try to be more than satisfactory on all fronts.
There's plenty of institutional sexism, too. (And ogged, don't be a weenie. Seriously, it's sexism. Get over it.) Sometimes it comes from weird sources -- like, for example, the desire to avoid sexism. E.g., important governing committees are all supposed to have women on them, so that women's voices are heard in the highest counsels of the enterprise. Laudatory! Except, women are underrepresented in the industry, so the same women keep getting called on to serve on committees -- much more often than their more numerous male peers are. When are they supposed to do research and teaching, again? etc.
173: I'm really not going as far as, "oh yeah? They really shouldn't volunteer to do that." I'm saying that ogged is wrong about people's possible responses to saying, "Have someone else do that this time." In the liberal, well-meaning environment that he's posited, people are pretty good about symmetric fairness.
Seriously, I take the point, and "hmmm" to it, but I think the initial situation--women doing all the planning--is sufficiently patently unfair that you don't need to call it "sexism" to get people to want to change it. Is SCMT really saying "why don't the women just stop?" Are you, SCMT?
I keep on reading "scientific" explanations for what to me seems a metaphor for non-science: the difference between male and female. I do not believe we will ever quantify this, but you'd better believe there is a difference. As for me, I intend to enjoy it.
And in my department, somehow it always seems to be the female professors who make themselves more approachable and available for committee work and supervising students; a lot of the male professors, through various strategms, have managed to establish "hard-ass" or "difficult-to-approach" reputations---without, somehow, getting to be known as "bad colleagues."
Oh, and in my sister's department, there was the case of her very excellent and well-meaning advisor's failing to invite her to a hoity-toity conference--instead, inviting a project teammate, largely to present my sister's data--because he reckoned that with a young child, she wouldn't want to go. And she didn't, really, but she was upset at not having been asked and never managed to say so to him.
This shit is just legion, and so much of it isn't really visible, even to the people on whom it has the greatest impact.
I don't see why that's the end of the conversation, in 171. If he's saying "I'm not going to ask anybody to do this," then his bluff will have to be called by pointing out that he's in effect saying that these social events will be stopping, and it's going to be his decision. Suggesting that rotation or adding it to somebody's job description or bearing the consequences of not doing it are the only choices, and it's his choice to make.
And how is 171 pwned by 168, if the point of 171 is the need for the explicit hammer of charging sexism? It seems that 168 does its work by simply assuming fairness, a good rhetorical ploy.
Is SCMT really saying "why don't the women just stop?" Are you, SCMT?
Yeah, though slol's #174 suggests that's not possible in academia. FWIW, I know a woman in the academic sciences who did, in fact, say essentially that; they went to a rota, and she didn't see (or at least tell me) about any ill-effects. She works in a pretty liberal geographic area, though, so maybe that's not representative.
Well, look. Here's my defense of sexists. In the last 3 years, when I was the money-earning working partner, and Mr. B. was the stay-home parent, guess what? I so was not going to do anything I didn't have to do. I totally became the 50s dad, "forgot" about home deadlines and school events and the like, went "mm-hm" without listening to what he was saying about domestic nonsense, ignored messes, all the rest of it. Effectively, that's sexist: he was doing the mom job and I was doing the dad job, and one of the advantages of the dad job is that you don't, in fact, want to change it. Why would you? I want to come home from work and cook dinner just to be fair? Screw that--I want to sit on my ass.
I think the guys in the lab are going to have the same response. And I also think you can't blame them. If it's unfair, the obvious response is, well then, don't do it. If it's sexist, then there's an implicit sense that okay, we know this is a Very Bad Thing and we should do something about it even if we don't really want to.
I think that among people who are generally open-minded and don't want to be sexist, if you call attention to the ways that unconscious sexist assumptions (like who should plan parties) unfairly burden women or men, the people involved stop without blaming anyone. They may miss the days when parties just happened by themselves, but they don't get mad at the people who stop arranging them.
183: Well, of course the women should just stop it. But as slol pointed out, that's not easy, and women are often v. paranoid about this stuff. Having more women mentors who tell you what you can and can't get away with, and what you do and don't have to do, would help. That said, though, I'll wager there's not a woman grad student or junior faculty member in the country who doesn't know she should probably say no more often (and probably the same is true of a lot of the guys, too). It's the senior faculty and the guys who need to also know that they should ask a lot less, and occasionally just tell the women, "no, you shouldn't be doing that right now."
Effectively, that's sexist: he was doing the mom job and I was doing the dad job
See, I find that conclusion puzzling. You aren't being sexist; you're just being unfair. What's sexist is labelling one the mom job and one the dad job. Right?
What's sexist is labelling one the mom job and one the dad job. Right?
I'm not sure what you're calling sexist. It's the mom job because the percentage of mothers who do it is incomparably higher than the percentage of fathers (I, like B. am in the 'dad' position, and it is unfair to Buck). It's sexist to insist that women must do it, or that it's natural or preferable or inevitable that women are going to do it more than men. But it's not sexist to note that they do do it more than men.
I think what apo was saying is that in B's situation, the unfairness isn't due to sexism, and what's sexist is saying that the "mom" job belongs to women (moms) and the dad's job belongs to men.
I suppose you could argue that the mom job is worse because women do it, so anyone doing it and being treated unfairly is suffering the lingering effects of institutionalized historical sexism, but then I'd probably find you annoying.
188: Right. But it's stupid to fail to realize that we DO think of one as "the mom job" and the other as "the dad job," and that that's the main reason why the person doing the dad job manages to get away with thinking that his/her work day is "over" when he/she goes home. In other words, even if I say "oh, I don't *personally* think that moms should do X and dads should do Y," that doesn't mean that the situation isn't basically sexist. And quibbling over whether or not it is ain't getting dinner on the table.
Yeah, but stuff like this report (and bitching about this stuff generally) is useful to make people aware that, yes, they do need to rock the boat and risk being thought of as uncooperative and unfriendly. The situation won't change on its own.
193/192: No, it's not sexist because women do it; it's sexist because the traditionally "male" role (earning money working outside the house) includes a sense of entitlement to not "have" to work at home as well. Women aren't raised thinking that they don't "have" to do home work, so *most* women who work outside the house don't quite internalize the dad role as much as LB or I do. In fact, notwithstanding my "dad" role, I felt actively guilty about not spending more time with PK, b/c my internalized sense of what being a "mom" means is stronger than my internalized sense of what being a "wife" means.
I don't care if my saying this annoys you. The fact of it annoys me. You wanna hate the messenger, go right ahead.
Another data point on the mom/dad thing: we have no children, but my wife pointed out, quite correctly, the other day that she is always the one to buy more paper towels when we're out, refill the cat food container, and clean up cat puke, etc. I have my designated chores, and she has hers, but all of the unassigned ones seem to fall onto her by default.
This isn't exactly parallel to anything mentioned above, but it's interesting (to me) so, here I am. I definitely have been getting away with thinking that as soon as I got home I was done, except for the home-related work explicitly assigned to me. I probably wouldn't have noticed it if it weren't brought to my attention.
Evidence of unexplored sexist assumptions? Pure laziness? A little of both? Either way, something I should change.
Evidence of unexplored sexist assumptions? Pure laziness? A little of both? Either way, something I should change.
It's a little of both, but I'm betting it's more laziness. This whole discussion seems like a repeat of the "cleaning the house" argument over at Hol/bo-Wa/ri/ng's blog. Sometimes we're talking about free-riding that might well exist, even independent of sexism.
There's also a certain amount of (unconscious) playing chicken that goes on. If you have a task that needs to be done in some timeframe, and either of two people has to do it (this is more applicable to childcare than housework), the one whose traditional role is to ignore it has a big advantage in waiting the other person out.
Although kind of the same with cat puke. Someone's got to clean it up, and you can ignore it because you know she'll get to it. But the fact that you feel that way means that it's even harder for her to ignore it, because she knows that if she tries to wait you out, it's going to be a long, long wait. So she can formally assign the task to you, do it herself, or live in a house with cat puke on the floor.
Do you think there's still an unconscious sense of anticipation--the sense that the job of "wife" involves some seamlessness/mindreading--or is it all more conscious and unexpressed? I'd say it used to be unconscious, I'm not sure if the feminist movement took care of at least making it conscious, if still not fully aired.
200: You're right, this is exactly what's going on. (In my defense on cat puke, she tends to get up first and discover the puke before I do. F'ing cats.)
201: You're right that the solution isn't to just do what she asks, but rather to do some of this stuff without even being asked. That's going to take some self-retraining.
And to 168: I once worked in a smallish (30 employees) office where we went through a period of not having anyone to cover the phones during the receptionist's lunch. It was decreed that each employee would take a turn. In theory this would mean less than 1 hour a month of covering phones.
In practice, the (female) marketing staff did their share, and the (female) editorial staff did their share and the (male) editorial staff, by and large, did not. And when they didn't pull their weight, nobody was willing to make a giant stink about it, and nobody wanted to punish the receptionist by not letting her have lunch, and so one of the women would step in. And you'd end up having the 60-something senior female editor covering phones three times in two weeks because the male editors, senior and junior, had (perfectly legitimate and understandable) excuses for why they couldn't possibly cover phones that day.
It's a peer pressure situation. If the culture of the office is that you will look like a jerk for shirking your work, then everybody will band together and informally enforce the rule, and hardly anybody will bag out. If nobody is willing to call you on the carpet for what is, after all, a stupid hour once a month, then somebody will end up covering for you and you'll get away with it.
It takes energy and tact to always be the moralizer/tattletale who complains about this petty stuff. But it adds up.
Yeah, like LB said, not to pile on mrh (especially because I was so flattered that you said I made a good point above).
I think the self-retraining starts with an eye for what is wrong. My understanding from Margie, who gets in trouble for not doing her share, is that she just doesn't see the half-full glasses in the living room that need to be rinsed and put away. She isn't avoiding the chore; she doesn't see it.
I know that my favorite person in the world to keep house with is my sister, who was raised with my priorities in cleaning. It is such a relief that we see the same problems and attend them in the same order.
Wow, I'm glad that "she wouldn't want to go to the conference because she has little kids" thing was brought up. Just yesterday, me and my friends were brainstorming faculty members to ask to supervise our (school-related) trip to Egypt next spring, and I was all "I doubt she'll want to bust out of the country for two weeks" about a woman who has a very young child. That sucks. Crap.
I know that my favorite person in the world to keep house with is my sister, who was raised with my priorities in cleaning. It is such a relief that we see the same problems and attend them in the same order.
I agree with Megan down the line, I think. Yet I'm not sure Megan would think we agree.
209: Well, the question is whether you think that the traditional roles thing plays into it, or whether it's just funny how things work out that way, must be that women are just neater.
Not annoyed in the least. Just puzzled. If you aren't avoiding work out of expectations of what a man should do, and it occurs regradless of which partner is the breadwinner, then it seems quite a stretch to call it sexism.
208.--The woman with the child should at least be given the chance to refuse.
Speaking of cat-puke, this sister and I shared a bedroom until we were teenagers, and one of our longstanding disputes was who should clean up the dog-pee. The rule that had evolved was that whoever saw it first should clean it up, which OF COURSE led to campaigns of ignorance. I'm not sure when (whether?) we grew up out of that.
Self-retraining (also an answer to 199): it's *not* "just" laziness. It's a question of who does, and who does not feel responsible for x, y, and z. If you truly feel that X is your responsibility, it's always there at the back of your mind. If you truly don't feel that it's your responsibility, it's really easy to forget it or "just be lazy" about it. Also known as the "I just don't care about X as much as you do, honey" argument.
