"Men Are From Earth, and So Are Women"

[Scott F. Kiesling]

Thanks Alice-

I got this just as I went to head off for my first language and gender
class! It was a great way to begin to let the students know I would *not*
be telling them what the differences are between men and women's speech.

BTW, good discussions along these lines for biological similarities are in
two books by Robert W. Connell:

Chapter 2 of "Gender and Power," (1987; Stanford U.) and Chapter 3 of
"Gender" (2002; Polity Press).

SFK

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004 at 10:21am, the following was brought forth by Alice F....:

> 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
>

--
Scott F. Kiesling

Assistant Professor
Department of Linguistics
University of Pittsburgh

2816 Cathedral of Learning     Phone: 1-412-624-5916
Pittsburgh, PA 15217 USA       Fax: 1-412-624-6130

kiesling at pitt.edu
http://www.pitt.edu/~kiesling/skpage.html
http://www.linguistics.pitt.edu