Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Brain Storm: Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences

Hi everyone. I'm Lilian on behalf of Harvard bookstore I like to welcome you to this afternoon's event with Rebecca Jordan young and here with us to discuss her book Brain storm. Before we get Sarah's mind take a few seconds and tell you all about some of our exciting upcoming events we have upcoming ticket events include Salman Rushdie on Nov. 29 to the First Parish Church and Tuesday December 7th we have the cast of America's Test Kitchen at the Brattle Theater where they will discuss and hopefully cook from their new health or into the cookbook . Also mark your calendars for annual warehouse sale on December 4th and 5th it's a veritable treasure trove of bargain books and collectors items and super fun. You can find information about these and other events on our advent calendars of friends and events are also listed online at Harvard dot com where you can sign up for a weekly e-mail newsletter. You can also find us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter if you're so inclined. After the talk we'll have a Q&A session followed by a book signing at this table. You can find copies of brainstorm of the registers up front and you all have my personal thanks for buying your books from Harvard bookstore. Your attendance supports great events like these for the community and supports a local

independent business. But I also like to remind you all to please take a moment and turn off or silence your cellphones as the events being recorded and you don't want to be that guy. Trust me. Right. And so today I'm honored to introduce Rebecca Jordan young here with us to discuss her book brainstorm the flaws in the science of sex differences. A brainstorm Publisher's Weekly writes that Jordan Young has written a stunning book The demolishes most of the science associated with the dominant paradigm of the development of sex and gender identity behavior and orientation. Jordan young interviewed virtually every major researcher in the field and reviewed hundreds of published scientific papers. She explains in exquisite detail the flaws in the underlying science from experimental design that make no statistical sense to conceptually sloppy definitions of male and female sexuality contradictory results and the social construction of normality. Her conclusion that the patterns we see are far more complicated than previously believed and due to a wider range of variables will shake

up the research community and alter public perception. Rebecca Jordan Young is a socio medical scientist whose researchers include social epidemiology studies of Hib and AIDS and evaluation of biological work on sex gender and sexuality. She is deputy director of the social theory core at the Center for Drug Use and HIV research has been sponsored by the National Institute of Health . Mr. Nunn is a professor at Barnard College where she teaches courses in science and technology studies sexuality gender theory and HIV and AIDS. We are thrilled to have her with us this afternoon so you please join me in welcoming Rebecca Jordan. Thank you. It's absolutely my pleasure and honor to be here and and to have yet another fantastic forum to talk about this book which has been so exciting to me in the fact of its reception. I knew that I was taking on something

that had been very broadly accepted and I was half convinced that what I had to say would simply sink like a stone. And that you know maybe a few people would nod but that would be it. And instead I've found that this is a moment in time where a lot of people seem to be ready to think a little bit differently about gender and sexuality and its relationship to the brain and maybe that has to do with a very welcome turn in neuroscience where a lot more people are thinking about plasticity and ongoing developmental models and that in general the idea of hard wiring seems to be on its way out scientifically which is really great news. It's not yet on its way out popularly. People are still talking and writing a lot about hardwiring as if that is a useful way to think about virtually any kind of. Personality trait characteristic behavior etc..

So actually I want to borrow my my own book from up here for a moment and I will just briefly read to you from the preface and then I might I might do a little bit more reading Believe it or not this is not the best read aloud book so I'll mostly talk to you instead of read to you today . Most books set out to answer questions. This book sets out to question answers. The answers I question have to do with the Nature and Causes of differences between men and women and between straight people and gay people. Specifically I question what we know about male and female brains or gay and straight brains when Simon Levey reported in 1991 that he had found a difference in brain structure between gay and heterosexual men which was trumpeted as the discovery of the gay brain. I found it interesting but also puzzling. How could gayness take a single identifiable form in the brain when it takes such varied forms in people's lives. At the time I had already been engaged for several

years in large scale sexuality research related to the AIDS epidemic in an outreach storefront in Washington D.C. I ran a project that focused on injection drug users. It was there that I first met a lot of gay men. These men were not the poster children of the gay rights movement but were poor struggling with addiction and recovery and trying to avoid or outlive AIDS. And so where they're headed with sexual brothers with whom I also also worked. In fact these men were so similar in demeanor dress and daily struggles that without our detailed interviews it was impossible to tell the difference between the gay and straight men. In spite of our firm belief in our great gaydar and in spite of the trumpeting of Gaydar out there from a number of scientists a number of prominent psychologists are doing research on what they call gaydar and confidently pronounce that you can really tell the difference. But why my own work and the work of lots of other people who especially people who work in more marginalized communities indicates