This revelation brought to you by a book I've pushed before and will doubtless push again: Halving it All. Which btw I bought and read long before having kids, and which I think is *way* more advantageous to read long before kids enter the picture.
Man, I will so do the waiting out thing, 'cause I am just stubborn like that. When I was living with my ex-boyfriend, we had a nasty rotting pumpkin (jack-o-lantern) right outside our front door, which was literally there until mid-december at least. I had asked hiim to throw it away, and he didn't, and I waited for a very very long time. Finally I was like "look, I'm not going to touch that thing" and he was all "I won't either" and after another week and battle of wits I told him I'd take it down to the dumpster if he paid me $5. He did. So at least I got financial remuneration.
scmt - well, I'm still mad at you because you called my friend Sean an ass, but we might agree on this thread. I haven't kept track of what you've been saying.
Well, the question is whether you think that the traditional roles thing plays into it, or whether it's just funny how things work out that way, must be that women are just neater.
But part of what came out in the thread on the other blog is that the two are related in not-always-said ways. Specifically, sometimes women are too neat as a result of conditioning; someone (a woman) mentioned this (IIRC) in comparing the housework she did with the amount of housework her mom wanted her to do. Sometimes the answer is to care less (as with the "feeling guilty about not spending more time with the kid" thing.)
Marriages and household set ups are much more confusing on this issue, I think, because there are so many side deals. But, again, I think in most cases, for liberal, well-meaning men of a certain age, symmetrical fairness is an easy case. It's the not-easily-comparable ones that are more difficult.
212: An analogy that might help: a school system employs cooks and janitors. The janitors have a lounge and the cooks are expected to make sure there's always coffee in it, and that snacks are stocked, and that it's tidy. The janitors get paid half again as much as the cooks, and have better benefits. 80% of the janitors are men, 80% of the cooks are women.
When a cook is tidying the janitors' lounge and restocking the coffee and snacks, that's related to sexism, even if the cook is a man and the janitor who made the mess is a woman. The unfair division of work and status among gender-stereotyped roles is sexist even if sometimes those roles are occupied by people of the non-stereotypical gender.
Oooh. One time I decided to wait out my ex, because he kept saying that he didn't do the dishes because I always got to them first. So I was all, OK, I won't get to them first. And I waited for more than a week and he didn't do the increasingly disgusting dishes and when I told him that he had had plenty of time to get to the dishes, he accused me of creating tests for him to fail.
212: Hm. I think this is the crux of the issue. It's sexism, not because I, personally, think men should do X and women should do Y. It's sexism because the dividing lines between X and Y have been drawn in certain ways. If X = earning money outside the home, and Y = not earning money outside the home, then the expectation we, as a society, have developed and learned to think of as pretty much normal is that X does *not* involve doing "extra" work at home (i.e., not feeling responsible for housework), whereas Y *does* involve doing house work--after all, you're home all day anyway!
A baby comes along, and someone needs to take care of the baby; so we redefine Y as "taking care of the baby." Which is done at home, and doesn't earn money, so it's not X. Being not X, it involves doing the things that X doesn't do.
All of this doesn't *have* to be a gender issue. But, in fact, it *is* a gender issue; hence, it's an expression of sexism. One feminist argument is: if more men start doing Y, and more women start doing X, then the expectations of "extra" work for Y and X not having to do that extra work will change. One feminist argument is that both men and women should be expected to do X *and* to take care of the place they live and any children they might have. One anti-feminist argument that often masquerades as feminist or as "just equalist" is that it "doesn't matter" who does X or Y, and that it's mere concidence that it's usually the man doing X and the woman doing Y; that these things are individual choices.
But, the feminist would argue, that simply isn't true. People don't make these choices in a vacuum, and the basic expectation that X somehow absolves you, the adult human being, from being responsible for taking care of your home and children, is deeply rooted in sexism--even when X is being done by a woman who is leaving Y to her husband.
The emphasis was not on who did the dishes or even on equal time with the children, but on whether the responsibility was truly divided. That includes the "mental work'' of managing the routine, like keeping track of children's schedules or noticing that baby needs new shoes.
This really hit home for me. I don't know if I've mentioned this here before, but I was raised by my dad only from age 7 on, so I guess I have a lot of thoughts about men as parents. I think the impulse for men not to do the mental work is really strong, because shit, my Dad didn't really do it and he was the only one there. As a kid, I basically kept track of my own schedule, made my Dad take me shopping for new clothes, made sure forms got returned to school, and seriously would say shit like "hey, we need more toilet paper." Yeah, at 8. I love my Dad dearly and I think I benefitted a lot by having to run a lot of things, but it seriously kind of sucked at the time.
I strongly advise against the waiting out game, which is just passive-aggressive nonsense.
I recommend, instead, just biting the bullet and deciding that any guy who's going to break up with you over housework is a guy you're better off getting rid of. And then just go with a bitchy running narrative of all the shit you're doing until he (1) recognizes how much stuff he somehow manages not to notice; and (2) realizes he'd way rather start paying attention and doing shit himself than listen to you bitching about it.
Maybe this scenario is less intuitive for me, since in both of my marriages, both of us worked full-time for roughly equal pay and the kids have been in daycare. This is true for most of my friends as well.
I know sexism plays a huge, often unacknowledged role in the balance of burdens and anxieties; I hope we all know that.
But the role of purely personal, or familial expectations can make a big difference. My mother's housekeeping has always been "busy," in the sense that the order and neatness of things has suffered because of clutter and fussiness, and many tasks could not be done efficiently. This has been a particular trial for my sister. Everybody's house must be a little like this, but ours was dysfunctionally so, and it effected our morale.
I remember my first visit to my future mother-in-law's apartment: while the "public" areas, like living room, dining room and kitchen were well maintained, they weren't fussy at all. And her bedroom might have been a college student's. I took that as a very good sign, that the irrational housekeeping fetishism I had learned to fear was not an inheritance of my wife's, and so has it proved. There's never been much tension between us about how the house should look. We clean to the same standard, more or less.
Her brothers, on the other hand, seem to me to be treated as if their easier standards than their wives' were entirely due to sexism and male entitlement, when I would say it's what they were raised to think was normal.
Well, to me, 222 really hits hard at that question of how one tells the difference between "purely personal" difference and how things "should" be done. I mean, from one pov., M. Leblanc survived just fine, and probably learned to be self-sufficient, and really, isn't the guy way of doing this stuff better because it doesn't get all hung up on nonsense?
And then there's the other pov, where M. Leblanc says she thought it sucked at the time. And that her dad, lovely though he no doubt was in all other respects, was kind of falling down on the job when it came to that stuff.
224: I will take your word for it, but I find it hard to believe that you and your friends exist in a non-sexist nirvana that's somehow insulated from the rest of America. I'm more inclined to suspect that y'all are basically pretty okay with division-of-labor issues and think that fighting out the small unfairnesses that may exist in your own marriages is less important than getting along well (which, if so, is imho a perfectly fine way to deal with these things privately, even though I myself would be incapable of doing so).
225: I think what they were raised to think was normal can be very affected by gender. Certainly I know men who are not shy about telling their sons "Come help clear the dinner table," and then modeling that behavior, as if it is totally natural that they should take responsibility for cleaning up. But for men to do that is often not natural in our culture, and it takes conscious effort.
Oh, no, it's largely not any more. But it's well-established that, by and large, even in two-income families, women still do that second shift--which goes to show that the division between X and Y isn't simply neutral, right?
I think mrh and his wife probably both work -- this dynamic happens in two-income couples as well. (Hell, Buck works, he just works at home and for himself, and I work long hours.)
This is a helpful guideline that I've formulated one failed relationship at a time: if you're a guy, don't think about what is whose task, just do whatever the hell occurs to you or seems to need doing, and do it right away if possible. If you do that, odds are that you'll still end up doing less, but you won't engender any bad feelings.
(Humorless feminazi can't help pointing out that the reason this rule starts out with "if you're a guy" is because the girls are *already* doing that stuff; it's only when they start realizing that the guys aren't that they start getting testy.)
231: Can be, but isn't necessarily. Some families raise daughters with different housework standards than sons, but some don't. No question that there's a significant element of sexism in how much my wife and I have gone through to get to somewhere vaguely reasonable on household stuff, but there's also a substantial element that comes from my having grown up with messiness and her having grown up with sometimes-obsessive neatness.
Sure, but it doesn't matter if the family itself raises the daughters/sons w/ different expectations--the girl is still gonna figure out, at some point, that society at large expects her to keep a clean house.
Comity, my ass. Most people will happily follow the rule in 237; hell, most people do. The problem is that what occurs to you or seems to need doing is not, when this is an issue, the same thing as occurs to her and seems to need doing. Even post-identification, it remains to be seen if this is something that needs doing ("feed the kids") or could be safely ignored ("lovingly shape the kids' food to resemble their favorite cartoon character, using appropriate foods for appropriate coloring"). And that's where the argument starts.
the girl is still gonna figure out, at some point, that society at large expects her to keep a clean house.
This is true. I didn't do shit for housework as a kid (we had a maid), but when I grew up and moved out and lived with dudes, who was doing all the housework, and feeling guilty when I wasn't? Yup, me.
244 is true, but the standard of cleanliness varies pretty widely, as does the degree of social support for the "wife's duty" thing. I'm not arguing that there isn't a huge problem with this stuff, just that the differing standards issue with which it's commonly conflated is also real. (Also often deployed in bad faith, obviously.)
Most people will happily follow the rule in 237; hell, most people do
I don't think that's true, but even that aside, the nice thing about the rule in 237 is that, if you follow it faithfully, eventually your state of mind changes, and you start to see things in terms of "keeping the house tidy" or "taking care of the baby," instead of as a series of discrete, mildly annoying tasks. When that happens, things that you "didn't notice" before start to seem obvious.
Right, like realizing that maybe the argument isn't over "feed the kid" vs. "shape their food into cute dinosaur patterns" but rather over "put food in front of the kid" and "make sure they actually eat a reasonably well-balanced diet, by whatever means necessary."
I've always done the dishes at our house, from the beginning of our relationship, yet neither my son nor daughter, it seems to me, does them as much as I did when I was their age, even when I ask and help. It's like pulling teeth, and I just give up and tell them to go away after a while. Perhaps I'm not as demanding as my mother was. Same for laundry, bed making, and many other things I was raised to do. Perhaps moms who do these things feel they have more moral authority to force them on children.
I firmly assume that any claim that science has shown a physical cause for behavioral differences between the sexes is bullshit
Yup. Especially the ones that don't recognize that the brain is plastic, and forms structures in response to external stimuli.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:29 AM
Are there really brain structures devoted singularly to "sex" and "aggression"? If so, can I move some cells from the agression center over to the sex center?
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:34 AM
or the aggression center.
bah, I say.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:35 AM
"irrebuttable" probably forms the basis of many jokes.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:37 AM
Sadly, I think one of the reasons people like David Brooks are so invested in promoting ev-psych and the idea of sex-based neurological differences is that people will believe any damn thing if you tell them its neurologically derived. We have to lock women in the kitchen to bake cakes while the menfolk boink cheerleaders? Well, if that's how it was laid down in the Upper Paleolithic, then I guess that's how it has to be...
Posted by Steve | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:39 AM
The paragraph is bullshit but it does seem to be true that there is differences between male and female brains:
From language log:
To summarize, there are five empirically testable claims in this passage:
1. Until eight weeks old, every fetal brain looks female -- female is nature's default gender setting.
2. If you were to watch a female and a male brain developing via time-lapse photography, you would see their circuit diagrams being laid down according to the blueprint drafted by both genes and sex hormones.
3. A huge testosterone surge beginning in the eighth week will turn this unisex brain male by killing off some cells in the communication centers and growing more cells in the sex and aggression centers.
