Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

Implicit neurosexism is pervasive, behavior-altering, and often imperceptible. Examining several studies, Fine observes that our self-concept is strongly influenced by gender expectations, and that those gender expectations can have little to do with what we think we believe. We imagine our personalities as solid, but in fact, “the boundary of the self-concept is permeable to other people’s conceptions of you (or, somewhat more accurately, your perception of their perception of you)” (10).

In several studies, subjects who were asked to discuss gender stereotypes—or merely to note their gender—before judging their own ability in traditionally gender-coded areas (for instance, math versus verbal talent) assigned themselves more stereotypical strengths and weaknesses (8-9). Furthermore, people asked to write first-person stories in the personas of different kinds of people took on the stereotypical characteristics of those people in later assessments—rating themselves as smarter if they wrote from the perspective of a professor, or sexier if they wrote as a cheerleader (11).

These alterations in self-concept—which can arise from very slight suggestions—change not only people’s minds, but their behavior. A malleable self-concept has some obvious adaptive features, helping us to “ensure that we are wearing the right psychological hat for every occasion” (12). As Fine points out, “No doubt the female self and the male self can be as useful as any other social identity in the right circumstances. But flexible, context-sensitive, and useful is not the same as ‘hardwired’” (13).

Fine zooms in on a specific stereotype—female empathy—and observes the flaws in studies that have purported to prove such empathy is innate and gendered. As the previous chapter discussed, cultural priming and implicit gender stereotypes affect how people behave and imagine themselves—so, when study subjects are asked to self-report on empathetic behavior, gendered expectations immediately come into play. For instance, a self-assessment questionnaire administered by the scientist Simon Baron-Cohen, purportedly to determine a subject’s “Empathy Quotient,” unintentionally primes subjects to think in terms of their gender by asking questions about gender-coded activities, such as “being drawn to tables of information, such as football league scores” (16).

Further studies have weakened the idea that a self-report can measure empathetic power at all; as it turns out, people are poor judges of their own empathy (17). In more realistic studies, in which empathy is assessed through in-person interactions and judgments, empathetic power in both men and women could be seen to fluctuate based on motivation: Subjects who were offered $2 per correct guess at a partner’s feelings became substantially better at guessing accurately (21). While both motivation and ability play into empathy, social expectations have a huge influence on whether one is motivated to develop one’s ability to empathize (22). “In other words, when we are not thinking of ourselves as ‘male’ or ‘female,’ our judgments are the same” (25).

The capacity to mentally rotate three-dimensional shapes “is the largest and most reliable difference in gender cognition” (27). Under typical testing conditions, “about 75 percent of people who score above average are male” (27). However, even this pronounced difference can be immediately modified by altering the testing conditions: People of both sexes are as good at mentally rotating 3D objects as the scientists running the study prime them to expect they’ll be. Simply changing the way a task is described—for instance, telling subjects that the task is a predictor of talent in engineering versus in interior design—has an “erosive effect on the most robust gender difference in cognition in the literature” (29).

As a result, women trying to work in traditionally male environments have an automatic setback to deal with: Our capacities are affected, for better or for worse, by our context, our beliefs, and the beliefs of those around us. “Stereotype threat,” “the real-time threat of being judged and treated poorly in settings where a negative stereotype about one’s group applies” (30), has been shown in study after study to have a substantial effect on women’s achievement—and the effect is often stronger when the gender-priming cues are subtler. Merely being asked to identify oneself as female at the outset of a math test may have a more deleterious effect than hearing overtly sexist statements, which, Fine argues, “suggests the intriguing possibility that stereotype threat may be more of an issue for women now than it was decades ago, when people were more loose-lipped when it came to denigrating female ability” (32). Women placed in situations that provoke stereotype threat have been shown to actively struggle against or suppress gender stereotypes—an effort that is itself a distraction (33). In short, the more that women struggle to do well in male-dominated domains, the more their performance suffers. Furthermore, the more a woman succeeds in a male-dominated field, the fewer women she’ll have around her—making her even more susceptible to stereotype threat: “This body of research reminds us, again, that everything we do […] we do with a mind that is exquisitely sensitive to the social environment around it” (39).

Surveying stories of gender bias told by prominent female academics, Fine explores implicit and explicit discrimination against women in the classroom and the workplace. The studies she examines in this chapter look at the ways that women may be made to feel as if they don’t belong in a particular space or field—particularly math and science. Exposure to gender stereotypes (for instance, watching ads in which women rejoice over a new shampoo) diminishes women’s belief in their own mathematical or scientific capacities—but so does something as simple as seeing a video of a science conference at which men substantially outnumber women (as, at most such conferences, they do).

Beliefs about whether or not one will fit in may also explain why some male-dominated professions are easier for women to enter than others; the stereotype of a veterinarian has more overlap with female gender stereotypes than the stereotype of a computer scientist (44). In one study, in a computer science classroom decorated to reflect a geeky stereotype (Star Trek posters, junk food), men reported themselves as significantly more interested in computer science than women, whereas in a classroom decorated in a more neutral style (art posters, bottled water), women and men reported themselves as equally interested (46).

Environment has a significant shaping effect on how people imagine themselves and their capabilities. A stereotypical culture can thus produce a self-reinforcing loop: [I]f gender stereotypes can affect people’s perceptions of their abilities (as we now know that they can), then it would not be surprising to discover that this then has effects on career decisions” (48). Boys do not disproportionately pursue math and science because they score better at these subjects than girls, but because they rate their own abilities higher.