that what gaydar shows you is community cohesiveness in a group of Self's of self-selected or fairly homogenously gay or lesbian people . And it's not very effective as soon as you step out of particular communities that you're not familiar with. In levade study the homosexual men were a singular type. Unlike the also homogenous heterosexual men and they were also similar to the presumably straight women. Those are common enough ideas both inside and outside of science. But our research challenge these notions. What we did was go around and actually recruit people based on their proximity in a particular area to where we were recruiting or based on their drug use habits so we weren't actually screening people initially for anything to do with sexuality but then we proceeded to ask everybody very detailed questions and that kind of method avoids the sorts of biases that are overwhelmingly present in the research that looks specifically

for causal associations with sexual orientation. Because in fact something the idea of causes for sexuality and sexual orientation wasn't what we were doing. That wasn't the aim of our study. We wanted to know about the very ations in people's sexual behavior their interests their identities and so on. But then we were able to take a look at that and look at how homogenous and how modern US or not our people. And in a nutshell to relate. That sort of research including not just the studies that I've been a part of but our broad network of studies related to my own work that involved detailed information on sexual behavior from more than 70000 drug users and their partners across 63 cities . There would be no way to come up with a profile of the sort that you would be able to slot people into the selection criteria for the studies used by people like Simon Levey or Michael

Bailey or increasingly people who do a number of other studies that relate to early hormone exposures on one hand to patterns of sexuality or gender on the other. So let me tell you a little bit about how people make those relationships. The point of this particular book was to actually investigate what you can think of as one stop shopping theory of gender and sexuality. And that theory is what I call brain organization theory. Now I underscore that that's what I call it because in fact most often this idea is no longer identified as a theory. It's very often treated as a simple fact of human development. So we might actually even call it a paradigm that that actually connects a number of different theories at this point. The basic idea is that early exposure to steroid hormones during a critical period of development while you're still in the womb might. Actually take what is initially a neutral a sex neutral brain undifferentiated and send

down a developmental path that is either masculine or feminine and there is a lot of interesting work in other animals that suggests that hormones affect sexual behavior affect a number of traits and characteristics that differ between the sexes. If you administer hormones during this early critical period. But there are two problems with the way that that theory has gotten extended to the idea of hardwired human brains. The first problem has to do with the animal experiments themselves and that is that the idea that those differences caused by the early hormone exposures are permanent and are hardwired has mostly been assumed instead of empirically tested even in animals. So in the book there are a number of places where I point out studies that take these experimentally manipulated animals and then. Expose them to different kinds of interventions. Handling different sorts of

handling different caging conditions exposure to animals that are sexually experienced versus inexperienced even a couple of hours in a cage with a sexually experienced animal can reverse the effects that are supposedly permanent from these early hormone exposures . So even in other animals the idea of hard wiring is a pretty flimsy idea and lots of developmental biologists in particular are for a long time not enchanted with with that word in that notion. When you get to humans there are a lot of other problems. For one thing the sorts of traits and behaviors that are supposedly hardwired in the human brain are not nearly so dichotomous as they are in animals anyway. And in fact for virtually every single trait with the single exception of attraction to males versus females for every other trait there is more variety among men or among women than there is difference

between the two groups. So the idea of a fundamentally sexed brain is already problematic just from. You know on the ground that it's standing on with the animal studies and the notion of what the outcome actually look like . But giving it all that benefit of the doubt I nonetheless wanted to say what kind of evidence do we have from human studies that relate to this this idea . So I did what is the first ever comprehensive analysis of the human data related to this theory. I have at this point looked at over 400 studies at the time that the book was drafted when I say I looked at I mean really analyzed in detail I've looked at more studies than that but that that actually includes pretty much the universe of human studies related to this theory. And I also interviewed the most important scientists who are doing this work I did an influence analysis and I identified the top 25 most cited scientists and I got interviews with 21 of them. And

I found a few things that were pretty stunning from the perspective of somebody who focuses on research design and on measures as I've done in my own work. The first thing is that overwhelmingly the scientists doing this work proceed as though those traits that they believe are caused by early hormone exposures are just common sense they're self evident. And so you don't really need to pay too much attention to how you define and measure them. In fact I was often greeted with puzzlement when I asked scientists Okay will you in some of your studies have found that you know early hormone exposures seem to be associated with a feminine sexuality pattern. What is feminine sexuality. And I would get a sort of a head shake in sight. But that's a no brainer literally and that that phrase was used a number of times for me which I thought was interesting. And likewise sexual orientation was treated as really self evident and not

worth taking a whole lot of time to come up with detailed measures I'm just going to read you a quote from one of the scientists who I interviewed this is from Dr. A. I will call him I use pseudonyms because. I wanted scientists to feel free to criticize each other's work if they wanted to I wanted to know what they thought was the best and the worst stuff out there who had you know interesting approaches and so on and so in a tradition of anthropology of science and other science and technology studies I guaranteed them that I would only identify them by name if something about the quote mattered so many people ask me about why do I call. Why don't I use their names that's why it's a Dr. A. One of the most important scientists doing this work this is in January 1999 Fritz Klein had some complicated grid for determining sexual orientation. And Dr. in this is Dr. Ray's colleague he's working with who was doing the bulk of these interviews said you know these are all nice scholarly here mystics but 99 times out of 100