4. If the testosterone surge doesn't happen, the female brain continues to grow unperturbed. The fetal girl's brain cells sprout more connections in the communications centers and areas that process emotion.
5. because of her larger communication center, this girl will grow up to be more talkative than her brother. Men use about seven thousand words per day. Women use about twenty thousand.
#1 and #2 are more or less true -- except that (a) the research Brizendine cites says that there may be some differences in gene expression in neural tissues from the beginning of fetal development, not necessarily mediated by testosterone and AMH; and (b) the brain's "circuit diagrams" are not laid down once and for all as the embryonic brain grows, but continue to develop for a long time after birth (and in some ways throughout life) .
As for the striking claims #3 and #4, none of the references that Brizendine cites in support of this passage provide any empirical support for them at all.
And claim #5 appears to be a scientific urban legend. There's apparently no evidence that it's true, and some reason to think that it's false.
Posted by joeo | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:40 AM
#1 and #2 are more or less true -- except that (a) the research Brizendine cites says that there may be some differences in gene expression in neural tissues from the beginning of fetal development, not necessarily mediated by testosterone and AMH; and (b) the brain's "circuit diagrams" are not laid down once and for all as the embryonic brain grows, but continue to develop for a long time after birth (and in some ways throughout life) .
What, specifically, is your basis for saying #2 is true? I may be missing something, but I don't see it.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:44 AM
Of course, broadly speaking, there are differences in the brains of men and the brains of women. That tells us jack shit about how men and women behave in the world, however.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:44 AM
If my name were Benzedine I would change it.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:45 AM
Any good structural accounts of the phenomenon? The phenomenon of trying to find a physiological basis for gender differences in behavior, other than the obvious ones anyone can see. Ehrenreich & English's For Her Own Good, had a historical survey but was more narrowly focused.
Seems this recurs often enough to reward study as a pattern, to say nothing of its potential for social criticism.
People like us tend to assume it's bunk, because it always has been and doesn't meet our needs, but the need and desire for it might be worth studying.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:46 AM
7: That is, the part of #2 claiming that differences in sex hormones have a known significant effect on gender differences in embryonic 'circuit development'. I'm not sure if you meant #2 to claim that, or if the mention of hormones was just "Hormones probably have some effect here, they effect lots of stuff."
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:46 AM
I am not saying it. Language log is. (scroll to bottom)
Posted by joeo | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:47 AM
People like us tend to assume it's bunk, because it always has been and doesn't meet our needs, but the need and desire for it might be worth studying.
I assume that it's attachment to gender stereotypes, and a resulting desire to show that they're ineradicably determined by our physical natures.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:48 AM
Let's get those languagelog folks a MacArthur.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:50 AM
12: Duh, I'm an idiot, I didn't notice your link, and didn't recognize the passage out of context. And in context, Language Log is not saying that there's research showing gender differences arising out of the differing hormonal environments of the male and female embryonic brain.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:53 AM
I could have told you that the book was worthless just by looking at the cover - the "M.D." after the author's name.
Not that having an M.D. makes you a bad writer, but if an author puts it on the cover of her book, it's a sign that she's trying to use credentials to substitute for substance.
The same applies to any author who puts "Ph.D." after his or her name on the cover of a book.
Posted by Zadfrack | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:53 AM
Not that I'm saying you were saying they did, just that the passage is ambiguous out of context and puzzled me.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:54 AM
I assume that it's attachment to gender stereotypes, and a resulting desire to show that they're ineradicably determined by our physical natures.
I do too, but it'd be nice if somebody tried to find out. Considering the kind of funding devoted to testing what seem to me obvious platitudes in say, rational choice, I would hope somebody would do it. Might turn up a non-obvious pattern or two.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:57 AM
Moreover, I'd add that supposing even some of the macro-level differences are true, Brizendine's societal conclusions don't necessarily follow. People don't pop out of the womb fully formed: take the predisposed-to-be-talkative girl child and beat her every time she speaks, and I'll bet she won't be talkative when she's older.
What bothers me about this type of argument is just that 'science' is used as the magic wand to support the claim that some contingent social practice was hardwired in the Pleistocene era. And if you deny that, you're denying science.
What infuriates me about this argument is how it is often dishonestly applied. If "science" discovers that boys have a shorter attention span, we will rush to revamp the curricula so they can succeed in mathematics and science even as their testosterone-addled brains spin. If "science" discovers that girls don't do as well in mathematics once they hit puberty, we'll put it down to hormones and the fact that girls just aren't as gifted, but never move to change the way we teach to them.
'Cause it's just science ,you see.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 11:57 AM
I thought that the attempts to find physical causes for women's (assumed) intellectual inferiority was a Francis Galton thing, but it appears to have been more of a focus of Broca's. The books I'd check are at home, though, and Googling is mostly turning up people trying to smear evolution with spurious Darwin quotes.
13, 19: That Language Log link in 5 suggests that people will accept statements that they'd otherwise find horribly retrograde if you add a disclaimer that "neurological studies tell us that...". I don't think this is just a happy coincidence for promoters of this sort of research in the non-scientific press.
Posted by Steve | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:04 PM
10: Back on the savannah, pre-agricultural men used to spend all the time they were out on the hunt complaining to each other about how women acted irrationally, and trying to think of why that was.
Posted by Tom Scudder | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:06 PM
Yeah, I read the link.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:07 PM
I assume that it's attachment to gender stereotypes, and a resulting desire to show that they're ineradicably determined by our physical natures.
Note the comments on CT yesterday, that Brooks was making this latter claim implicitly, simply by talking about the book, as a way of explaining why he didn't seem to be making any claims nor drawing any conclusions.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:11 PM
I assume that it's attachment to gender stereotypes, and a resulting desire to show that they're ineradicably determined by our physical natures.
Note the comments on CT yesterday, that Brooks was making this latter claim implicitly, simply by talking about the book, as a way of explaining why he didn't seem to be making any claims nor drawing any conclusions.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:12 PM
Sorry for the double.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:13 PM
1. Cala's 19 is spot on.
2. LB, are you going to blog that story, or what?
3. I resent your prescriptivist blog recommendations.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:17 PM
26.2 Not until late afternoon, if then -- I need to work some. If you want to go ahead with it it's yours.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:18 PM
26.3: I say, as always, "Bow! Bow before Giblets!"
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:19 PM
This is one of the papers that Brizendine cites for #2:
The brains of males and females differ, not only in regions specialized for reproduction, but also in other regions (controlling cognition, for example) where sex differences are not necessarily expected. Moreover, males and females are differentially susceptible to neurological and psychiatric disease. What are the origins of these sex differences? Two major sources of sexually dimorphic information could lead to sex differences in brain function. Male and female brain cells carry a different complement of sex chromosome genes and are influenced throughout life by a different mix of gonadal hormones.
Language log points out that maybe people are different from rats and birds on this.
Posted by joe o | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:19 PM
"Yup. Especially the ones that don't recognize that the brain is plastic, and forms structures in response to external stimuli."
This is not infinitely true, and investigating exactly how and in what ways the brain is plastic is a hugely interesting ongoing area of research. The vast majority of which doesn't concern itself at all with between-group differences (we just don't know nearly enough to even begin talking in a useful way about that sort of thing, which is why Brezendine is full of it).
I suspect people know this, but its good to highlight (as is BPHD's #8) so that no one ends up saying silly things when rightfully dissing the type of work that people like Brezendine are presenting.
Posted by jason | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:22 PM
Sure. People have certainly found gender-linked differences, on average, in brain structures. They just haven't linked them to human behavioral differences.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:24 PM
31 to 29.
to 30: Yeah, part of what sucks so badly about this sort of nonsense is that it tends to make one reject anything said about brain structures and behavior as bullshit, because the interesting stuff is so often bullshit. I end up relying on the fact that when something interesting and well supported shows up, someone I think is credible will probably point it out to me so I can take a second look.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:26 PM
My point was more that issues of brain difference and plasticity extend far beyond these types of between-group difference discussions.
So no one should assume that simply talking about brain-behavior relationships necessarily has anything to do with work like Brezendines. That's where I thought #1 was being far too broad.
Posted by jason | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:27 PM
19 is a good point.
I do think it will take some work for such research and popular books to effectively be used to promote theories of the inferiority of female brains when the female/male college enrollment ratio stands at about 60/40.
Posted by joeo | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:28 PM
ignore 33.
Sorry, thought 31 was a reference to my earlier post. 32 is spot on.
Posted by jason | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:29 PM
Sure. People have certainly found gender-linked differences, on average, in brain structures. They just haven't linked them to human behavioral differences.
This is the problem regarding most pop-science references, isn't it? In many fields, our knowledge of questions we're super-curious about is limited, and particularly limited among lay people. But we still feel compelled to make claims on the basis of it, because decisions need to be made, and scientific knowledge allows us to push our own views forward with the patina of unbiased truth.
This stuff drives me nuts: it's not clear to me that, even if Brezendine's claims are correct, it matters. Even imagining that for every girl, there was a boy who was ten perecent better than her in math, why would we care? Do we really think that 10% is going to make any difference in the unbelievably vast majority of cases that require math skills?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:32 PM
34: This is me being bitter and cynical, but I'm expecting social factors to preserve male predominance at the highest level of achievement in a lot of fields for quite a while yet. To get to the very top of any field, you need, on top of a great deal of ability, a lot of support and breaks going in your direction, and no catastrophic breaks going against you. Your ability is a large and necessary part, but the contingent path you take, dependent on other people's response to you, is also necessary. And that's not going to be absolutely level for a while yet.
And as long as the highest levels of math and science are predominately male, people are going to say it's innate.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:33 PM
This stuff drives me nuts
Are you observing Talk like a Pirate Day?
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:36 PM
Arr, mateys, I am.
Oh, man, I've got an excellent TLAPD post I was forgetting to put up.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:39 PM
I think you nail the biggest weakness in a huge number of studies of this type, which is a massive asymmetry between the effect size observed at the level of experiment or empirical investigation and the inferred impact of the effect on a vast range of behaviors and phenomena in the world.
It's not unique to studies of gender difference, etcetera. I see the same sleight-of-hand through almost all of the "media effects" literature. But it's especially obnoxious here. Differences which just barely clear the threshold of statistical significance are then given singular and primary causal responsibility for extremely substantive divergences in consciousness, behavior, expression and so on.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:39 PM
Or they're going to wring their hands about how the system is failing boys, because more women than men are choosing science/succeeding in college/etc, and everyone knows were the system working properly, the men would be outnumbering the women because of some crap ev-psych argument.
Still, I'd love to see an article like that, just once: Women are more naturally suited to run English departments at top universities because of our greater natural ability with language. Certainly, there are many talented male writers, but isn't it reasonable to assume that at the highest levels of perfection, the innate tendencies will win out, and that's why no men ever advance beyond adjunct?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:39 PM
I be almost forgetting!
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:40 PM
Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:41 PM
Still, I'd love to see an article like that, just once: Women are more naturally suited to run English departments at top universities because of our greater natural ability with language.
Yeah, but if that happens, the next step will be an only slightly more sophisticated form of, "And that's why English departments don't matter." That's also part of the answer to 34, I think: insofar as there is a "power imbalance" (whatever we decide that means), standards themselves can be subject to it. So if there's a power imbalance in favor of men, and women outcompete them in some endeavor, that endeavor will be devalued. How quickly and decisively this happens could be a good way to assess how much of an imbalance there is.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:44 PM
It's often overlooked that some very successful pirates were wymyn.
Posted by Stanley | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:46 PM
I am descended from pirates on my mother's side, including Sir Francis Drake.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:51 PM
It's often overlooked that some very successful pirates were wymyn.