Sex discrimination in the workplace, Fine argues in this chapter, begins before candidates have even gotten through the door. Fine begins by recounting the experiences of female-to-male transsexuals who find themselves far better respected by their colleagues after their transitions, from overhearing colleagues praising their bosses for firing that incompetent woman and hiring the “delightful” new guy, to finding themselves called in to meetings to offer opinions they were never consulted for as women (55).

Fine then surveys a series of studies that confirm that a male or female presentation alters the way in which the same person is received. In these studies, subjects presented with two identical resumes—the only difference being the male or female name at the top of the page—consistently privilege the male-named resume for hiring in stereotypically masculine jobs. When asked to justify their choices, subjects almost never report that they’re thinking in terms of gender, yet they use gender-biased justifications; for instance, a woman described as “ruthless” is perceived as less likeable than a man described the same way (59): “In other words, both the descriptive (‘women are gentle’) and the prescriptive (‘women should be gentle’) elements of gender stereotypes create a problem for ambitious women” (56).

Subjects will also unconsciously shift job criteria in order to match applicants to gender-stereotypical positions. In a study in which “Michael” and “Michelle” both sought such a job, Fine explains:

[…] participants [...] inflated the importance of being an educated, media-savvy family man when these were qualities Michael possessed, but devalued these qualities when he happened to lack them. No such helpful shifting of criteria took place for Michelle (61).

Women attempting to take on stereotypically male positions of power find themselves in a bind: Behavior that would be welcomed in a male leader is often read as unsavory in a woman: “This is sexism gone underground—unconscious and unintended” (66).

Where previous chapters examined implicit bias, this chapter takes on active discrimination: hostile sexism at work. Since women first struggled to join so-called male professions, those professions have closed ranks against them:

So long as women stick to their traditional caring roles, they can bask in the stereotype of the ‘wonderful’ woman—caring, nurturing, supportive, and the needful recipients of men’s knightly chivalry [...] But the woman who seeks nontraditional high-status and high-power roles risks triggering the hostile sexism that ‘views women as adversaries in a power struggle’ (67).

Fine examines ways in which men, so triggered, have excluded women from the circles of power and influence, from refusing to shake hands with the one woman in the room to conducting crucial business at golf courses and strip clubs—places that either separate women (stranding them at the ladies’ tees) or actively intimidate them.

These campaigns of exclusion and disempowerment take their ugliest form in sexual harassment. Fine relates many stories of women being degraded and insulted by male colleagues—groped, trivialized with nicknames like “little girl,” flashed, and depicted in pornographic cartoons. Many women who have been treated this way by their colleagues second-guess their own anger and pain, worried about being perceived as fragile. One woman reported: “[I]f you blow up over every little comment someone makes to you…you’re too sensitive” (74). Harassment and discrimination are both common and difficult to contest: “[P]ublicly naming discrimination of any kind is neither easy nor guaranteed to bring about positive change nor something anyone does lightly when career, reputation, and (if lawyers get involved) savings are at stake” (75).

Having delved into discrimination against women in the workplace, Fine moves into sexism at home. Here, Fine raises her own experience, recording her and her husband’s difficulty in “attempting an egalitarian marriage” (80): Even two people who are invested in dividing housework and childcare evenly trip over their own implicit gender expectations. The statistics are unequivocal: “In families with children in which both spouses work full-time, women do about twice as much child care and housework as men” (80). Women who earn more money than their male partners do even more housework (80).

Fine looks askance at neurosexist (and untested) pop psychology hypotheses that women naturally gravitate to such work to raise their levels of warm-and-fuzzy oxytocin (a hormone associated with social bonding), or that their brains are naturally primed for domestic chores—offering instead sociological studies that demonstrate a phenomenon called “gender deviance neutralization.” Households in which the traditional breadwinner/homemaker scenario doesn’t hold, these studies demonstrate, perform gender roles more aggressively (82).

As previous chapters have repeatedly shown, conscious beliefs about gender have little to do with one’s implicit training and automatic attitudes—and those attitudes come to bear strongly in men’s and women’s behavior at home. This becomes particularly evident around childcare, where women in “inflexible” jobs somehow still manage to do the bulk of childcare that men in the same jobs feel they cannot manage (86). To the argument that men and women are driven to different kinds of responsibility by different hormonal chemistry, Fine offers rebuttals drawn from both sociological and biological studies, demonstrating that even a male rat—normally disinclined to care for rat babies—becomes a good parent if the babies are left with him.

In this last chapter of Part 1, Fine offers an overview of her research, once more calling into question the just-so stories of gender that have proliferated in pop psychology. There is, she reiterates, no evidence to suggest that any of our ideas of gendered behavior are in fact innate, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise. Fine raises the example of contemporary Armenia, whose culture privileges connections with friends and family over “loving” one’s work; in this society, women make up close to half of computer science majors, because computer science is not viewed as a high-status masculine activity, but a lucrative means to support other life goals:

Cultural realities and beliefs about females and males—represented in existing inequalities; in commercials; in conversations; in the minds, expectations, or behaviors of others; or primed in our own minds by the environment—alter our self-perception, interests, and behavior (95).

These cultural realities and beliefs reinforce and replicate themselves, almost imperceptibly.