. Listen to the subject and they'll tell you who they are. You don't run into too many straight men who lie and say they're gay. You may have some gay men who will tell you they're heterosexual but not if they know the confidentiality of the project is high and under questioning and interactions and interchange as well as filling out questionnaires if they're consistent. We keep them as subjects if they check off straight and then start checking off gay and then they tell you straight and then they tell you gay. We're just not sure what's going on. We're not sure if the person is just having fun with us. We're not sure if the person is themselves not sure of who they are. And when that would happen would exclude them from participating further in the study. Now I chose this quote because I want to just point out if you pull too little elements from it what he says is listen to the subject and they'll tell you who they are. But a little bit further down he says if they're consistent. So you listen to the subject if they're consistent . But what methodological research on sexual behavior orientation and identity has shown over and over again is that

inconsistency isn't noise that you weed out. Inconsistency is the phenomenon of sexuality. And if you look at sociological research over and over you find that those three aspects of sexuality just don't fit together for an awful lot of people especially the domain that these scientists say they're most interested in which is sexual desire very very often for more than half of women who have any aspect of their sexuality that where they report same sex behavior or interest or identity. More than half of women have a mismatch between what they say they want. And what they call themselves or what they say they do. And nearly half of men have that same mismatch. So in other words and I could give other kinds of cites but the point is that these scientists from the beginning one of the ways that they make methodological decisions that create big

gaps between the work that different scientists in this field do and between their work and other ways that we know about sexuality is to demand a certain kind of definition of sexual orientation that doesn't actually fit the phenomenon as other scientists find it to be. There are other things I'll tell you just one other before I close out my comments and give you a chance to talk with me a little bit. Another is imagine that I wanted to relate early hormone exposures to sexual orientation and so I need to know what sexual orientation is and I ask my colleagues and they say sexual orientation is whether you are attracted to the same sex or the other sex. And somebody else tells me sexual orientation is whether you're attracted to men versus women. Well it sounds like it's a semantic issue that's not very important but it turns out that it's very very important because depending on which of those two definitions you use you group

your subjects in a different way for comparisons. So see if you can follow this with I usually I like to use pictures in a slide for this one. But let's try it. If sexual orientation is being attracted to the same versus the other sex then gay men are like lesbians because they both want the same and heterosexual men are like heterosexual women because they both want the other. But what if the definition is being attracted to men versus women. Then Gay men are like straight women because they both want men and lesbians are like straight men because they both want women. Now if you have two different studies that are drawing on these two different definitions and then you simply string the findings along and say both of these studies show that this hormone exposure caused this outcome. What you have is this. You have two studies pointing in exactly the opposite direction. Over and over again. When you pay attention to weigh these outcomes to the way the outcomes are actually measured. That's exactly the kind

of inconsistency gap error that you find. There are lots of other problems as well but those are some very big ones. And let's see if there's any other quick thing I want to tell you about before and I guess just that. What does this matter. What are some of the claims that are built on this theory. Why do we care if it if it's true or not. Well I said it was a one stop shopping theory and here are a few of the ways a few of the stories that are are held up on the back are on the basis of this theory. One of them is the old mars vs. Venus story. The idea that men and women can't communicate because we have different brains and we have different communication styles and that a lot of times gets connected to this idea that. Men and women have different brain activity where women are less lateral ised we're using the whole brain for things and men are using one side or the other. Well as it turns out there's a lot of recent evidence including a fantastic

recent Metta analysis showing that that Lateralus zation contrast doesn't actually seem to be the truth. When you when you look consistently across studies but it's again it's really taken as just self-evident it's repeated over and over again. And the idea is that those differences come about because of early hormone exposures this exact theory I'm talking about. Another one as I mentioned was gay brains straight brains. What kinds of studies that involves you know the familiar some of you heard about finger length to the 40 digit ratio studies that's one of them believe it or not there are scientists who've been recently looking and again going back to an early 20th century design and comparing genital shape and size between gay men and straight men that hip waist ratios I mean. Yeah yeah exactly hip and waist ratios between straight women and lesbians that sort of thing. Obviously brain comparisons functional imaging studies that compare men and women gay men's straight minute cetera. A very important research design that's been used a

