Gender Defiance – The Female Brain is. . .what, exactly?

As an undergrad majoring in neuroscience, I participated in more than my share of psychology studies.  These were requirements for all psych & neuro students, ensuring our peers would have plenty of subjects for our various projects and papers.  These studies were pretty much what you’d expect: simple memory tests, lie-detectors, cooperative learning tests, spacial recognition, etc.

As a 101 student two of the first things you learn about gender are * Women have better verbal skills  * Men have better spacial skills.  This is nearly always presented as an “innate” gender difference.  Studies cite examples from early childhood development: girls start talking earlier and tend towards larger vocabularies; boys move around more and prefer playing with blocks and sports.  And while verbal skills for boys tend to catch up to girls with age, girls never seem to gain the spatial skills necessary to put them on par with boys.

This is such ubiquitous set of facts, it’s pretty much taken for granted in psychology.  Spatial recognition, too, because it is such a great divider, is often what the tool used to understand “gendered brains” in general.

If you control for sexual orientation, things get really interesting.

(Note: I’m not using data below because 1. I’m not interested in hunting it down and 2. I’d like to show you how I was presented with this information in my own classes, sans data.)

One of the most common spatial skill tests is that of object rotation.  A subject is presented with two pictures of unfamiliar objects, and must report whether, if rotated, the images match.  Like this:

In general, if you plot the correct responses to such a test on a scale of terrible to perfect, parsing out gender, you’ll see something like this:

Now, if you parse it further, according to self-reported sexual orientation, where you do think gay men will fall on this scale?

Any guesses?

Ding ding ding!  Yep! Gay men tend to score a little better than women but worse than straight men.  Okay, so that may be expected based on our stereotypes, right?

Okay, so then what about lesbians?  If gay men are “something between” straight men and women, then lesbians must be too, right?

WRONG.  Lesbians are typically dreadful at this test.

Using the social assessments so often thrown at gender studies it’s easy to come to simple conclusions like:

• Men are masculine
• Men are good at spacial reckoning.
• Gay men are less masculine than men, but more masculine than women.
• Women are more feminine than gay men.
• Gay women are more feminine than women.

Weird, right?

Well, yes, it’s weird, but for plenty more confounding reasons than simple ones.

There’s this thing called “stereotype threat.”  It’s an anxiety, whether conscious or subconscious, that a person who belongs to a group, when tested, will confirm the social stereotypes about that group.  In this case, it’s pretty common knowledge that men are considered to be better at spacial reckoning than women.  So, understanding stereotype threat, it’s no surprise that men outperform everyone.

What about lesbians then? Well, it could be that lesbians don’t give two shits about whether they outperform men on these tests.  Or, maybe lesbians are even more susceptible to the stereotypes that condemn women’s skills in spacial tests.

So, knowing that I’m both 1) a woman and 2) pretty gay, where did I end up on these tests?

What in the hey?!

Yep, I rock so hard at rotation tests. I also rock at water line tests, puzzles, and pretty much all the other spacial reckoning tests I’ve taken.  And no, I was never a field-sport athlete, I’m not an architect, and I’m crap at physics.   So. . . what gives?

My hypothesis?  Defiance.

Growing up, I always liked to buck gender assumptions for the hell of it.  In my Catholic school, I was the only girl to wear pants (Those Ohio winters were cold. Why the fuck would I wear a skirt?!). I always chose the boys’ role in school plays and chose to play with the boys at recess.

Did I want to be a boy? Nah, not really.  But I saw from a very young age what male privilege looked like and I wanted it. Playing with boys’ toys, wearing boys’ clothes, talking like a boy, etc, these things were rewarded by society two-fold: 1) I got the ease of moving through the world with a little more authority thanks to my comfortable shoes and mental/emotional investment in things like science and 2) Society says tom-boys are cute.  Double win.

This stuck with me through college, so whenever I got a whiff of gendered studies happening (and I’m pretty good at detecting the purpose of a psych study too, which often made me an asshole-ish outlier) I decided I was going to ROCK at that shit.  I would double up my efforts at math, spacial reckoning, and dumb down my supposedly feminine traits like empathy.  Perhaps because of cold-blooded neuroscience-major disdain for psychology, I decided I’d be the chick who didn’t behave according to traditional psych rules.

Stereotype threat says that I’d be so nervous about confirming gender stereotypes, that I’d ultimately succumb to them.  Instead, I subverted them.

The point of this post isn’t about how great I am at noticing whether your cufflinks match.

It’s that even the innocuous factoids, these taken-for-granted ideas of gendered brains, are largely bullshit. You can mold results by merely priming subjects with information (“By the way, it’s okay if you don’t do well on this test, most girls don’t.”)  or even by reminding people of the stereotypes associated with their gender (“Male or Female? Please check one box. Good now proceed to calculus problem #1.”).  I molded the results by refusing to put up with their bullshit studies. I don’t have a “male brain;” I have a brain in the body of a female who hates bad science so much she’ll try even harder to prove that your study is bullshit.  My defiance in the face of the stereotype threat made me an outlier.  And I’d be willing to guess it’d work for pretty much anyone.

It works the other way, too.  Men are bred to compete in our society and they’re pretty damn aware of how good they’re supposed to be at math, science, etc.  So, put them in front of a test that’s supposed to measure how “manly” they are, and you BET they’ll work hard to prove it.

Tests like these are so fraught with confounding variables, it’s nearly impossible to get a clean data set that represents anything like concrete facts.  Everything from self-reporting to the gender of the test administrator can spin simple psych tests into the ineffable zone of socialized behavior patterns. In short, most everything we know about gendered brains is wrong.

To learn more about studies like this and the terms I use, check out the fantastic book Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine.  I was fortunate to have first hand experience with the stench of bad pop-psychology, but plenty of folks take at face value everything that Psychology Today tells them is true.  Delusions of Gender will give you some ammo for destroying those hot-air balloons of bad science.