How does gender bias shape the brain?

Leviathan Press:

In the debate on gender bias, a typical view is: Why are most philosophers and scientists men in history? It can be seen that men have made more achievements in these fields than women. In this regard, I can only say that people who hold this view have committed a typical "survivorship bias". In all such analyses, we must include logical background and antecedents: in a society dominated by male discourse, it was rare for women to receive education in the past, so the probability of celebrities naturally became much smaller. Today, although women have the same rights as men in many matters, gender bias in society is still deeply rooted, even though I can read a long list of female names in fields such as science and philosophy (Mary Anning, Curie, Lovelace, Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson, Ayn Rand...). Does gender really determine your interests and future? The author of this article obviously does not think so. My daughter is obsessed with all girl things and pink. She fell in love with pink floral dresses before she was two years old, which are usually prepared for little girls. When she was three, we saw a group of kids playing soccer and I suggested that she could join in when she was a little older. However, she firmly responded, “Soccer is not for girls.” I carefully pointed out that girls, although in the minority, could play, too. She was not impressed.

Despite this, she was always boisterous and loved to climb and jump, attributes often described as boys'.

It was a little surprising to me that she was picking up on ideas about what girls and boys should do at such an early age, but it's not surprising considering that many children's worlds are gendered from the beginning.

When it comes to gender, the divisions may seem purposeless at first, but over time, our gendered world has lasting effects on how children grow up to understand themselves and the choices they make, and how they behave in the societies they live in.

Thus, gender stereotypes continue to influence and perpetuate a society that unwittingly promotes values ​​associated with masculinity, which is bad news for all of us, whether we agree with it or not. So how exactly has our obsession with gender had such a lasting effect on the world?

Even with the number of girls playing football – and the recent success of women’s professional football – it is still seen as a predominantly male sport. © Careers in Sport

The idea that women are less intelligent than men was accepted as fact centuries ago. The scientific community has long been searching for faults in this assumption. Slowly, while many studies have now disproven many of these proposed differences in intelligence, our world still stubbornly persists in misconceptions about gender.

If you think about it, this isn't surprising at all, given how we're socialized as early as infancy. Parents and caregivers don't intentionally treat boys and girls differently, but the evidence shows that they clearly do. This starts before birth, with mothers describing their baby's movements differently if they know they're having a boy. Boy babies are more likely to be described as "energetic" and "strong," but there's no such distinction when the mother doesn't know the sex.

Ever since it became possible to identify gender from a scan, the first question asked to prospective parents has been whether they are having a boy or a girl. Before this, people had been using the shape and size of the baby to guess the gender, despite there being no evidence that this works. More subtly, we use different words to describe boys and girls, even for exactly the same behaviour. Throw in gendered toys, which reinforce subtle traits and predilections that have already been assigned to males and females.

“How children play is a very important part of development. It’s how children first develop skills and interests. Blocks encourage building, while dolls encourage observation and care. A range of play experiences is obviously important,” said Christia Brown, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky. “When you deliver just one skill-building toy to half the population, that means half the population will be the ones that develop a certain set of skills or interests.”

Children, like little detectives, also figure out which category they fall into by constantly learning from those around them. Once they understand which gender they fit into, they naturally accept the category that has been imposed on them since birth. This is why, starting around the age of two, girls tend to focus more on pink things, while boys avoid them. I witnessed this firsthand when my two-year-old stubbornly refused to wear anything she thought was a little boyish, despite my early attempts to not gender her clothes.

Although boys are not usually given dolls, they can enjoy caring for them just as much as girls. © Javier Hirschfeld/Getty Images

It's not surprising, then, that preschoolers learn to identify with their gender at such an early age, especially since parents and friends often give children toys associated with their gender at an early age. Psychologist Cordelia Fine from the University of Melbourne explains that once children understand which "gender tribe" they belong to, they respond more to gender labels. This affects their behavior. Even the way a toy is presented can change a child's interest in it. For example, it has been found that girls are more interested in some typical boys' toys if they are pink.

The reverse is also true. If we give dolls or grooming sets to girls but not boys, we encourage them to associate themselves with those interests. Boys can be inspired to pursue creative pursuits through toy tools and cars.

