"Men Are From Earth, and So Are Women"

[Alice F. Freed]

Hi everyone,

Here is a great article from this week's Chronicle of Higher Education,
forwarded by a colleague . It energetically questions the validity of
some widely-touted "truths" about gender differences. The language
references are old but this is a good way to start the semester. We
could put it on the desk of everyone we know!

Alice F. Freed
Professor of Linguistics
Montclair State University
_______________________________
>From the issue dated September 3, 2004

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i02/02b01101.htm

Men Are From Earth, and So Are Women. It's Faulty Research That Sets  Them Apart.
By ROSALIND C. BARNETT and CARYL RIVERS

Are American college professors unwittingly misleading their students by
teaching widely accepted ideas about men and women that are scientifically
unsubstantiated?

Why is the dominant narrative about the sexes one of difference, even
though it receives little support from carefully designed peer-reviewed
studies?

One reason is that findings from a handful of small studies with
nonrepresentative samples have often reported wildly overgeneralized but
headline-grabbing findings about gender differences. Those findings have
then been picked up by the news media -- and found their way back into
the academy, where they are taught as fact. At the same time, research
that tends to debunk popular ideas is often ignored by the news media.

Even worse, many researchers have taken untested hypotheses at face
value and used them to plan their studies. Many have also relied
exclusively on statistical tests that are designed to find difference,
without using tests that would show the degree of overlap between men
and women. As a result, findings often suggest -- erroneously -- that
the sexes are categorically different with respect to some specific
variable or other.

Yet in the latest edition of its publications manual, the American
Psycho-logical Association explicitly asks researchers to consider and
report the degree of overlap in statistical studies. For good reason:
Even if the mean difference between groups being compared is
statistically significant, it may be of trivial consequence if the
distributions show a high degree of overlap. Indeed, most studies that
do report the size of effects indicate that the differences between the
sexes are trivial or slight on a host of personality traits and
cognitive and social behaviors.

Because of such serious and pervasive problems, we believe that college
students get a distorted picture about the sexes, one that overstates
differences while minimizing the more accurate picture -- that of
enormous overlap and similarity.

It is easy to understand why college professors might spread myths about
gender differences. Many of the original studies on which such findings
were based have been embraced by both the academy and the wider culture.
As Martha T. Mednick, an emerita professor of psychology at Howard
University, pointed out in an article some years ago, popular ideas that
are intuitively appealing, even if inadequately documented, all too
often take on lives of their own. They may have shaky research
foundations; they may be largely disproved by later -- and better --
studies. But bandwagon concepts that have become unhitched from research
moorings are rampant in academe, particularly in the classroom. For example:

Women are inherently more caring and more "relational" than men.

The chief architect of this essentialist idea is Carol Gilligan, the
longtime Harvard University psychologist who is now at New York
University. In the early 1980s, she laid out a new narrative for women's
lives that theorized that women have a unique, caring nature not shared
by men. Her ideas have revolutionized the psychology of women and
revamped curricula to an unprecedented degree, some observers say.
Certainly, almost every student in women's studies and the psychology of
women is familiar with Gilligan. But how many are aware of the critics
of her theories about women's moral development and the relational self?

Many scholarly reviews of Gilligan's research contend that it does not
back up her claims, that she simply created an intriguing hypothesis
that needs testing. But the relational self has become near-sacred writ,
cited in textbooks, classrooms, and the news media.

Anne Alonso, a Harvard psychology professor and director of the Center
for Psychoanalytic Studies at Massachusetts General Hospital, told us
recently that she is dismayed by the lightning speed at which Gilligan's
ideas, based on slender evidence, have been absorbed into psychotherapy.
Usually new theories go through a long and rigorous process of
publication in peer-reviewed journals be-fore they are accepted by the
field. "None of this work has been published in such journals. It's hard
to take seriously a whole corpus of work that hasn't been
peer-reviewed," Alonso said. The idea of a relational self, she charged,
is simply an "idea du jour," one that she called "penis scorn."

Men don't value personal relations.