And Jews.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:52 PM
I be meaning,
Thar be many a pirate to be found amoung me ancestors.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 12:52 PM
30, 32 and 19 all make good points. I am extremely hostile to the viewpoint espoused in the post and in 1. Biology shapes our minds and capabilities in significant ways. The fact that science has been used lazily by others to reach unpleasant conclusions does not justify being dismissive toward the possibility of real differences between male and female brains. You've only got to look at the reported differences in qualitative experience for men and women on hormone therapy to get a sense of the extent to which biology can shape our minds. While it's also anecdotal evidence this article also makes a strong case, I think.
I say all of this hesitantly — last time it came up I found myself in the unpleasant position of sort-of-defending Larry Summers' asinine remarks. But the kneejerk reaction that No, of course there couldn't be a difference! is simply wrong, based on everything I learned as a wee cognitive science major.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:02 PM
But the kneejerk reaction that No, of course there couldn't be a difference!
Reread the post, and then tell me if that's my position. Hints: Look for the word 'irrebuttable' and a sentence beginning "After all".
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:04 PM
Cala is certainly right that one cannot read policy prescriptions off of gender differences in any obvious way. Let us stipulate that men are, on average, stronger than women. Hard to know what policy recommendations fall easily out of that fact.
So that's absolutely true. And it is likewise true that 99% of gender science, like 99% of all pop science, is worthless. What is emphatically not true is that the default assumption about gender differences on quality X should be "there are none," or "any that exist will be swamped by the effects of culture." Whenever these topics come up on unfogged, however, I get a very strong sense that this is the default assumption some think appropriate. But it isn't the appropriate assumption. Nor should the standards of proof for the 'no difference' conclusion be different than the standards of proof for the "differences" conclusion. It's actually quite hard to find really good evidence from a controlled clinical trial about the effects of testosterone on aggresion. Yet I hope we are willing to accept that relationship.
And Tom, Larry Summers thanks you.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:04 PM
I think there's some pretty decent evidence for brain structure differences between gay and straight men, although I'm not sure if they sorted out whether that could possible have been feedback from behavior or not. I think the differences were pretty big, though. Been a while since I looked at it.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:06 PM
baa: You linked to a Pub Med search page. Did you have a particular link in mind?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:07 PM
And it is likewise true that 99% of gender science, like 99% of all pop science, is worthless.
My point is that pop science on gender differences consistently makes strong claims about the existence of gender difference that are not sourced to actual research.
What is emphatically not true is that the default assumption about gender differences on quality X should be "there are none," or "any that exist will be swamped by the effects of culture."
Why not? Really, what's your support for this?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:08 PM
True story: one of the tracks I'll be playing today (y'all're listening, right?) is called "ArR".
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:11 PM
Why not?
I believe you answered that in the first part of your comment, LB.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:19 PM
Huh?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:20 PM
"Why not? Really, what's your support for this?"
Scientific method?
I mean, as if citing studies based on relatively close relatives of ours could tell us nothing.
As if there were a special "true but asinine" category to reject.
Posted by rilkefan | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:25 PM
Sorry, that was supposed to link to a page of all randomized studies done looking at the effects of testosterone on aggression. Really, there's not much direct clinical evidence -- small n studies, conflicting data, etc. If instead of testosterone, it were "random small molecule X", people would say: "there's not much evidence there." Nonetheless, my understanding of the scientific consensus is that testosterone influences aggression. It was meant to be a point that if one raises burdens of proof high enough, even points most people will stipulate become dubitable.
The support is: setting the default claim is a way of increasing the oppositions' burden of proof without justice. The sex egalitarian doesn't get to set the default claim as no difference. The sex difference supporter doesn't get to set the default claim as difference.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:26 PM
Huh?
"there are none," or "any that exist will be swamped by the effects of culture" are strong claims about the existence of gender difference that are not sourced to actual research.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:30 PM
59: baa, if I'm understanding you properly, you're saying that the correct default position is "we just don't know." Is that right?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:31 PM
59: So, you're saying that it's wrong to have any default claim? That seems hard to manage.
Sorry, that was supposed to link to a page of all randomized studies done looking at the effects of testosterone on aggression. Really, there's not much direct clinical evidence -- small n studies, conflicting data, etc. If instead of testosterone, it were "random small molecule X", people would say: "there's not much evidence there." Nonetheless, my understanding of the scientific consensus is that testosterone influences aggression.
This is really weird thinking to me. I don't have strong opinions about what's known about testosterone and aggression, generally. But what you seem to be saying is "The scientific consensus is X. The evidence for X is really weak. Therefore you only need really weak evidence to make a scientific consensus." I'd think a stronger conclusion would be "Therefore, either I'm mistaken about there being a scientific consensus, or there's something questionable about the consensus on this point."
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:33 PM
59, 60: Okay, howzabout for the default claim: We have no strong evidence for any differences in human behavior caused by innate physical differences between the sexes.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:35 PM
50: Yeah, I saw that. It's providing a caveat to a default assumption that isn't justifiable, however. As baa points out, there isn't a good default position to take on these issues other than "we'll have to look at the evidence, and should be skeptical of the significance of the stated effect." And to consider the source, of course.
A few differences (more to prove that they exist than to present a complete list):
hippocampal volume
relative levels of myelination
brain mass and neuronal density
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:36 PM
Isn't the default claim in these sorts of questions usually no difference? Isn't that how hypothesis testing is supposed to work? Or is it different because obviously there are big differences at the output of the developmental chute, so we're looking for the source?
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:37 PM
These nature-nurture debates remind me of early QM - "It's a wave!" "No, it's a particle"! People tend to be only enthused about their side of the question (though sort of aware there are arguments on the other side), and the middle-wayers are as mushy as in politics.
Posted by rilkefan | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:39 PM
I think it might help to remember that we're lay people, and ought to be thinking of standards for lay people, and let the scientists, and their peer review, take care of their studies. As a lay person, I'm much more inclined to side with B and LB here, not because I don't think there are innate differences between the sexes, and that those differences don't have significant real-world effects, but because 1) science at this point has very little to tell us about the behavioral effects of physical differences--if 99% of the pop science is crap, that's a good argument for a default assumption that it's crap and 2) because the rhetorical / political landscape on this issue really is dominated by ill-meaning hacks who want to use any perceived difference to reinforce cultural norms.
Shorter comment: if I were a scientist, my working assumption would be "There have to be differences, and I wonder what they are." As someone involved in public discourse about this, my default position is "Bullshit. What difference? Prove it. So what?"
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:40 PM
(cont'd from 64)... none of which, I hasten to add, say anything about behavior. But if we're taking the reductionist line that I assume we all are, it'd be pretty silly to imagine that everything will just magically shake out to work precisely the same between men and women, despite the fact that the biology clearly differs in some ways.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:40 PM
59, 60, 64: Look, anyone whose hypothesis is that an effect exists has to take as a control hypothesis the possibility that it doesn't. The post did not intend to, and in fact did not, state that for research purposes the hypothesis that there are no differences in human behavior caused by innate physical differences between the sexes should be privileged over any other hypothesis. If you understand the post to make that statement, look back and check to see if your reading is supportable; I do not believe that it is.
What the post said is that, as matter of my experience, pop science claims that such differences have been established by research have uniformly been bullshit. And that therefore, I, as a matter of practice, assume that future such claims will be bullshit, unless someone who I trust tells me that it's worth checking the science out behind this one.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:41 PM
Shorter comment: if I were a scientist, my working assumption would be "There have to be differences, and I wonder what they are." As someone involved in public discourse about this, my default position is "Bullshit. What difference? Prove it. So what?"
Exactly. Scientists should be going ahead and doing the research. It's a fascinating field. But don't expect me to take claims about what science shows about the innateness of the behavioral differences between men and women seriously until the research has been done.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:44 PM
As someone involved in public discourse about this, my default position is "Bullshit. What difference? Prove it. So what?"
Exactly.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:45 PM
Is there an echo in here?
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:46 PM
Is there?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:47 PM
Is.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:49 PM
.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:50 PM
66: "middle-wayers are as mushy as in politics."
I can't speak to the particular book referenced, but the view espoused by its title is decidedly NOT a mushy middle approach.
It's reminding everyone that genes all exist in an environment. While we think of "environment" as being your parents and your school, its actually relevant all the way down to the surrounding fluid that your genes are floating around in.
This is often overlooked but important to remember.
Posted by jason | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:51 PM
73-75: You people frighten me. You sure you're not sitting next to each other in the same undergrad computer lab?
Posted by Tom Scudder | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:51 PM
You sure you're not sitting next to each other in the same undergrad computer lab?
Not sure.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:55 PM
77: Does this answer your question?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:56 PM
From now on I am proceeding everything I say with the phrase "neurological studies show..." I'm going to start practicing now:
Neurological studies show, quite definitively, that you should give me [a job/a MacArthur fellowship/oral sex]. In the Pleistocene in was vital to the survival of the species that individuals like me were correctly identified and given [a job/a MacArthur fellowship/oral sex]. As a result, innate modules evolved that program people to seek me out and give me [a job/a MacArthur fellowship/oral sex]. Something very unnatural and wrong is happening in society if I do not get [a job/a MacArthur fellowship/oral sex] right now.
What do you mean you don't believe me? Are you anti-science? Do you doubt that the biological methods that have done so much to explain other organisms can't also unlock the mysteries of the human mind. I can't believe so are so bogged down in superstition that you won't give me [a job/a MacArthur fellowship/oral sex].
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 1:57 PM
[a job/a MacArthur fellowship/oral sex]
"a fellatio"
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:00 PM
Sorry.
Neurological studies show "a fellatio"
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:01 PM
There's evidence of innateness - smiling is universal, babies who develop with sex hormone oddities have a higher rate of gender role issues, animals we're closely related to have many in-built behaviors, matriarchy is rare-to-non-existent. There's evidence of culture - try dressing a baby boy in pink and see how strangers react, try functioning in a foreign country, etc. etc. One has to cast a cold eye on everything, but since people care so much about these matters it's better to cast two cold eyes.
What's funny is that the nature/nurture argument has such a complex relationship to politics - is homosexuality plastic?
76 - was being sarcastic - I like that book, esp. because Ridley was more of a nature guy previously judging by his earlier work. I was reacting to the quote in 1. It's gotta be less taste or more filling.
Posted by rilkefan | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:01 PM
Hey, where did the David Reimer link come from? It's open in a browser tab. That is so tragic. If I were a conservative and I wanted to write a melodrama with a liberal arch villain, that would be my source material.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:02 PM
78: I've had something exactly like what LizardBreath talked about in the linked comments happen, back when I was an undergrad and the Internet was so new and all.
Posted by Tom Scudder | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:06 PM
LB and ogged: If we're just taking a stance against pop neuroscience, then fine, I'm completely behind you. One only has to go back and read Dragons of Eden or Astonishing Hypothesis — books written by people considerably smarter than the average pop science writer — to see how bad and instantly-dated it tends to turn out.
You're right, the post is focused -- I ended up reading more into it than I should have. Most of the dismissive attitude toward the possibility of sex differences came in at the comment phase.
I'm sensitive to the need not to make life easier for people keen to produce pseudoscientific justifications for sexism. But they'll keep bringing up scientific justifications for their conclusions anyway, and the field is sufficiently complicated and well-developed that simply dismissing them out of hand is probably not a completely reasonable strategy for responding. Pointing out the specific holes in the arguments (the way LB did in this post) is really the way to go, I think.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:06 PM
What's funny is that the nature/nurture argument has such a complex relationship to politics - is homosexuality plastic?
Extremely. This is actually very well known, and is familiar to anyone who has studied classical Greek culture, prisons, boarding schools, etc.