Boys, however, clearly love dolls, too, but they aren't usually bought for them. My son holds a stuffed baby just like his sister and loves pushing it around in a toy car. "Boys also thrive on caring and nurturing in their first few years of life. It's just that we teach them early on that it's a 'girl skill' and we punish boys for doing it," Brown says.

If, starting in infancy, boys are prevented from playing with toys that we might consider feminine, they may not develop a set of skills they might need later in life. If they are prevented from playing with dolls by their peers, while at the same time they see their mothers doing most of the childcare, doesn’t that say something about whose responsibility it is to care for the child?

Thus, we enter the realm of "biological essentialism," where we assign an innate basis to a behavior, when, when you dig deeper, the behavior is likely learned.

Toys are one thing, and features are also prone to gender stereotyping. Parents of boys often talk about how they are more rowdy and like rough play, while girls are more gentle and submissive. But the evidence suggests otherwise.

In fact, research shows that our own expectations often frame how we view others and ourselves. Parents attributed neutral and angry faces to boys, while happy and sad faces were labeled as girls. Mothers were more likely to emphasize boys’ physical traits — even setting more adventurous goals for boys than for girls. They also overestimated their sons’ ability to crawl compared to their daughters, despite reporting no physical differences. So people’s own biases can rub off on their children, reinforcing these stereotypes.

Language also plays a powerful role - girls are reported to talk earlier, a small but identifiable difference. Research suggests this may be due to mothers talking more to their baby girls than to their baby boys. They also say more about emotions to girls. In other words, we unconsciously socialize girls to believe they are more talkative and emotional, while boys are more aggressive.

Brown explains, “It’s clear that these false beliefs can continue later in life because we ignore behaviors that don’t fit the stereotypes we expect.” She says, “So you ignore all the times that boys sit there quietly reading a book, or all the times that girls run around the house loudly. Our brains seem to skip over information that’s inconsistent with what we call stereotypes.”

Young children are constantly searching for clues about their place in the world. © Javier Hirschfeld/Getty Images

At the same time, parents will buy their girls toys and clothes that are usually marketed to boys, but rarely the other way around, often in an effort to be gender neutral. This in itself provides an interesting insight into how we think about gender.

Males have always been seen as the dominant and powerful sex, which means parents, overtly or not, discourage boys from liking girly things. As Fein explains, "We're starting to see the manifestation of gender hierarchy - boys seem to be reacting to the 'bad reputation' of females, even in early childhood."

It reveals why parents are more comfortable with girls wearing boys' clothes than boys wearing girls' clothes. Or why I received positive comments from my parents growing up as a tomboy - I never liked dolls and loved climbing trees. The opposite is true for boys who dress or act like girls. Being seen as sissy or showing feminine traits lowers a man's status - and those who do so receive even less.

Gender scholars agree that these preferences are highly socialized, but remain divided over whether any gendered behaviors are innate. For example, there is evidence that girls who are exposed to higher levels of male hormones in the womb prefer toys that we would typically classify as boys'. Even here, Fein points out, it may be that the environment is shaping their preferences. The girls also don't consistently show better spatial construction skills—a skill that is said to be more pronounced in males.

We also know that infants are extremely sensitive to the social cues around them and can detect differences early on. Regardless of how these preferences develop, the conditioning and expectation of certain behaviors by adults and peers, for example, creates a gendered world with concerning consequences.

For example, when girls first enter preschool — the gender gap in math doesn’t exist, but later on, as their teachers and their own expectations kick in. This is particularly problematic because these reinforced gender stereotypes “run counter to contemporary gender egalitarian principles, which say that your gender shouldn’t determine your interests or your future,” Fein said.

When a specific toy is marketed to boys, it may also be changing the brain to increase connections in areas such as spatial recognition. In fact, when a group of girls played Tetris for three months, the areas of their brains involved in visual processing were larger than those of those who didn’t play the game. If girls and boys have different types of hobbies, changes in the brain will naturally follow.

As Aston University neuroscientist and author Gina Ribon explains, the very fact that we live in a gender-differentiated world creates a gender-differentiated brain. It creates a culture of boys who feel conditioned to exhibit more typically masculine traits — and who risk being ostracized by their peers if they don't. If we focus on differences, it also means that we start to buy into myths, like boys are better at science and girls are better at caring for people.