lot is the study of people with intersex syndromes meaning people or who are born with either ambiguous genitalia or genitals that are thought to not match their chromosome will type So in other words girls who because of a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia have very high end regions during development and their genitals develop so that when they're born they look much more like boys instead of a clitoris. They have they may have what looks like a fully few fully formed penis for example. Studies of girls with this condition have been very very important. And I spend a lot of time talking about this particular set of studies in the book in part because I think so many conclusions are made on the back of these women and girls and in part because. A persistent failure to take seriously what it means to be reared with this condition and what the medical treatment and

surveillance involves in this condition and in particular what this theory itself has done to women and girls with this condition such that they're not just followed medically but they are followed very very closely from birth to watch how their gender and sexuality are developing. They're asked over and over and over again. Do you feel it would you ever think you'd rather be a boy. Do you feel like a girl on a scale of 1 to 5 How much like a girl do you feel. Do you prefer girls toys or boys toys toys that your little girls play with these toys or those toys. And from before birth even parents who are seem to be at risk of having children with this condition are warned that their daughters are likely to be more masculine than other girls. So I could go on and on that the exams the approach to these children within the overall medical research on this theory. I actually believe constitutes abuse because it's so intrusive and because.

There has been such a failure to take seriously what the structure of the research it does itself does to the people who are undergoing that so that that's something that I just wanted to put in there because it's something I feel strongly about and because those girls in particular are are always hauled out as the cream of the evidence this is where we really can see the difference. So with that I think I'll stop my comments and welcome your questions I hope you'll read the book. I tried to make it as accessible as I possibly could while explaining the details of the studies and I'm really grateful that you're that you're here and interested to talk about it. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. Well OK so the question is that

it's a well-known fact you're saying that animals turn to homosexuality by which I'm assuming you mean same sex behavior during periods of overpopulation for an animal and if that's the case then how could a scientific theory about about homosexuality as a permanent state be taken seriously. Does that capture what you asked. So the first thing I would want to do is just caution that. Different animals different species different strains of different species within different contexts and so on have really different patterns of not only sexuality but what sex difference looks like. And to give an example in most animals what gets counted as homosexuality has has traditionally until very very recently been if an animal of one sex actually exhibits sexual behavior that is associated with the other

sex. So what does that mean in the small animals that are typically studied in labs. That means is an animal mounting other animals or is an animal allowing itself to be mounted in in small rodents. This involves a position called lordosis where they arched their back and present the rump but it turns out that males and females. Virtually every species do both of those behaviors whether or not there is overpopulation whether or not they've been treated with hormones. The question is just how much what's the ratio of one behavior to the other and what's the amount. What's the sex difference in frequency of one or other behavior. And that ratio changes with a lot of interesting things again species to species it changes that particular strain of a particular species housing conditions age of the animal the rearing conditions what kind of what kind of sexual experience did the adults they're reared with have all of those

things actually changed the ratio of those behaviors so all of this is to say that this. I think it speaks back to your to your point that looking at this like it's something fixed in dichotomous doesn't work from so many different angles. If you look at Sheep sheep are are an example of an animal that's been studied with a different model for what would constitute homosexuality in this animal. So that with Rams instead of counting rams that allow themselves to be mounted as gay rams the which the New York Times by the way used gay Rams in a headline which just cracked me up I thought that's OK. That's really we have ard time in my world deciding which people to call gay or straight so that was fascinating but that's a digression. So the gay Rams were rams that preferentially mounted other rams even if you a female sheep

in he was president and they went through a number of different tests and trials and so on and so to a lot of people this looked like a better test of sexual orientation than whether or not an animal allowed itself to be mounted because as many people have noted gay men and lesbians both do all kinds of different things with each other and so just doing some kind of behavior across sex behavior isn't a good test so. So there's been a lot of attention to this idea of these these gay Rams who. Seem to appear in both wild and semi-wild settings as they've been observed. But there was a fantastically interesting study that came out in the maybe a year after the first study that reported this method this new way of determining sexual orientation and rams. A couple more studies came out talking about how they were refining the test and had determined you know quite a few Rams in this herd were just naturally male oriented instead of female oriented. But another study that

same year was taking a look at the genetic how to gauge how effective a sire different Rams were so they were testing to see how many of the different Rams had sired lambs in the herd that year. And it turned out that a huge proportion probably all of the so-called male oriented Rams had sired. Offspring in fact not here and there but of I believe it was seven male oriented Rams had sired hundreds of the Lambs in that herd and in terms of the proportion they were siring compared to the so-called female oriented Rams they fell about half way between female oriented rams that had been rated as really really strongly female oriented and weakly female oriented but

