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Dear Alas Readers,<\/p>\n I”m a new guest blogger here and I wish to thank Ampersand for his exquisite taste in allowing me this opportunity. I will do my best to maintain the high standards of discourse on this site. January has been a tough month for women in the field of gender science. This field contains a mixture of subfields ranging from microbiology to various origin myths in the shadier kinds of evolutionary psychology. Though the proponents of gender science view it as a pure, objective form of science which will tell us all the definite answer to any questions we might have about sex or gender differences, I am concerned with its almost complete lack of interest in cultural or environmental explanations and also with the whole question of objectivity in a field where every researcher is both part of the subject matter and an individual with particular biases, values and personal experiences. Trying to be neutral is important in sciences but I doubt that it is completely feasible here. Just leafing through some of the literature in evolutionary psychology has me pretty convinced that this particular subspecialty attracts a large number of people with conservative and anti-feminist values. These individuals might argue that it is their science which informs their opinions, but these things tend to go in circles.<\/p>\n All this is background for the news in the last month. It all started with the way (presumably heterosexual) undergraduates rated the attractiveness of photographs of the other sex for purposes of both one-night stands and long-term relationships. The crux of the study was that some photographs were randomly assigned to be the rater’s superior at work, whereas others were also randomly assigned to belong to a subordinate at work.<\/p>\n Women tended to rate attractiveness independently of the boss-subordinate status of the pictures, and so did men in the case of considering someone for a quickie. But when it came to long-term relationships, men rated the women who were marked as bosses lower than the women who were marked as subordinates.<\/p>\n Popularization of these results was instantaneous. We were told that educated women will not find husbands, we were told that feminism was a great hoax (this one courtesy of Maureen Dowd in the New York Times<\/em>) and other similar idiocies. We were also told that the explanation for these findings <\/a>is in our deep prehistory where we somehow decided that uppity women are more likely to be unfaithful…<\/p>\n Very few popularizers pointed out the faults in the study which were many. For example, the superiors were described as monitoring the rater all the time and as correcting the rater’s behavior. These might be odd quirks in the behavior of a long-term partner and not exactly the kinds of things most of us look for in a potential mate. It’s actually more interesting that the female students didn’t seem to mind such descriptions. Perhaps this is why the study did not find, as it expected, that women preferred the superiors for long-term mating purposes. This is one of evolutionary psychology’s major speculations: that women find money and power sexy and therefore marry older men while men find fertility sexy and therefore marry younger women.<\/p>\n The reality is, of course, rather different and surely affected by the actual distributions of income and power in the society. But gender science appears to regard these sorts of explanations as unscientific.<\/p>\n Anyway, only a week later we are offered the whole debate<\/a> over women’s scientific abilities, ignited by the comments<\/a> of Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University. The burning question is, once again, whether the scarcity of women in the fields of mathematics, physics and engineering is best explained by innate biological differences between the sexes or not. Few appear to mind that we literally cannot answer this question, given our current knowledge of genetics. Instead, it is perfectly acceptable to have an opinion on this issue and to use studies which find gender differences or don’t find them in various test taking as proof of genetic differences. That all such test taking is based on the tests humans make up and administer on individuals who already have years of history as members of a culture is ignored by those who believe in the biological explanations.<\/p>\n And today a study argues that it is the lack of testosterone<\/a> that makes women supposedly less capable parallel parkers and mapreaders. This study is another one done on a sample of undergraduates, this time in Germany, and it finds that men score better, on average, in mental rotation of three dimensional figures and similar tests. The finding is old-hat. What is new about the study is that those women who supposedly had higher testosterone levels scored better than women who had lower levels, and that you can predict a woman’s parking abilities by how long her ring fingers are. Oddly enough, the study didn’t actually try to find out how well the subjects could do in mapreading or parallel parking.<\/p>\n There is something smelly about this all. Poor and sloppy research is not only given a pass but immediately popularized all over the media, but only if its results confirm age-old sex stereotypes about women’s weaknesses. I have looked hard for those studies in gender science which pursue similar stereotypes of men’s weaknesses but I have had little luck so far.<\/p>\n All this is political, of course. Individuals with conservative opinions tend to have prior beliefs in the genetic determination of sex differences of all kinds and they will welcome these sorts of findings uncritically. Individuals with liberal opinions have more varied prior beliefs, but on the whole we tend to assume that cultural effects at least exacerbate any existing biological differences. Something very important is at stake here: the way the society organizes itself into hierarchies by gender and the way its rewards and punishments are distributed. To argue that our interest in the findings is purely scientific is ludicrous. January has been a tough month for women in the field of gender science. This field contains a mixture of subfields ranging from microbiology to various origin myths in the shadier kinds of evolutionary psychology. Though the proponents of gender science view it as a pure, objective form of science which will tell us all the definite answer to any questions we might have about sex or gender differences, I am concerned with its almost complete lack of interest in cultural or environmental explanations and also with the whole question of objectivity in a field where every researcher is both part of the subject matter and an individual with particular biases, values and personal experiences. Trying to be neutral is important in sciences but I doubt that it is completely feasible here. Just leafing through some of the literature in evolutionary psychology has me pretty convinced that this particular subspecialty attracts a large number of people with conservative and anti-feminist values. These individuals might argue that it is their science which informs their opinions, but these things tend to go in circles. Continue reading
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