You actually have to do a lot of conceptual analysis-- distinguishing situational sexuality from basic sexuality, identification from orientation from practice, etc--before you can arrive at something you can even begin to call fixed.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:06 PM
I fail to see what the problem with my comment #1 is. The more detailed comment on brain plasticity in 30 is of course true, but I didn't, in fact, say that there are no significant sex differences in the brain other than those that are learned. I merely said that given that we know that the brain's plasticity is far greater than we assumed even a few years ago, I for one am not really inclined to trust statements about innate sex difference in the brain that don't take this into account.
What is emphatically not true is that the default assumption about gender differences on quality X should be "there are none," or "any that exist will be swamped by the effects of culture."
In fact, these *are* the appropriate assumptions. I wish to point out, however, that in fact no one here, including myself, has said that there are *no* inherent differences between the brains of men and the brains of women; quite the opposite, in fact. I'm sure there are. I'm also sure, as a matter of fact, there our knowledge of these matters, at this point, is not well-developed enough to draw any conclusions about the actual behaviors of men and women.
Lacking that ability, therefore, and knowing that such conclusions are based in wishful thinking and/or stereotype, the only proper response to such speculation is to place the burden of proof on the person who is arguing for the existence of such distinctions. I say this because I presume as an article of faith that we assume that people are essentially equal unless we have actual proof or evidence that that isn't the case.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:06 PM
Yes, exactly. I'm not sure what work 'default assumption' is doing in the criticisms above, exactly. Scientists should be approaching their research with the hypothesis that some effect exists, and the control assumption that it doesn't. In the policy arena, I think the interests of justice require an assumption that the innate capacities of all demographic groups are equal until and unless convincing research demonstrates otherwise.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:14 PM
The problem with #1, B, is that you wrote it. It's personal, but don't take it personally. Why do you have to be so difficult?
No, seriously, that was mainly from Tom, who has admitted that he's a bad guy, was wrong, kills kittens, etc.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:16 PM
"I say this because I presume as an article of faith that we assume that people are essentially equal"
I am he
As you are he
As you are me
And we are all together.
Posted by rilkefan | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:17 PM
And in the "sitting around and talking out your ass" arena, which is where we are here, assuming innate gender differences without a half-decent reason for doing so gets you thrown into the "reactionary toad" category.
Assuming that people like me deny the existence of gender difference, however, just puts you in the "poor reader" category, but only because I'm feeling generous today.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:18 PM
90: Aww, baby, you're so adorably ineffectual when you're trying to get my goat.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:20 PM
I think she just called you impotent, ogged.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:25 PM
when you're trying to get my goat
B, you maroon, I was expressing sympathy, but if you want to feel attacked, let me know; I can help.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:25 PM
No, no, Ogged. Sympathy is "B. is exactly right, as always." Haven't you learned *anything* in our time together?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:28 PM
I think there's some pretty decent evidence for brain structure differences between gay and straight men
Possibly. What about the bisexuals? I've no doubt that brain structure and genetic pedigree influence who/what we find desirable, but most of the arguments I've read on this topic seem so essentialist.
Pwned by #87, I see.
Posted by Paul | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:29 PM
Do you think it's genetic that they guys are funnier than the women?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:30 PM
Do you think it's genetic that they guys are funnier than the women?
You clearly haven't been following the New Yorker caption contest debacle.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:30 PM
I haven't. What's going on?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:31 PM
No they aren't.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:32 PM
More on 52:
Are you thinking of Simon LeVay's work on gay men's brains? Because it has been thoroughly discredited.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:32 PM
The submissions by women trend funny. The submissions by men trend ass.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:32 PM
The submissions by men trend ass.
Neurological studies show that 80 is hysterical.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:35 PM
No they aren't.
Fucking archives.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:35 PM
A very dear friend who occasionally reminds me of you, dear Ogged, except that he's far less sexist, tells me that men's humor is broader and more competitive, while women's humor is dryer and more self-deprecating.
But you, of course, are the funniest man evah.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:35 PM
It's been years. It wasn't one study; it was lots of stuff; I read a couple of reviews. I know there are different ways to even understand what it means to be gay--is it practice? What changes in blood flow when you watch which porn? etc. And I can't remember how the studies defined it. Since I can't really remember whose work I'm talking about, I'm not that invested in defending it.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:36 PM
103: The whole contest trends ass, and I wish I could stop just reading the back page.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:36 PM
The submissions by women trend funny. The submissions by men trend ass.
Is the debacle that the men win anyway?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:36 PM
Is the debacle that the men win anyway?
Sorry, I was unclear. The debacle is what B said in 108.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:37 PM
he's far less sexist
If you're X% serious, I'm X/2% hurt.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:38 PM
See, Ogged? Standpipe knows how to sympathize with a girl.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:38 PM
Christ, what an asshole.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:39 PM
Sorry about 104, I thought "submissions" meant submissions here.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:39 PM
I get the distinct feeling that the magazine has a surplus of rejected "extremely large/small human" comix, and is foisting them on a reading public of thousands of men who think themselves hilarious.
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:40 PM
111: Maybe you should upgrade your armor class.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:41 PM
107: I don't know a damn thing about brain differences in gay men, and what Tia said is perfectly natural and reasonable, and what I'm about to say is probably perfectly obvious to everyone.
107 is exactly why shit like the book I criticised (or, rather, linked to eriudite criticism of) makes me insane. Reasonable well educated people read this stuff, and then they're wandering around thinking that SCIENCE! has proven it's true. And they look at you funny when you say that no, it hasn't, and ask what you have against SCIENCE!.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:41 PM
Now that you've got all the space you need, LB, why don't you tell us what you have against science?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:42 PM
Blast. I was trying to take a dig with the "funniest man evah" thing, not the other one. The "far less sexist" was meant to be along the lines of 90.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:43 PM
Not that Tia did anything like that. Just that she seems to be wandering about with an intitially firm opinion on a scientific matter that doesn't seem to be based on much, like most of us do all the time. But when people purposefully inject nonsense into the discourse, it's really hard to get it back out.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:43 PM
Just, you know, for clarity, the reviews I read were quite scholarly, even though I can't remember what they were. I'm not defending them, but I didn't get them from a magazine.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:43 PM
Eh, so maybe it's not exactly the same problem. It still drives me insane even if you aren't a good example of it.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:44 PM
There was an interesting recent study comparing the way gay men and women respond to odor. I wrote it up here. and Majikthise talked about it here.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 2:52 PM
baa, I can only assume that you're responding to me since you started out quoting me, but I don't mean to imply super-plasticity of all neurological traits. I'm willing to bet that some will certainly be more malleable than others, and some could turn out to be wholly determined by genes sort of like eye color.
But that's really neither here nor there. Societies are wonderfully flexible contingent things. What we will do in response to new information about what's innate just isn't fully determined by how hardwired the trait is. And what we'll do in response will depend on society's values, resources, technology, and all of that sort of thing.
Take the testosterone example. We could just shrug and say, that's men for you and mock the weak. We could medicate those with extra testosterone because we believe they're dangerous. We could institute a system of weregild. We could do lots of nifty things in response.
Now, if you want to claim -- and I'm not sure you do -- that these hardwired traits are unmalleable, and that the costs to society would be too much to deal with it in any way except one particular prescribed way, that's a much, much harder claim to make, one that would require a lot more scientific proof (more than rats.) and a boatload of political/philosophical arguments. That is a high burden of proof, but it's not an artificially high one.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 3:24 PM
There are sex-dimorphic behavioral differences. That's a given, isn't it?
The question is "What causes those differences?"
It's a scientific question. It doesn't matter whether the researcher who attempts to answer that question is a social theorists or a neurobehavioralist. In order to support their theory they need solid research and sufficient empirical support.
If the social justice issue is a moral one (as I believe), it is independent from the answer to the question of what causes behavioral differences. The answer, however, does affect the form that the solution takes to get from inequality to equality of the sexes so it is an important question.
It is wishful thinking to assume that social scientists have already answered the question and it is unfair to demand a level of scientific support from the neurobehavioralists that is not demanded from the social scientists. Both sides make a positive claim each that demand a rigorous body of research.
So far, there is weak support from both sides so the likely answer is that there is a genetic and a cultural component to behavior.
Posted by Yamamoto | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 3:37 PM
114: It's okay, though. While I abominate 80, if science says that it's fun, it must be funny. Clearly B needs amend her claim to say that she is 100% always correct, as demonstrated by game theoretical studies performed by cognitive psychologists at UCSD.
Posted by Steve | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 3:55 PM
No, b/c if I amend my statement as advised, it implies that I require outside confirmation of my obvious rightness. When really, the point is that it's entirely self-evident.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 4:01 PM
Some of the relevant gay related papers.
One of the physiological differences proposed for male homosexuality has been anatomic differences in the anterior hypothalamic nuclei.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1331721
And here's a paper showing that two potential human pheromones, 4,16-androstadien-3-one (AND), and estra-1,3,5(10),16-tetraen-3-ol (EST), activate regions in the nuclei of the anterior hypothalamus, and that the activation differs with regard to sex and compound. From the paper, "In contrast to heterosexual men, and in congruence with heterosexual women, homosexual men displayed hypothalamic activation in response to AND." In other words, homosexual men responded to the pheromone produced by other men.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15883379
With regard to how a genetic component for homosexuality can be maintained when homosexual men reproduce less than heterosexual men, there are studies that indicate "female maternal relatives of homosexuals have higher fecundity than female maternal relatives of heterosexuals and that this difference is not found in female paternal relatives." and "We found increased fecundity in the relatives of gay men and this is one explanation of how a genetic influence might persist in spite of reduced reproductive fitness in the gay phenotype."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15539346
and
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15772775
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 4:20 PM
128: Your second link is the paper I was blogging about. I was mostly responding to the NYT write-up though. Thanks for linking to the primary source.
Posted by rob helpy-chalk | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 4:24 PM
Yeah, that NYT write up wasn't too hot.
Posted by gswift | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 4:31 PM
(a) "Trend ass" is my new favorite phrase.
(b) I have a friend who asserts that almost every New Yorker cartoon that appears in the caption contest (and perhaps almost every New Yorker cartoon that appears in the New Yorker) can be profitably captioned "Fuck you." I haven't tested this rigorously myself, but my informal ventures suggest that he's onto something.
Posted by redfoxtailshrub | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 4:52 PM
131(b): The canonical all-occasion caption was given in 113.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 5:06 PM
I was only partially responding to you, Cala. I think your 19 is correct: 1. Drawing moral and political conclusions from natural facts is a mug's game. 2. Isn't it convenient that natural facts are always cited in support of the status quo?
There's a second strand here -- one which I don't associate with you -- which seems to suggest that certain positions should get to be the default hypothesis, have the presumption of truth, whatever. Briefly, these are hypotheses which posit the equality of men and women on variable X, and also hypothesis that posit that any differences we do observe derive primarily from cultural conditioning. I think that move -- politically valuable as it may be -- is an intellectual error. There are lots of qualities on which men and women differ on average, and lots on which they don't. Pick some quality out of a hat (natural aptitude for juggling), and I have no idea whether the group means will be the same. Asserting a priori that they are or are not seems unfounded. Once we've found a difference with supporting evidence we believe (randomized study: females juggle better), we can ask, is the primary cause of this difference social or natural. And here again, we will look to evidence (do female gorillas juggle better, what about female infants, what about rates of female juggling proficiency across time, across cultures, have men been discouraged from juggling). Predicting how this comes out ahead of time, again, seems illigititmate.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 5:12 PM
Female infants totally suck at juggling.