female oriented So in other words these male oriented Rams were sort of middle of the road breeders when it came to what they were doing. When the scientists weren't testing them for sexual orientation what does this say this says that context really matters and again this is back to your question the context matters who else is in the herd. Some of these things that are looked at as sexual behavior in animals are about a lot of other things they can be about play. It can be about dominance. It can be about all kinds of other ants. So it's really complicated to try to draw those parallels. But even in the animals where people are trying to draw those parallels it's not nearly as tidy and cut and dried as as this theory requires it to be in order for the theory to be true . Pretty long answer. Hi. Yes.

OK this question is how has my research and he notes that I've been doing this for more than a decade which is right. How has my research changed. The work of these 21 scientists or presumably anybody else doing this kind of study. That's probably the most depressing question that I've been asked in my entire running around talking about the book because to my knowledge it hasn't changed what they're doing at all but I didn't actually think it was going to change the work especially of those scientists who are the most prominent why they've built their careers on this theory. They have not only built their careers it's not just personal investment. They have they have grant proposals that are built on this theory. They have entire laboratories they have post-docs that are funded based on this theory and on taste testing it in a sense the higher up you go the more

influential the people are in this work the less likely it is that an analysis like this is going to be able to budge them because it's not just their ideas. There's a lot of there's a lot of investment literally money as well as you know there's there's Nuttall and research instruments and other people in careers involved in this theory. But. There are some inklings that it has changed some of the people in the pipeline and the way they're thinking. So for example I've had the opportunity to present about my work for quite a while including for a number of years before the book itself was finished and there have been a number of times when either post docs or people during their doctoral training would come up to me and say This is amazing. Can you give me references and can we talk about what kind of study could we be doing that where I could. I still am really interested in hormones and sexual behavior. What else could we be

doing. And I don't know I can't actually give you back what specific research designs people have picked up but from young people in the pipeline there is some change there's there's one other thing I'll mention which is somebody who did her doctoral research on this this theory and in the course of her work. Was really disappointed to find that she was actually studying using a research design involving twins. So there is the idea that same sex versus other sex twins could give you one test of this theory like like many of the research designs. There are some conceptual problems in drawing that but I'll leave those aside so the idea is a girl who is in the womb with a male foetus is going to be exposed to different hormones than a girl who's in the womb with another girl. And you could compare them on a group level and see that there seemed to be an effect.

Well what this young scientist Salena co-inventor hand told me was that when she had been at a bunch of scientific meetings and asked other twin researchers what they had seen she found over and over again that people said they had looked in their data and they hadn't found any indication. And this was a really great example of what's been called the file drawer problem. None of those people had ever written about it because there was nothing to write about. They looked for it and they didn't find it. Who writes about it. The people who look for it and they find the difference. But what that means is that an overwhelming number of people who are looking in their data and not finding the expected difference nobody ever knows about that journals don't like to publish negative results. Try it if you haven't already done that. It's a really really difficult. The standards for publishing negative findings are much much more stringent. It doesn't make a research career it'll never make a headline your university won't give you a press

release etc. etc. etc. So nobody bothers to publish those studies. She gave up that line of inquiry and I can't speak to her but I can say I'm hopeful about this that a number of folks that I've talked to have tomy expressed skepticism more skepticism after our conversations that that just a better research design would be the answer. And they're starting to think about maybe a different way to imagine the relationship between our biology and our behavior. Yes. Yes. All right.

It's. It . All lives. It's. It's. Of the preconception . OK let me see if I can do justice to your to your question so they can get it on recording that's OK . I think that the gist of it is that there do I see any way around the problem of having preconceptions about the nature of sex differences. In addition to just having a good model

or not. Are you asking whether you think that just preconceptions about what sex differences are and where they come from May fatally flaw. This kind of research. OK so not just sex differences but across the board . OK. OK. So does this. Does that do. Preconceptions fatally flawed investigations. Well yes and no. When I do when when I talk about the book sometimes I have started out by talking about what what I mean when I say the flaws in the science of sex differences. What do we mean flaws. And I think it's useful to think about flaw in two different ways . One sense of flaw you could think of a geological or topographical sense as a crack that runs through something that looks solid and seems quite solid and uniform and unitary and cracks that run through and split things that start as one into