According to essentialist theorists, men are uncomfortable with any kind
of communication that has to do with personal conflicts. They avoid
talking about their problems. They avoid responding too deeply to other
people's problems, instead giving advice, changing the subject, making a
joke, or giving no response. Unlike women, they don't react to troubles
talk by empathizing with others and expressing sympathy. These ideas are
often cited in textbooks and in popular manuals, like those written by
John Gray, a therapist, and Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at
Georgetown University. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, we are
told. They just don't understand each other. But systematic research
does not support those ideas.

An important article, "The Myth of Gender Cultures: Similarities
Outweigh Differences in Men's and Women's Provision of and Responses to
Supportive Communication," was published this year in Sex Roles: A
Journal of Research. Er-ina L. MacGeorge, of Purdue Universi-ty, and her
colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania find no support for the
idea that women and men constitute different "communication cultures."
Their article, based on three studies that used questionnaires and
interviews, sampled 738 people -- 417 women and 321 men.

In fact, the authors find, the sexes are very much alike in the way they
communicate: "Both men and women view the provision of support as a
central element of close personal relationships; both value the
supportive communication skills of their friends, lovers, and family
members; both make similar judgments about what counts as sensitive,
helpful support; and both respond quite similarly to various support
efforts."

Yet, MacGeorge and her colleagues point out, we still read in textbooks
that:

   * "Men's and women's communication styles are startlingly
dissimilar" -- The Interpersonal Communication Reader, edited by Joseph
A. DeVito (Allyn and Bacon, 2002).

   * "American men and women come from different sociolinguistic
subcultures, having learned to do different things with words in a
conversation" -- a chapter by Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Borker in
Language and Social Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1982), edited
by John J. Gumperz.

   * "Husbands and wives, especially in Western societies, come from
two different cultures with different learned behaviors and
communication styles" -- a chapter by Carol J.S. Bruess and Judy C.
Pearson in Gendered Relationships (Mayfield, 1996), edited by Julia T. Wood.

Gender differences in mate selection are pervasive and well established.

Evolutionary psychologists like David M. Buss, a professor at the
University of Texas at Austin, tell us in such books as The Evolution of
Desire: Strategies of Hu-man Mating (Basic Books, 1994) that men and
women differ widely with respect to the traits they look for in a
potential mate. Men, such writers claim, lust after pretty, young,
presumably fertile women. Pop culture revels in this notion: Men want
young and beautiful mates. There is, it is presumed, a universal female
type beloved by men -- young, unlined, with features that are close to
those of an infant -- that signals fertility. If there were a universal
male preference for beautiful young women, it would have to be based on
a strong correlation between beauty and reproductive success. Sure,
Richard Gere chose Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman because of her beauty
and youth. But would those qualities have assured enhanced fertility?

The answer, according to empirical research, seems to be no. Having a
pretty face as a young adult has no relationship to the number of
children a woman produces or to her health across the life span. Among
married women, physical attractiveness is unrelated to the number of
children they produce. If beauty has little to do with reproductive
success, why would nature insist that men select for it? It seems more
likely that having a young beauty on his arm indicates, instead, that a
man is living up to certain cultural and social norms.

According to some who take what we call an ultra-Darwinist stance, there
is no mystery about whom women prefer as a mate: The man with resources
to feed and protect her future children. The combination of wealth,
status, and power (which usually implies an older man) makes "an
attractive package in the eyes of the average woman," as Robert Wright,
a journalist and author of The Moral Animal: The New Science of
Evolutionary Psychology (Pantheon, 1994), sums up the argument.

But those who believe that gender roles are shaped at least as much by
culture and environment as by biology point out that women's preference
for older good providers fits perfectly with the rise of the industrial
state. That system, which often called for a male breadwinner and a
female working at home, arose in the United States in the 1830s, was
dominant until the 1970s, and then declined.

If that is correct, then we should see a declining preference for older
men who are good providers, particularly among women with resources. In
fact, a study by Alice Eagley, a psychologist at Northwestern
University, and Wendy Wood, of Duke University, suggests that as gender
equality in society has increased, women have expressed less of a
preference for older men with greater earning potential. The researchers
have found that when women have access to their own resources, they do
not look for age in mates, but prefer qualities like empathy,
understanding, and the ability to bond with children. The desire for an
older "provider" is evidently not in women's genes. Terri D. Fisher, a
psychologist at Ohio State University, told a reporter last year that
whenever she teaches her college students the ultra-Darwinian take on
the power of youth and beauty, the young men smile and nod and the young
women look appalled.