Posted by redfoxtailshrub | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 5:28 PM
How are they at being juggled?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 5:31 PM
134: gling s/b s
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 5:33 PM
47:
And kids.Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 6:41 PM
Excellent formatting, Gary.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 7:02 PM
Predicting how this comes out ahead of time, again, seems illegitimate.
Sure. As long as no one else is out there saying "Science has demonstrated that innate differences between the sexes determine behavioral differences between men and women", I won't claim that science has determined there aren't any differences. Hell, I won't make that claim regardless of what anyone else says -- it wouldn't be true.
But when I read, or hear, someone talking about what science has established in this regard, unless they have a fair amount of reputable and relevant research to show me, I'm going to point out that they're making it all up.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 8:25 PM
138 is the sort of compliment that makes my heart soar, and that I live for.
Although a bit too close to the kind of comment found in Bob Shaw's Fansmanship Lectures (yes, a pastiche), back in the day when I was doing this sort of thing in mimeographed form, when a fanzine reviewer would pick up a fanzine to review, inspect it closely, carefully rub a page or two between his or her fingers slowly, and then pronounce with great deliberation: "nice paper."
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 10:29 PM
Science has demonstrated that men make better linebackers.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-19-06 10:36 PM
Sizeist.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 7:30 AM
An awful lot of women would be better linebackers than me.
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 11:53 AM
See? All this nonsense about different average sizes is a myth.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 12:00 PM
Anyone read yesterday's article by Cornelia Dean on women & bias in science?
Women in science and engineering are hindered not by lack of ability but by bias and “outmoded institutional structures” in academia, an expert panel reported yesterday.
We make even better quarterbacks. Especially against Farber. And we look much better in pantyhose than Joe Namath.
Posted by DominEditrix | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 12:00 PM
What do you have against SCIENCE, Gary?
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 12:01 PM
145: Ogged actually sent it to me to be blogged, and I've been dawdling. What do you say about it? A bunch of people say women are held back from the highest positions in math and science by sexism? I think this is very probably the case, but I can't say that Shalala's endorsement of the proposition gets me any further.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 12:06 PM
I've always thought of Farber as more of a long snapper.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 12:13 PM
On the Unfogged eleven, LizardBreath plays LB. Also Wolfson.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 12:38 PM
What do you say about it?
One interesting thing was that most of the people on the panel were women, which seemed right up your "women in positions of power make a big difference" alley. (That, and the fact that even to a noted hater of women and equal rights such as yours truly, the kind of discrimination that the report is mainly concerned with--mostly subtle and fairly pernicious--is worth calling attention to.) But hey, if you think imaginary fat men are more important, far be it from me....
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 12:47 PM
a noted hater of women and equal rights such as yours truly
Your words. I'd have said "pest".
Posted by standpipe b | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 12:56 PM
I'm in a sour mood and have been for a while -- work's been irksome, but the problem with this: "that most of the people on the panel were women", is that I can already hear the response from those not poised to agree with the conclusions of the report. After all, why should anyone listen to a bunch of women claiming that women suffer subtle discrimination and should be better treated?
I think the report is probably accurate and interesting (a shame it's not free -- I can't see paying $50 for a pdf), but I doubt it's going to change anyone's mind.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 12:59 PM
Color me naive, but I don't think anyone here would disagree with the report's conclusions or make the argument you anticipate. I'll blog it.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 1:16 PM
142 to 148.
Posted by Magpie | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 1:21 PM
After all, why should anyone listen to a bunch of women claiming that women suffer subtle discrimination and should be better treated?
See, this is what I've been saying all along. Glad to see you coming around.
[Runs away, ducking and weaving]
Posted by Chopper | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 1:23 PM
I don't think anyone here
Sorry, didn't mean to impugn anyone here. I just meant that for anyone it convinces, it's preaching to the choir; for anyone not singing from the same hymnal already, it's going to be "Look at teh Feminists asking for special treatment for women again."
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 1:27 PM
I'm in a sour mood and have been for a while
Come back, LB, come back. It turns out litigators are charming, funny, cheerful people.
(Mostly. Except when they're not. Void where prohibited by law.)
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 1:35 PM
153: This is a variant of the She Who Cannot Be Named argument:
I'm not sure anyone would disagree, particularly as it doesn't seem to be specifically gendered, but gender-associated-characteristics.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 1:36 PM
You know, I seem to remember that when a bunch of women said that a couple years ago, there were *plenty* of people willing to argue with it.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 1:37 PM
Yeah, and of course that's not a reason not to do the report, and it should be publicized. I'm just not in the mood to listen to "Isn't it possible that the report itself is biased? Betcha didn't think of that! And really, shouldn't the people working in the field themselves be the best judge of who deserves promotions? Intangibles are important!" Not that anyone here was necessarily going to go there, I just can't take it this week.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 1:43 PM
I just meant that for anyone it convinces, it's preaching to the choir
This is where I disagree, and why I thought it was worth blogging. And I've decided I'm not going to blog it, because I can't do it without needling people--let's just discuss it here. Here's an example:
The Ex got a PhD in science from a prestigious and liberal institution. There were definitely some straight-up sexists in positions of power, and they caused plenty of problems. But the people in her lab were younger, liberal, well-meaning, and wouldn't be helpfully described as sexist.* Nevertheless, to take a trivial-seeming example that ends up being fairly important, all the social planning of the lab was done by the women. When you add up the birthdays and the outings, and defenses and celebrations, it adds up to quite a lot of social planning. In a competitive department where people have to do labwork that can't be rushed and takes at least X amount of time, being the social planner becomes a real impediment to getting one's work done. But once you've done some social planning, begging off seems uncooperative, and you're in a bind. That's a real, material disadvantage to the women but not something that even well-meaning, not notably sexist administrators would necessarily notice. It's also something that can be remedied very easily, by instituting rotating assignments for planning department socials.
Anyway, I have no idea if that example is in the report, but I get the impression that things like that--specific and concrete--are. That's the kind of stuff that people respond to.
*Of course the effect I'm describing flows from sexism, but--we've had this discussion before--I don't think it's helpful to call it "sexism," because you can get your point across without making people defensive.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 1:45 PM
*Of course the effect I'm describing flows from sexism, but--we've had this discussion before--I don't think it's helpful to call it "sexism," because you can get your point across without making people defensive.
I'm just going to curl up under my desk and weep softly for a while now.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 1:48 PM
Can we not, ogged? It's weird to put LB in the position of feeling a responsibility to respond when she's said she's not up for it at the moment. Also, this--"But once you've done some social planning, begging off seems uncooperative, and you're in a bind"--is freakish.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 1:52 PM
Oh, it's okay. I just couldn't come up with anything to post on it that didn't invite a conversation I didn't want to be responsible for managing.
But go ahead and talk about it.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 1:55 PM
LB doesn't have to respond. Hell, she's been blowing me off for days. And I don't know what's freakish about it. That kind of thing happens all the time, and not just with social planning, and not just with women. Isn't one of the great lessons of working life that if you do something, even if you're not strictly speaking responsible for it, people will come to think of it as "your" job, which means that you can't just up and stop when you feel like it?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 1:57 PM
How is it sexism if science has proven that females are hard-wired to prefer party-planning to intellectually challenging scientific work? It's just nature at work.
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 1:58 PM
Brock makes a good point.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 1:59 PM
Isn't one of the great lessons of working life that if you do something, even if you're not strictly speaking responsible for it, people will come to think of it as "your" job, which means that you can't just up and stop when you feel like it?
Yeah, that's true. Right up until the point you grow up. Does something like, "I can't do it because I'm really busy doing X. What about Person Y? I don't think he's done it yet," really not work? Here we're talking about something that isn't even remotely connected to work as such, so it's hard to see it fitting under the rubric of "area of expertise."
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:02 PM
A friend of mine does a lot of planning for a high-prestige university science department, and her job explicitly includes this sort of thing. People who don't have somebody who is paid to do it, but are relying on the women who work there to humanize the place on their own time, are getting it on the cheap and should be challenged.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:02 PM
Pfff. I'm not going to believe him until he tells me which part of women's brains light up when they plan parties. Then I'm all his.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:03 PM
But it seems to me (this is so redundant) that not calling it sexism, so as to not make people defensive, makes it impossible to address. You say, "hey, it seems like the women are responsible for all the social planning" and then the non-defensive person says, "oh yeah? They really shouldn't volunteer to do that." And that's the end of the conversation, and nothing gets done. Without the label, there's no real *reason* to change the thing, is there?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:03 PM
170 to 167. I'll be waiting at the bus stop.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:05 PM
171 pwned by 168. See?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:05 PM
Also, this--"But once you've done some social planning, begging off seems uncooperative, and you're in a bind"--is freakish.
No, it's totally the norm in academia, maybe because the jobs are so ill-defined to begin with. Once you become the guy (or gal) who did the thing so well, you're the guy (or gal) who's always going to be expected to do the thing so well.
This is especially murder on junior faculty, who know they need to please their senior colleagues, but don't exactly know how. What, exactly, is "collegiality"? How much service is enough? For chrissakes, isn't it enough to publish and teach with exemplary evaluations? Under such circumstances, a conservative bettor would try to be more than satisfactory on all fronts.
There's plenty of institutional sexism, too. (And ogged, don't be a weenie. Seriously, it's sexism. Get over it.) Sometimes it comes from weird sources -- like, for example, the desire to avoid sexism. E.g., important governing committees are all supposed to have women on them, so that women's voices are heard in the highest counsels of the enterprise. Laudatory! Except, women are underrepresented in the industry, so the same women keep getting called on to serve on committees -- much more often than their more numerous male peers are. When are they supposed to do research and teaching, again? etc.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:09 PM
173: I'm really not going as far as, "oh yeah? They really shouldn't volunteer to do that." I'm saying that ogged is wrong about people's possible responses to saying, "Have someone else do that this time." In the liberal, well-meaning environment that he's posited, people are pretty good about symmetric fairness.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:11 PM
171 pwned by 168. See?
Way to go, Timbot; great work.
Seriously, I take the point, and "hmmm" to it, but I think the initial situation--women doing all the planning--is sufficiently patently unfair that you don't need to call it "sexism" to get people to want to change it. Is SCMT really saying "why don't the women just stop?" Are you, SCMT?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:11 PM
I keep on reading "scientific" explanations for what to me seems a metaphor for non-science: the difference between male and female. I do not believe we will ever quantify this, but you'd better believe there is a difference. As for me, I intend to enjoy it.
Posted by Elliot Essman | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:13 PM
And in my department, somehow it always seems to be the female professors who make themselves more approachable and available for committee work and supervising students; a lot of the male professors, through various strategms, have managed to establish "hard-ass" or "difficult-to-approach" reputations---without, somehow, getting to be known as "bad colleagues."
Oh, and in my sister's department, there was the case of her very excellent and well-meaning advisor's failing to invite her to a hoity-toity conference--instead, inviting a project teammate, largely to present my sister's data--because he reckoned that with a young child, she wouldn't want to go. And she didn't, really, but she was upset at not having been asked and never managed to say so to him.
This shit is just legion, and so much of it isn't really visible, even to the people on whom it has the greatest impact.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:13 PM
Seriously, it's sexism. Get over it.
Of course it's sexism; I said it was sexism; I still think calling it sexism, in most cases, is a bad idea. But let's not get sidetracked....
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:14 PM
I have no idea what 177 means.
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:15 PM
I think it's something to do with foldy bits.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:19 PM
I don't see why that's the end of the conversation, in 171. If he's saying "I'm not going to ask anybody to do this," then his bluff will have to be called by pointing out that he's in effect saying that these social events will be stopping, and it's going to be his decision. Suggesting that rotation or adding it to somebody's job description or bearing the consequences of not doing it are the only choices, and it's his choice to make.