many or they seem like one into many and another way of thinking about flaws is simply errors mistakes problems. And I try to use that sense of flaw in both ways. In this book in terms of error problem misconception I think we can agree that science. That some kinds of science some fields of science some issues on which there are inquiries do a much worse job than other things. And I think that sex differences is a particularly tough area to get right because for a few reasons because our beliefs are so important to our social world and our daily interactions and our language all of that and because we ourselves all of us are personally associated with one or the other of the categories being explored. Our investments run so deep in this realm that it's really tricky there's a

second reason which is related to why all these scientists told me that. Masculine sexuality feminine sexuality homosexuality is just common sense. They're they're using the same terms in their work literally that we use in our daily lives in very casual and different ways so very often it's not just a conceptual problem but what I sometimes think of as a problem of doubling in the language that they're drawing on the same terms that we use in casual ways with a variety of meanings all the time. And for that reason there's way more messiness and and just resonance with the social world built in to this line of inquiry than there is in you know astrophysics where we don't use the words and terms and concepts to draw on in our daily interactions with each other. That's not to say that I don't think that people's preconceptions and their social worlds the social organization of a

lab and their worldview affects how they do astrophysics. I think we have lots of data that it that it does in fact and that science and technology studies in general broadly shows that it really matters what a scientist thinks and who they are and so on to how they do the work. Serious thinking about objectivity is very different than it was 50 years ago. But some work is harder to do than other work. And looking forward what I would say about that question is that it's a good cautionary tale for how to do better. Behavioral biology and I think that one really important thing is to stop obsessing about sex difference but to actually think about other aspects of human variety and difference that are less saturated with the way we routinely organize our social world. Other questions. Yes.

OK. So what did I find with regards to trans research. Great question. In this body of work in general . Well let's start historically initially all of the scientists doing this work on humans imagined that masculinity and femininity in the brain was running on a sort of spectrum from all the way male to Although a female it all ran on one continuum and that could be that that continuum depending on hormone exposures was available to males or females genetically or you know phenotypically in terms of the body. So what that meant on that continuum was all the way over on this and if let's say a female bodied person a genetically X X person had a masculine brain the most masculine would make me a transsexual. It would make me and that was the term they were using then not transgender or just trans. So the idea was I would

literally identify as and feel as if I were a man and then back up a little bit. It a little bit less masculine a little bit less male typical hormone exposures and I would be a lesbian and exclusively attracted and probably a career woman and which they really were deeply suspicious of early on. I would also have what you know just a mere 20 years earlier was referred to in psychological research as sex bitterness meaning that when these folks did their first research in the 60s some of the questions they asked routinely of girls and women were who do you think has a better deal in life. Boys or girls men or women and any kinds of answers to questions like that that indicated that women felt in any way that the social world was unfair indicated that maybe that had just a little bit too much testosterone in utero. So this string. And so obviously now the definitions have switched around. But you'll often find citations to those studies. They won't anymore in a current They study mentioned that particular finding. But

those studies are still strong in with contemporary studies just to give you a sense of some of the problems. What's going on more recently. It's still the case that. Scientists doing this work in general don't explicitly lay that model out anymore but implicitly it's still there. And there are very few folks who break from that one group although I'm extremely critical of this group in other ways one group that's broken from that model is in the Netherlands who's a neuroscientist and his group actually has paid attention to the fact that transgender people may have a sexual orientation to either the same or the other sex for example so they're starting to treat gender identity whether you identify as male or female as different from sexual orientation who you're attracted to. And so that disrupts this you know spectrum thing a little bit. But excuse me in general there's still

there's still. Drawing on on data in many many ways that's problematic including again ignoring large studies that show that early hormones have no effect on gender identity for example or really really overblowing the claims that are made about gender identity and sexual orientation in girls with CIA Choy I mentioned before. So there's there's definitely a lot of work on this. But and it should and I do consider it as part of the mix there are fewer people doing that work than the other work. But it doesn't hold up any better than the rest of it either . Yes. Yeah. Very very good question I'm glad you asked that . These studies

do not to my knowledge I haven't. You know if there's something out in the last month or two that has done this I haven't seen it. But before that no the studies themselves in the work are not saying different schools would be a great idea. Some of the studies do by the time they get to the conclusion actually talk about that sex difference in occupations for example and say that given the this kind of difference in say fundamental interests or in fundamental cognitive abilities which most of them have abandoned because basically almost all of that has disappeared. But they do a few of them point right in the research articles to the implications for. Programs that would seek equity in the occupations. But even though you don't see mention of schooling in the articles a lot of these people have started talking about single sex versus

