Women's brains & 'myths of gender'

I've just met him on this car ride to the train station. He's explaining to me the difference between women and men, girls and boys. "They play differently. They think about things differently. They have different brains."

Did he get that theory from Harvard President Lawrence Summers, I ask?

He leans forward against the straps of his car seat. "Who?" he frowns. He is six years old.

When I ask him the difference between girls' and boys' brains, he begins to squiggle his index finger in the air, making a "scientific" drawing that only he can see.

Clearly, it's time to talk to a scientist about this matter.

Dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling, an esteemed biologist and feminist, spoke to Workers World about the controversy that allows a Harvard president with no scientific background--in fact, he's a former World Bank economist and Clinton administration Treasury official--to squiggle in the air his theory that sex differences in the human brain may make women less capable of being mathematicians and scientists.

Fausto-Sterling is a professor of biology and gender studies in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown University. She is also author of the ground-breaking book, "Myths of Gender."

In an interview with Workers World newspaper, Fausto-Sterling said her area of science has ranged from basic embryology and genetics to a sociological and historical approach to science. Today she is working on the application of ideas about the interaction of nature and nurture to complex problems having to do with gender, particularly in early childhood development.

"Politically I would describe myself as left wing," she says. "I've been involved in the feminist movement since its early days. I've been involved in progressive political movements to some degree for all of my life."

How does Fausto-Sterling talk about female and male brains and capabilities? "The 100-year-long debate on this is: Is it nature or is it nurture? I think that's the wrong way to look at it. The main thing I've been doing in my current work is trying to reframe the question."

Based on current findings from neurobiology labs, she explained, "the brain, and the rest of our bodies, are constantly being shaped and reshaped in its physical and also its social context.

"So nowadays if someone comes to me and says, 'I've done this study on men and women and it shows that some tiny little area of the brain looks different,' I do want to know if the study is well done, because there're plenty of bad studies. But assuming that it could be a well-done study, then I say, 'Oh, that's nice. How did they get to be that way?'

"Most of these differences that are cited about the brain--first of all one has no idea what they mean in terms of function--but most of them aren't present in newborns, in little kids. They develop during childhood and into adulthood.

"So why then do the brains of any two people diverge? They diverge because of some interaction between the life experiences of the individuals and how their genes respond to the life experience. So genes aren't at the bottom or the cause but genes are kind of in the middle. They're the way the body reacts to the environment, they're the tools the body uses to respond to environmental input. And if you de-center genes and genetics that way, then you have to talk about the environment as part of the picture."

She stresses, "The whole discussion of math and science needs to take place at a totally different level, which is that we know a lot about discrimination, about discouraging kids from being mathematicians or scientists. We know a lot about barriers that women face if they try to go into more advanced walks of life. And let's stick to those things first. We know what they are. And then if there's still a problem we can talk about genes."

Who's being subjective?

Some people uphold science as totally objective and others argue that scientists are such a product of their societies that they are totally subjective and would therefore like to write science off completely.

Fausto-Sterling answers, "Obviously I don't agree that science is all subjective and nothing is knowable. If I thought that, or if anybody thought that--especially peo ple who are committed to political action-- there would be no grounding in the world that could make you move forward."

She makes an analogy with a union in a struggle with a corporation to win higher wages. Union members will collect data, like company profits and how much the CEO is paid.

"The CEO may argue that his bonuses are not really his income and the union argues that it is. So there you start to argue about how you construct the facts. But still you try to do a good enough job that you think that the basic conclusion is correct even if the data aren't perfect.

"The data are never perfect. And that's true in science. And that's simply true in any walk of life, whether it's science or whether you're figuring out whether to put boots on your kid when you send them out the door. You have to make conclusions about the world and how it's working in order to put one foot in front of the other."

But scientists and science are social products, subject to the prevailing ideas and prejudices like racism, sexism and homophobia.

"When we talk about things like sex or gender or race," Fausto-Sterling cautions, "we're talking about categories that carry with them very deep social meanings. And it's very hard to separate the social meaning from how we decide to collect our information.

"For example, in studies of homosexuality in biology, many scientists come in to a study of gay men with a definition of gayness in males as meaning a male is more feminine, so they equate gay men with straight women at some level or with wanting to be straight women. If they come in with that theory of gayness, then the sort of science questions they're going to ask is going to be based on that theory. And so the question is: Is that the right way to frame the question to begin with?

"So you come in with these social definitions which are often nothing more than stereotypes and if you use those to do your science then your science is going to be constrained by that initial definition.

"And the same, by analogy, to race. If you believe that a dark skin color makes it likely that a person will get hypertension through some genetic cause, then you look for a pill to treat the hypertension. But if you believe that the dark skin color is a source of extraordinary stress, because of the daily insults of race a person of color encounters in the U.S., then preventing the hypertension might mean attacking racism."

Change the curricula!

Can brains be easily grouped as "female" or "male" for study?

"The problem is--well, there're many levels of problems," Fausto-Sterling replies. "The first is how you're defining female and male. Whether you're doing it based on chromosomes, on the degree of masculinity or degree of femininity, in terms of male-presenting and female-presenting--you know there's this huge variability within sexes with just about any aspect of physical or emotional being, and there're huge overlaps.

"So the real question from my point of view is how and why individuals vary rather than asking how these big overlapping groups vary. I think the groups are not too useful as categories. You have men who are brilliant in math and you have men who can't add one and one. And the same for women. And the really interesting question to me is what makes the difference between any two individuals. And I think the group question isn't usually too helpful at this level."

Fausto-Sterling concluded, "There's one other point I want to make, which is that science education in this country stinks for everybody. It's really bad. And in biology one reason for this is we still have that battle about teaching evolution in our schools.

"The first, most important step we could take would be to really beef up science education for everybody in elementary and secondary schools. Because if we did that, if we turn science from something badly taught and boring into something that is tremendously exciting and vibrant--which those of us who do science find it--we would catch a lot more of the potential scientists and mathematicians, both boys and girls."