And how is 171 pwned by 168, if the point of 171 is the need for the explicit hammer of charging sexism? It seems that 168 does its work by simply assuming fairness, a good rhetorical ploy.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:22 PM
Is SCMT really saying "why don't the women just stop?" Are you, SCMT?
Yeah, though slol's #174 suggests that's not possible in academia. FWIW, I know a woman in the academic sciences who did, in fact, say essentially that; they went to a rota, and she didn't see (or at least tell me) about any ill-effects. She works in a pretty liberal geographic area, though, so maybe that's not representative.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:25 PM
Well, look. Here's my defense of sexists. In the last 3 years, when I was the money-earning working partner, and Mr. B. was the stay-home parent, guess what? I so was not going to do anything I didn't have to do. I totally became the 50s dad, "forgot" about home deadlines and school events and the like, went "mm-hm" without listening to what he was saying about domestic nonsense, ignored messes, all the rest of it. Effectively, that's sexist: he was doing the mom job and I was doing the dad job, and one of the advantages of the dad job is that you don't, in fact, want to change it. Why would you? I want to come home from work and cook dinner just to be fair? Screw that--I want to sit on my ass.
I think the guys in the lab are going to have the same response. And I also think you can't blame them. If it's unfair, the obvious response is, well then, don't do it. If it's sexist, then there's an implicit sense that okay, we know this is a Very Bad Thing and we should do something about it even if we don't really want to.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:27 PM
I think that among people who are generally open-minded and don't want to be sexist, if you call attention to the ways that unconscious sexist assumptions (like who should plan parties) unfairly burden women or men, the people involved stop without blaming anyone. They may miss the days when parties just happened by themselves, but they don't get mad at the people who stop arranging them.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:30 PM
B is the sexistest!
Posted by Brock Landers | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:30 PM
183: Well, of course the women should just stop it. But as slol pointed out, that's not easy, and women are often v. paranoid about this stuff. Having more women mentors who tell you what you can and can't get away with, and what you do and don't have to do, would help. That said, though, I'll wager there's not a woman grad student or junior faculty member in the country who doesn't know she should probably say no more often (and probably the same is true of a lot of the guys, too). It's the senior faculty and the guys who need to also know that they should ask a lot less, and occasionally just tell the women, "no, you shouldn't be doing that right now."
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:31 PM
Effectively, that's sexist: he was doing the mom job and I was doing the dad job
See, I find that conclusion puzzling. You aren't being sexist; you're just being unfair. What's sexist is labelling one the mom job and one the dad job. Right?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:32 PM
Screw this, let's talk about this Life in the USA book that Essman up above appears to have written. Crazy? Useful? Crazy and useful?
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:32 PM
What's sexist is labelling one the mom job and one the dad job. Right?
I'm not sure what you're calling sexist. It's the mom job because the percentage of mothers who do it is incomparably higher than the percentage of fathers (I, like B. am in the 'dad' position, and it is unfair to Buck). It's sexist to insist that women must do it, or that it's natural or preferable or inevitable that women are going to do it more than men. But it's not sexist to note that they do do it more than men.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:36 PM
It's sexist to insist that women must do it, or that it's natural or preferable or inevitable that women are going to do it more than men.
That's what I meant by labelling - identifying housework/childcare as the naturally female task.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:41 PM
I think what apo was saying is that in B's situation, the unfairness isn't due to sexism, and what's sexist is saying that the "mom" job belongs to women (moms) and the dad's job belongs to men.
I suppose you could argue that the mom job is worse because women do it, so anyone doing it and being treated unfairly is suffering the lingering effects of institutionalized historical sexism, but then I'd probably find you annoying.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:41 PM
188: Right. But it's stupid to fail to realize that we DO think of one as "the mom job" and the other as "the dad job," and that that's the main reason why the person doing the dad job manages to get away with thinking that his/her work day is "over" when he/she goes home. In other words, even if I say "oh, I don't *personally* think that moms should do X and dads should do Y," that doesn't mean that the situation isn't basically sexist. And quibbling over whether or not it is ain't getting dinner on the table.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:42 PM
185 makes an excellent point.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:43 PM
Yeah, but stuff like this report (and bitching about this stuff generally) is useful to make people aware that, yes, they do need to rock the boat and risk being thought of as uncooperative and unfriendly. The situation won't change on its own.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:44 PM
193/192: No, it's not sexist because women do it; it's sexist because the traditionally "male" role (earning money working outside the house) includes a sense of entitlement to not "have" to work at home as well. Women aren't raised thinking that they don't "have" to do home work, so *most* women who work outside the house don't quite internalize the dad role as much as LB or I do. In fact, notwithstanding my "dad" role, I felt actively guilty about not spending more time with PK, b/c my internalized sense of what being a "mom" means is stronger than my internalized sense of what being a "wife" means.
I don't care if my saying this annoys you. The fact of it annoys me. You wanna hate the messenger, go right ahead.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:48 PM
196: Yep. Although I actually muster up some guilt about the housework, too. But I don't think I end up doing near half of it.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:50 PM
Another data point on the mom/dad thing: we have no children, but my wife pointed out, quite correctly, the other day that she is always the one to buy more paper towels when we're out, refill the cat food container, and clean up cat puke, etc. I have my designated chores, and she has hers, but all of the unassigned ones seem to fall onto her by default.
This isn't exactly parallel to anything mentioned above, but it's interesting (to me) so, here I am. I definitely have been getting away with thinking that as soon as I got home I was done, except for the home-related work explicitly assigned to me. I probably wouldn't have noticed it if it weren't brought to my attention.
Evidence of unexplored sexist assumptions? Pure laziness? A little of both? Either way, something I should change.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:50 PM
Evidence of unexplored sexist assumptions? Pure laziness? A little of both? Either way, something I should change.
It's a little of both, but I'm betting it's more laziness. This whole discussion seems like a repeat of the "cleaning the house" argument over at Hol/bo-Wa/ri/ng's blog. Sometimes we're talking about free-riding that might well exist, even independent of sexism.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:55 PM
There's also a certain amount of (unconscious) playing chicken that goes on. If you have a task that needs to be done in some timeframe, and either of two people has to do it (this is more applicable to childcare than housework), the one whose traditional role is to ignore it has a big advantage in waiting the other person out.
Although kind of the same with cat puke. Someone's got to clean it up, and you can ignore it because you know she'll get to it. But the fact that you feel that way means that it's even harder for her to ignore it, because she knows that if she tries to wait you out, it's going to be a long, long wait. So she can formally assign the task to you, do it herself, or live in a house with cat puke on the floor.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:55 PM
mrh - keeping a list in her head of what has to get done and assigning you certain tasks is also work she is doing constantly.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 2:57 PM
Do you think there's still an unconscious sense of anticipation--the sense that the job of "wife" involves some seamlessness/mindreading--or is it all more conscious and unexpressed? I'd say it used to be unconscious, I'm not sure if the feminist movement took care of at least making it conscious, if still not fully aired.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:00 PM
Not to pile on mrh -- you offered yourself as an example and are being discussed as such, rather than as what's wrong with men.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:01 PM
200: You're right, this is exactly what's going on. (In my defense on cat puke, she tends to get up first and discover the puke before I do. F'ing cats.)
201: You're right that the solution isn't to just do what she asks, but rather to do some of this stuff without even being asked. That's going to take some self-retraining.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:01 PM
203: It's cool.
Posted by mrh | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:02 PM
Yay 161!*
*Except the asterisk.
And to 168: I once worked in a smallish (30 employees) office where we went through a period of not having anyone to cover the phones during the receptionist's lunch. It was decreed that each employee would take a turn. In theory this would mean less than 1 hour a month of covering phones.
In practice, the (female) marketing staff did their share, and the (female) editorial staff did their share and the (male) editorial staff, by and large, did not. And when they didn't pull their weight, nobody was willing to make a giant stink about it, and nobody wanted to punish the receptionist by not letting her have lunch, and so one of the women would step in. And you'd end up having the 60-something senior female editor covering phones three times in two weeks because the male editors, senior and junior, had (perfectly legitimate and understandable) excuses for why they couldn't possibly cover phones that day.
It's a peer pressure situation. If the culture of the office is that you will look like a jerk for shirking your work, then everybody will band together and informally enforce the rule, and hardly anybody will bag out. If nobody is willing to call you on the carpet for what is, after all, a stupid hour once a month, then somebody will end up covering for you and you'll get away with it.
It takes energy and tact to always be the moralizer/tattletale who complains about this petty stuff. But it adds up.
Posted by Witt | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:05 PM
Yeah, like LB said, not to pile on mrh (especially because I was so flattered that you said I made a good point above).
I think the self-retraining starts with an eye for what is wrong. My understanding from Margie, who gets in trouble for not doing her share, is that she just doesn't see the half-full glasses in the living room that need to be rinsed and put away. She isn't avoiding the chore; she doesn't see it.
I know that my favorite person in the world to keep house with is my sister, who was raised with my priorities in cleaning. It is such a relief that we see the same problems and attend them in the same order.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:09 PM
Wow, I'm glad that "she wouldn't want to go to the conference because she has little kids" thing was brought up. Just yesterday, me and my friends were brainstorming faculty members to ask to supervise our (school-related) trip to Egypt next spring, and I was all "I doubt she'll want to bust out of the country for two weeks" about a woman who has a very young child. That sucks. Crap.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:11 PM
I know that my favorite person in the world to keep house with is my sister, who was raised with my priorities in cleaning. It is such a relief that we see the same problems and attend them in the same order.
I agree with Megan down the line, I think. Yet I'm not sure Megan would think we agree.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:12 PM
It's tough, because there's a shot that you're right. But you ask anyway, in a "Dude, we completely understand if you're not up for this," manner.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:13 PM
209: Well, the question is whether you think that the traditional roles thing plays into it, or whether it's just funny how things work out that way, must be that women are just neater.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:16 PM
I don't care if my saying this annoys you.
Not annoyed in the least. Just puzzled. If you aren't avoiding work out of expectations of what a man should do, and it occurs regradless of which partner is the breadwinner, then it seems quite a stretch to call it sexism.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:20 PM
208.--The woman with the child should at least be given the chance to refuse.
Speaking of cat-puke, this sister and I shared a bedroom until we were teenagers, and one of our longstanding disputes was who should clean up the dog-pee. The rule that had evolved was that whoever saw it first should clean it up, which OF COURSE led to campaigns of ignorance. I'm not sure when (whether?) we grew up out of that.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:20 PM
Self-retraining (also an answer to 199): it's *not* "just" laziness. It's a question of who does, and who does not feel responsible for x, y, and z. If you truly feel that X is your responsibility, it's always there at the back of your mind. If you truly don't feel that it's your responsibility, it's really easy to forget it or "just be lazy" about it. Also known as the "I just don't care about X as much as you do, honey" argument.
This revelation brought to you by a book I've pushed before and will doubtless push again: Halving it All. Which btw I bought and read long before having kids, and which I think is *way* more advantageous to read long before kids enter the picture.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:22 PM
Man, I will so do the waiting out thing, 'cause I am just stubborn like that. When I was living with my ex-boyfriend, we had a nasty rotting pumpkin (jack-o-lantern) right outside our front door, which was literally there until mid-december at least. I had asked hiim to throw it away, and he didn't, and I waited for a very very long time. Finally I was like "look, I'm not going to touch that thing" and he was all "I won't either" and after another week and battle of wits I told him I'd take it down to the dumpster if he paid me $5. He did. So at least I got financial remuneration.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:24 PM
scmt - well, I'm still mad at you because you called my friend Sean an ass, but we might agree on this thread. I haven't kept track of what you've been saying.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:25 PM
Well, the question is whether you think that the traditional roles thing plays into it, or whether it's just funny how things work out that way, must be that women are just neater.