mixed sex education when they're interviewed they're drawn on by by people like Leonard Sax who's a somebody who's really popularized the idea of hard wired sex differences being the reason to do single sex education . So I am both and alum and a professor at a single sex institution. And I want to go on record as saying I think single sex education in particular women's higher education is a really good idea. There are lots of reasons to support that have to do with the outcomes the fact that more women who go to women's colleges end up getting Ph.D.s. There are many. More graduates that that in that traditionally still overwhelmingly male fields of math and science in particular physics engineering and so on. I could go on with with the wonderful outcomes that you see with women's colleges but I think they're for everybody but there they don't work because we have different brains that's clear enough. They work

for very different reasons. But I think that we should really be alert to the fact that this hard wiring story is being recruited and touted all over the place as a reason to have single sex education early on. And one of the real tragedies about that is the kind of sex typing that gets built into these single sex curriculum curricula is really horrifying. One place where you can read about that in a nice way there are two places I would send you to Language Log which is a brilliant and hilarious blog that's written by the linguist Mark Lieberman at the University of Pennsylvania. He is unbelievable he just spits things out like nobody's business and he talks about this a lot so do some searches on Language Log. The other place where this whole issue is covered very well is in a recent book by Cordelia Fine called delusions of gender core Delia's book has been reviewed with mine a lot. It's great timing they're very complimentary. I take on this theory and look very

specifically at this one underlying causal theory. What she does is look at the social psychology evidence about gender socialization and gender differences and takes a look at what are the patterns of broadly gender differences in the world and in particular her stuff around single sex education is very compelling . Yes. OK. I haven't studied this. OK the question is why does single sex education work. I will give an answer even though I haven't studied it. It's my opinion about why it works. And they're there. I'll tell you some research that backs up the opinion it's not a completely out of the air opinion. I think that it works because. Of the structure of the learning environment and I'll give you an example of what goes on at Barnard where I teach at Barnard even though the classrooms themselves are themselves or mixed sex

all of the student organizations at the institution are obviously because all of the student body of Barnard is women. They are populating all of the leadership of every student organization. They are very clear walking into every class room that they belong in that classroom regardless of what's being taught. So it doesn't matter if what's being taught is something that's thought of as a typically male topic that men are typically better at. They know they have some ownership over the place and there's something about their ownership that makes them less hesitant to speak up in a classroom even if they do have male peers present. They have many more opportunities for for leadership on the campus and the administration and professors are there primarily to actually see to the intellectual development of our women students. We all recognize that that's our obligation. And those things really make a difference.

Now what what some of that social psych literature for example that would back that up . The idea of having ownership in a classroom. One way you could think about that is in relation to something called stereotype threat stereotype threat there's a fantastic body of research on this idea that the way people perform in a job or in an academic setting or in any kind of setting is very very sensitive to what is expected of them and to what they think people like them typically do. So stereotype threat has been shown to really operate a lot to affect the performance of any group. When something about their group membership is associated with doing well or poorly on a task so for example if. Girls are given a tast in math or science even

without in advance telling them this. This particular test is something that boys usually do better on but you'll probably do fine because you've gotten good grades in math . If you tell them that even if you say you'll probably do fine they do worse than if you say nothing. It turns out that if you tell them there's no sex difference on this test they do better than if you tell them nothing. What that implies is that walking into a math test or a science test stereotype threat is already operating for girls and women just because that stereotype is so broadly pervasive such as saying this particular test there's no sex difference. What's really fascinating is if you tell them you know recent research shows that due to genetic reasons women do better on this kind of test. So you tell them as Cordelia would say a big fat lie. They do even better than the boys on that test when they're told that they do better than the girls who are told there's no sex difference. What this means is and these are these are studies that have been done in many many

many settings. They've been replicated in lots of ways I can't tell you all the varieties of them but I will say that. It turns out that. When you're talking about math and science or engineering simply taking the test in the presence of boys or men for college age women actually reduces their performance. It's sad but the truth is that we are so far from an equal world that I think it's premature to pretend that we're already there and say oh let's not make it salient. It's already salient. And so what single sex education in certain contexts does is take seriously the fact that we're far from an equal world. And it takes seriously the data we have on how that matters. And it tries to equalize things during an important time period in education development. Yes hello Elizabeth. Sure.