This continues with adults. It turns out that when asked how they would score on math tasks, women underestimate their abilities, while men overestimate their scores. Women also do worse on tests if they are first told that their gender typically does worse. Of course, this may and does affect school, college, and career choices.

More worryingly, some masculine traits that are emphasized early on, and then trained in, are associated with male violence against women. For example, we know that men who perpetrate violence tend to have higher levels of "hostile masculinity," says Megan Maas, a psychologist at Michigan State University. These are beliefs that men are inherently violent and need sexual gratification, while women are inherently submissive.

There is some evidence that mothers who talk more to their daughters than to their sons can improve language development. © Javier Hirschfeld/Getty Images

Studies have also shown that girls who are heavily obsessed with princesses are more concerned about their appearance and are more likely to "debase themselves -- so they see themselves as a sexual object," Maas said. Girls who scored highest on "sexualized gender stereotypes" also downplayed traits associated with intelligence. One study found that early on, both girls and boys viewed attractiveness as "incompatible with intelligence and ability."

Brown and colleagues have now also argued in a 2020 paper that male sexual aggression against women is so common precisely because of the values ​​we set for children. This socialization comes from a combination of parents, schools, the media, and peers. "The sexual objectification of girls starts very early," Brown said.

Sexual objectification is a concept that only emerged 50 years ago, but it is everywhere. It refers to treating a person sexually as a commodity or object, without regard for their personhood or dignity. Although both men and women can be sexually objectified, the concept is primarily associated with the objectification of women. © British Psychological Society

One reason these gendered ideas and assumptions about the self continue to persist is that there are still regular reports of innate brain differences between men and women. Yet most brain imaging studies that don’t find any sex differences don’t mention sex at all. Or some go unpublished. This is the so-called “file drawer” problem—when no effects are found, they simply don’t get mentioned or scrutinized.

And in those cases where small differences are found, it’s hard to really show the extent to which culture or expectations play a role. Adult brains can’t be neatly divided into male and female brains, either. In a study analyzing 1,400 brain scans, neuroscientist Daphna Joel and colleagues found “extensive overlap in the distributions of females and males across all dimensions of gray matter, white matter, and connectivity assessed.”

That is, overall, we are more similar to each other than we are different. One study even showed that women behaved just as aggressively as men in an online game when they were told their gender would not be revealed, but behaved less aggressively when they were told the experimenter knew whether the participant was male or female.

It follows that women are often perceived as less aggressive and more compassionate.

When we think about the physiological response to potentially evocative situations, women and men actually react the same way, it’s just that from a very early age women are socialized to act more on these overtly feminine emotions.

This means that in order for any important change to occur, people must first understand their biases and notice when their biases are inconsistent with the behavior they see. Even small differences in what they expect from girls and boys can add up over time.

So it’s worth remembering why people tend to think of boys as being more rowdy – and we need to be aware that this isn’t always true. My daughter is certainly just as rowdy as her brother – even if I wouldn’t say “rowdy” – and her brother also enjoys pretending to cook.

While these aren't necessarily representative examples, they also don't fit our ideas about what boys and girls like. Otherwise, it would be easy for me to emphasize my son's tendency to climb on everything and my daughter's preference for the color pink while ignoring the time she spent playing with cars and him with dolls.

When our children inevitably begin to recognize gender divisions, we can help them correct stereotypes with other examples, like explaining that girls can play soccer and boys can have long hair. We can also encourage a variety of toys, regardless of the gender they are intended for. We need to provide as many opportunities as possible “to give them the chance to experience play that is not gender-specific,” Maas said.

If we don’t understand that we are more similar than different from birth, and treat our children accordingly, our world will continue to be gendered. Undoing these assumptions won’t be easy, but maybe we can all think twice before telling a little boy how brave he is or a little girl how kind or perfect she is.

About the author: Melissa Hogenboom is editor of BBC Reel. Her forthcoming book, The Mothering Complex, is published on 27 May 2021. She is on Twitter at @melissasuzanneh.

By Melissa Hogenboom

Translation: Daffodils have no flowers

Proofreading/Rabbit's Light Footsteps

Original article/www.bbc.com/future/article/20210524-the-gender-biases-that-shape-our-brains

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