But part of what came out in the thread on the other blog is that the two are related in not-always-said ways. Specifically, sometimes women are too neat as a result of conditioning; someone (a woman) mentioned this (IIRC) in comparing the housework she did with the amount of housework her mom wanted her to do. Sometimes the answer is to care less (as with the "feeling guilty about not spending more time with the kid" thing.)
Marriages and household set ups are much more confusing on this issue, I think, because there are so many side deals. But, again, I think in most cases, for liberal, well-meaning men of a certain age, symmetrical fairness is an easy case. It's the not-easily-comparable ones that are more difficult.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:29 PM
212: An analogy that might help: a school system employs cooks and janitors. The janitors have a lounge and the cooks are expected to make sure there's always coffee in it, and that snacks are stocked, and that it's tidy. The janitors get paid half again as much as the cooks, and have better benefits. 80% of the janitors are men, 80% of the cooks are women.
When a cook is tidying the janitors' lounge and restocking the coffee and snacks, that's related to sexism, even if the cook is a man and the janitor who made the mess is a woman. The unfair division of work and status among gender-stereotyped roles is sexist even if sometimes those roles are occupied by people of the non-stereotypical gender.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:32 PM
Oooh. One time I decided to wait out my ex, because he kept saying that he didn't do the dishes because I always got to them first. So I was all, OK, I won't get to them first. And I waited for more than a week and he didn't do the increasingly disgusting dishes and when I told him that he had had plenty of time to get to the dishes, he accused me of creating tests for him to fail.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:32 PM
212: Hm. I think this is the crux of the issue. It's sexism, not because I, personally, think men should do X and women should do Y. It's sexism because the dividing lines between X and Y have been drawn in certain ways. If X = earning money outside the home, and Y = not earning money outside the home, then the expectation we, as a society, have developed and learned to think of as pretty much normal is that X does *not* involve doing "extra" work at home (i.e., not feeling responsible for housework), whereas Y *does* involve doing house work--after all, you're home all day anyway!
A baby comes along, and someone needs to take care of the baby; so we redefine Y as "taking care of the baby." Which is done at home, and doesn't earn money, so it's not X. Being not X, it involves doing the things that X doesn't do.
All of this doesn't *have* to be a gender issue. But, in fact, it *is* a gender issue; hence, it's an expression of sexism. One feminist argument is: if more men start doing Y, and more women start doing X, then the expectations of "extra" work for Y and X not having to do that extra work will change. One feminist argument is that both men and women should be expected to do X *and* to take care of the place they live and any children they might have. One anti-feminist argument that often masquerades as feminist or as "just equalist" is that it "doesn't matter" who does X or Y, and that it's mere concidence that it's usually the man doing X and the woman doing Y; that these things are individual choices.
But, the feminist would argue, that simply isn't true. People don't make these choices in a vacuum, and the basic expectation that X somehow absolves you, the adult human being, from being responsible for taking care of your home and children, is deeply rooted in sexism--even when X is being done by a woman who is leaving Y to her husband.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:33 PM
219: ass-calling retracted. Though (IIRC) he was advising you to be more stereotypically flirty, which I continue to think of as bad advice.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:35 PM
From a revies of the book B. linked:
The emphasis was not on who did the dishes or even on equal time with the children, but on whether the responsibility was truly divided. That includes the "mental work'' of managing the routine, like keeping track of children's schedules or noticing that baby needs new shoes.
This really hit home for me. I don't know if I've mentioned this here before, but I was raised by my dad only from age 7 on, so I guess I have a lot of thoughts about men as parents. I think the impulse for men not to do the mental work is really strong, because shit, my Dad didn't really do it and he was the only one there. As a kid, I basically kept track of my own schedule, made my Dad take me shopping for new clothes, made sure forms got returned to school, and seriously would say shit like "hey, we need more toilet paper." Yeah, at 8. I love my Dad dearly and I think I benefitted a lot by having to run a lot of things, but it seriously kind of sucked at the time.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:36 PM
I strongly advise against the waiting out game, which is just passive-aggressive nonsense.
I recommend, instead, just biting the bullet and deciding that any guy who's going to break up with you over housework is a guy you're better off getting rid of. And then just go with a bitchy running narrative of all the shit you're doing until he (1) recognizes how much stuff he somehow manages not to notice; and (2) realizes he'd way rather start paying attention and doing shit himself than listen to you bitching about it.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:36 PM
Maybe this scenario is less intuitive for me, since in both of my marriages, both of us worked full-time for roughly equal pay and the kids have been in daycare. This is true for most of my friends as well.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:39 PM
I know sexism plays a huge, often unacknowledged role in the balance of burdens and anxieties; I hope we all know that.
But the role of purely personal, or familial expectations can make a big difference. My mother's housekeeping has always been "busy," in the sense that the order and neatness of things has suffered because of clutter and fussiness, and many tasks could not be done efficiently. This has been a particular trial for my sister. Everybody's house must be a little like this, but ours was dysfunctionally so, and it effected our morale.
I remember my first visit to my future mother-in-law's apartment: while the "public" areas, like living room, dining room and kitchen were well maintained, they weren't fussy at all. And her bedroom might have been a college student's. I took that as a very good sign, that the irrational housekeeping fetishism I had learned to fear was not an inheritance of my wife's, and so has it proved. There's never been much tension between us about how the house should look. We clean to the same standard, more or less.
Her brothers, on the other hand, seem to me to be treated as if their easier standards than their wives' were entirely due to sexism and male entitlement, when I would say it's what they were raised to think was normal.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:40 PM
Well, to me, 222 really hits hard at that question of how one tells the difference between "purely personal" difference and how things "should" be done. I mean, from one pov., M. Leblanc survived just fine, and probably learned to be self-sufficient, and really, isn't the guy way of doing this stuff better because it doesn't get all hung up on nonsense?
And then there's the other pov, where M. Leblanc says she thought it sucked at the time. And that her dad, lovely though he no doubt was in all other respects, was kind of falling down on the job when it came to that stuff.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:43 PM
any guy who's going to break up with you over housework
That wasn't really the issue, though. Usually, it's whether I'm going break up with them over housework.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:43 PM
221 - It may be bad advice, but I am very protective of my friends.
223 - Yeah, waiting wasn't a success.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:45 PM
221 - Oh, but what I should have said: Thank you for the retraction. I'm not mad at you any more.
Posted by Megan | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:51 PM
224: I will take your word for it, but I find it hard to believe that you and your friends exist in a non-sexist nirvana that's somehow insulated from the rest of America. I'm more inclined to suspect that y'all are basically pretty okay with division-of-labor issues and think that fighting out the small unfairnesses that may exist in your own marriages is less important than getting along well (which, if so, is imho a perfectly fine way to deal with these things privately, even though I myself would be incapable of doing so).
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:52 PM
225: I think what they were raised to think was normal can be very affected by gender. Certainly I know men who are not shy about telling their sons "Come help clear the dinner table," and then modeling that behavior, as if it is totally natural that they should take responsibility for cleaning up. But for men to do that is often not natural in our culture, and it takes conscious effort.
Posted by Witt | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:53 PM
227: Yup, exactly. So I say, just fly the bitch flag and don't spend six months being silently angry over a rotting pumpkin.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:53 PM
I find it hard to believe that you and your friends exist in a non-sexist nirvana
That wasn't my claim. Just that having one parent stay at home to tend the kids is really not an economic option for most people I know.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:54 PM
Oh, no, it's largely not any more. But it's well-established that, by and large, even in two-income families, women still do that second shift--which goes to show that the division between X and Y isn't simply neutral, right?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:58 PM
I think mrh and his wife probably both work -- this dynamic happens in two-income couples as well. (Hell, Buck works, he just works at home and for himself, and I work long hours.)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 3:59 PM
Now, now, LB! People who don't earn incomes also work, you know ;)
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:06 PM
This is a helpful guideline that I've formulated one failed relationship at a time: if you're a guy, don't think about what is whose task, just do whatever the hell occurs to you or seems to need doing, and do it right away if possible. If you do that, odds are that you'll still end up doing less, but you won't engender any bad feelings.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:08 PM
Whoops. 'Work' s/b 'work for pay'.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:09 PM
237: Nicely put.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:12 PM
Funny, ogged, that's the rule my mother has tried to beat into me.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:13 PM
Equity!
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:14 PM
237: Good rule.
(Humorless feminazi can't help pointing out that the reason this rule starts out with "if you're a guy" is because the girls are *already* doing that stuff; it's only when they start realizing that the guys aren't that they start getting testy.)
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:16 PM
231: Can be, but isn't necessarily. Some families raise daughters with different housework standards than sons, but some don't. No question that there's a significant element of sexism in how much my wife and I have gone through to get to somewhere vaguely reasonable on household stuff, but there's also a substantial element that comes from my having grown up with messiness and her having grown up with sometimes-obsessive neatness.
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:18 PM
Sure, but it doesn't matter if the family itself raises the daughters/sons w/ different expectations--the girl is still gonna figure out, at some point, that society at large expects her to keep a clean house.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:21 PM
the reason this rule starts out with "if you're a guy" is because the girls are *already* doing that stuff
Everyone else already knew that, condescending humorless feminazi.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:23 PM
Comity, my ass. Most people will happily follow the rule in 237; hell, most people do. The problem is that what occurs to you or seems to need doing is not, when this is an issue, the same thing as occurs to her and seems to need doing. Even post-identification, it remains to be seen if this is something that needs doing ("feed the kids") or could be safely ignored ("lovingly shape the kids' food to resemble their favorite cartoon character, using appropriate foods for appropriate coloring"). And that's where the argument starts.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:24 PM
And once along Tim comes along to prove Ogged wrong. Thanks, Tim!
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:28 PM
the girl is still gonna figure out, at some point, that society at large expects her to keep a clean house.
This is true. I didn't do shit for housework as a kid (we had a maid), but when I grew up and moved out and lived with dudes, who was doing all the housework, and feeling guilty when I wasn't? Yup, me.
Posted by m. leblanc | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:28 PM
244 is true, but the standard of cleanliness varies pretty widely, as does the degree of social support for the "wife's duty" thing. I'm not arguing that there isn't a huge problem with this stuff, just that the differing standards issue with which it's commonly conflated is also real. (Also often deployed in bad faith, obviously.)
Posted by DaveL | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:29 PM
Most people will happily follow the rule in 237; hell, most people do
I don't think that's true, but even that aside, the nice thing about the rule in 237 is that, if you follow it faithfully, eventually your state of mind changes, and you start to see things in terms of "keeping the house tidy" or "taking care of the baby," instead of as a series of discrete, mildly annoying tasks. When that happens, things that you "didn't notice" before start to seem obvious.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:30 PM
Right, like realizing that maybe the argument isn't over "feed the kid" vs. "shape their food into cute dinosaur patterns" but rather over "put food in front of the kid" and "make sure they actually eat a reasonably well-balanced diet, by whatever means necessary."
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:32 PM
I've always done the dishes at our house, from the beginning of our relationship, yet neither my son nor daughter, it seems to me, does them as much as I did when I was their age, even when I ask and help. It's like pulling teeth, and I just give up and tell them to go away after a while. Perhaps I'm not as demanding as my mother was. Same for laundry, bed making, and many other things I was raised to do. Perhaps moms who do these things feel they have more moral authority to force them on children.
Posted by I don't pay | Link to this comment | 09-20-06 4:35 PM
ogged, you are right in 250, but it's not a lesson that only guys need to learn.
Posted by slolernr |