Yeah. That's again it's a great question you guys are completely putting me on the spot with this the question is am I as sympathetic to two single sex education for young men and I want to point out that neither men nor women or are homogenous groups. And there are particular groups of young men that I think where I I do think single sex education is a particularly good idea. One reason that this whole hardwiring story is you know doesn't pass the smell test is that if you look at different subgroups of girls and boys and men and women you see very different patterns of sex differences. So if you look at Euro-American aka white. Kids particularly in middle and upper classes you see the pattern that we're used to as thinking about the typical male female pattern where boys outperform girls on math and science. You see that in a much less pronounced

way these days if you move further down the class ladder what's really interesting is what happens if you look at African-American kids in the U.S. context in many many cases you see that sex difference reversed. Now it's. So what's going on there. What's going on there is a very different social context. What it means to be a girl or a boy is different depending on what your whole social context is. And in particular because stereotype threats about academic performance aren't just about sex but they're very racialized too. There are many many many stereotypes that especially African-Americans are not going to do well academically and particularly African-American boys. And for that reason I think that there really is a lot of promise in having an environment that would give those kids the same kinds of. A little ring of support. Ring of

counteracting the stereotype threat that operates the same thing is true of African-American girls I mean we can think about how to stereotype threat operate and the issue right now is you know it's at we're at a point in time where all there isn't any stereotype that is particularly credible . You know for white boys about the beat the stereotype has to do with behavioral problems. And in fact a lot of these single sex schools built on this hard wiring idea play to the idea that these boys innately have behavioral problems. So I think that I think that the whole process operates differently and it operates differently not because it's something different in brains or whatever or not because everybody shouldn't deserve opportunities but because it's about social structures and power and looking at you know who ends up right now in the most privileged position already anyway . And what kinds of interventions could we do that are about actually

challenging that instead of reproducing it. So yes. Oh that's a great question I'm so glad somebody asked that do I think there's no biological basis for a person's development of interests at all. No I don't think that. I think our bodies matter too to who we are to who we become to what we feel like but I think they matter in really complicated ways that cannot be boiled down to pink and blue because what we're interested in and and our cognitive skills our personalities and so on aren't actually divided by sex I think that's a poor place to look for our differences. But I can give you a couple of examples of how I think biology would matter simply are our perceptual apparatuses so that different people

process. Sites in different ways from very very early on. I think that that can orient us towards different stimuli our response to those different stimuli then puts us in different situations calling into play a whole looping process a cascade of effects that engages us differently with the world over a long process of development. The same thing could be true for something as straightforward as different tactile sense sensitivities and sensibilities. At what level does touch become pleasure in instead of tickle or painful for different people and where these seem like well what would that have to do with interests but I can actually draw a plausible trajectory from an initial difference that's a biological difference whether it's about hearing sensitivity to certain smells or the ability to perceive different kinds of smells different visual apparatus as I said all of those things. So that's one quick example

of how I think it's it's. Absolutely easy to think about how biology affects who we are what we like what we want to do without it being a simplistic story that's either about our fate. Notice that that was not something that said I am innately somebody who's going to really love chocolate. That and I don't think that kind of you know innate difference thing is the way to think about biology. Does that answer your question. OK. Hello. OK last question somebody maybe who hasn't had one and if not . Oh OK . Oh

yeah . Yes. I know. Oh . OK good. Another good questions great crowd. OK. The question again I'll try to to repeat it so you can get it is given that over the course of human evolution we lived in caves much longer than houses that there is this long period of time where women early humans were at staying home men were going out hunting etc. that these early roles how could

that sort of early history as hunters and gatherers not affect who we are now. Does that capture your question. OK so the first thing I would do is say that story about man the hunter and woman the gatherer. It's a lot of conjecture on very thin evidence and in fact there's a lot of very interesting evidence that suggests that early humans didn't sex differentiate when they went hunting for example hunting. We tend to think I mean the story the stereotypical you know archetypal story man the hunter is about going out and getting the big game. All the guys get together they get their spears they go out for days and hunt the buffalo. But in fact over the last 10 or 15 years some archaeologists have had the great luck of doing some digs in the tundra where the freezing has meant that the degradation of soft materials has not been the same as in other places. What they have found have been incredibly early nets. For

example they found evidence of different kinds of tools that you don't find in other sites. Not because they weren't there but because those materials degrade. And the evidence in these sites suggests that hunting was a communal activity that everybody would for example set traps that it would take a whole big group to chase an ant chase the herd over the cliff. And most of the hunting didn't involve big game where they went off for days but it was little animals around. So in other words. Obviously I believe in evolution I believe that evolution there's it's if you believe in evolution you can't avoid thinking that evolution has shaped who we are and what our capacities are. But I think the way that that shaped human capacity is to endow us with an enormous amount of flexibility behaviorally. And that the risk with looking backwards in time and thinking about you know well doesn't that arrangement. Affect how we are right now is that

what we make of that arrangement is based entirely on what we know from right now and that these tales about you know family arrangement or hunting practices and so on are often made on unbelievably thin data and are only now I mean this Manhunter story is a really good one that you almost never see a challenge but it's actually it's really conjecture so I hope that that helps. Thank you so much all of you for good questions. Thank you. Thank you all so much for coming there are books available up at the registers and little book signing right here. Thank you.