For girls, self-esteem plummets at early adolescence.

Girls face an inevitable crisis of self-esteem as they approach
adolescence. They are in danger of losing their voices, drowning, and
facing a devastating dip in self-regard that boys don't experience. This
is the picture that Carol Gilligan presented on the basis of her
research at the Emma Willard School, a private girls' school in Troy,
N.Y. While Gilligan did not refer to genes in her analysis of girls'
vulnerability, she did cite both the "wall of Western culture" and deep
early childhood socialization as reasons.

Her theme was echoed in 1994 by the clinical psychologist Mary Pipher's
surprise best seller, Reviving Ophelia (Putnam, 1994), which spent three
years on The New York Times best-seller list. Drawing on case studies
rather than systematic research, Pipher observed how naturally outgoing,
confident girls get worn down by sexist cultural expectations.
Gilligan's and Pipher's ideas have also been supported by a widely cited
study in 1990 by the American Association of University Women. That
report, published in 1991, claimed that teenage girls experience a
"free-fall in self-esteem from which some will never recover."

The idea that girls have low self-esteem has by now become part of the
academic canon as well as fodder for the popular media. But is it true? No.

Critics have found many faults with the influential AAUW study. When
children were asked about their self-confidence and academic plans, the
report said 60 percent of girls and 67 percent of boys in elementary
school responded, "I am happy the way I am." But by high school, the
percentage of girls happy with themselves fell to 29 percent. Could it
be that 71 percent of the country's teenage girls were low in
self-esteem? Not necessarily. The AAUW counted as happy only those girls
who checked "always true" to the question about happiness. Girls who
said they were "sometimes" happy with themselves or "sort of" happy with
themselves were counted as unhappy.

A sophisticated look at the self-esteem data is far more reassuring than
the headlines. A new analysis of all of the AAUW data, and a
meta-analysis of hundreds of studies, done by Janet Hyde, a psychologist
at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, showed no huge gap between
boys and girls. Indeed, Hyde found that the self-esteem scores of boys
and girls were virtually identical. In particular there was no plunge in
scores for girls during the early teen years -- the supposed basis for
the idea that girls "lost their voices" in that period. Parents,
understandably concerned about noxious, hypersexual media images, may
gaze in horror at those images while underestimating the resilience of
their daughters, who are able to thrive in spite of them.

Boys have a mathematics gene, or at least a biological tendency to excel
in math, that girls do not possess.

Do boys have a mathematics gene -- or at least a biological tendency to
excel in math -- that girls lack, as a popular stereotype has it?
Suffice it to say that, despite being discouraged from pursuing math at
almost every level of school, girls and women today are managing to
perform in math at high levels.

Do data support arguments for hard-wired gender differences? No. In 2001
Erin Leahey and Guang Guo, then a graduate student and an assistant
professor of sociology, respectively, at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, looked at some 20,000 math scores of children
ages 4 to 18 and found no differences of any magnitude, even in areas
that are supposedly male domains, such as reasoning skills and geometry.

The bandwagon concepts that we have discussed here are strongly held and
dangerous. Even though they have been seriously challenged, they
continue to be taught by authority figures in the classroom. These ideas
are embedded in the curricula of courses in child and adolescent
development, moral development, education, moral philosophy, feminist
pedagogy, evolutionary psychology, gender studies, and the psychology of
women.

Few students have the ability to investigate the accuracy of the claims
on their own. And since these ideas resonate with the cultural
zeitgeist, students would have little reason to do so in any case. The
essentialist perspective has so colored the dialogue about the sexes
that there is scant room for any narrative other than difference.

Obviously the difference rhetoric can create harm for both men and
women. Men are taught to believe that they are deficient in caring and
empathy, while women are led to believe that they are inherently
unsuited for competition, leadership, and technological professions.
Given how little empirical support exists for essentialist ideas, it's
crucial that professors broaden the dialogue, challenging the
conventional wisdom and encouraging their students to do so as well.

Rosalind C. Barnett is a senior scientist at Brandeis University, and
Caryl Rivers is a professor of journalism at Boston University. Their
book Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships,
Our Children, and Our Jobs has just been published by Basic Books.

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 51, Issue 2, Page B11