A – Academic Enrichment

Nature? Nurture? Both

Neurosexism as the New Sexism

This semester I am in two classes that are both currently discussing gender differences and sexual differentiation. In my Psychology of Gender course, I have been reading about the ways in which gender differences disappear when a study accounts for things such as priming. The message is that even unconscious attitudes lead to differential treatment which in turn shapes our reality. In my Hormones & Behavior neuroscience course, we have been talking about the organizational and activational effects of androgrens and estrogens. The takeaway has been that males and females are biologically fundamentally different in some way. For example, in one I learned about how differences in mental rotation task performance depends on testosterone and in the other that these differences disappear when you don’t frame it as a gendered task. By checking a box for geographic region instead of gender, a different identity was primed and men and women performed similarly.

Curious about these discrepancies, I attended office hours with both professors to gain their perspective on the matter. The lesson that was reinforced from this experience for me is to be critical of every finding as nobody is without bias. If you go looking for gender differences, you will find them. If you go looking for no gender differences, you won’t find them. Part of the issue is publication bias in which science is biased towards positive results and less interested in null findings. It’s less interesting to say, “Aha! We found nothing!” than, “Look, there’s this small but significant difference in the hippocampal volume that correlates to a difference!” However, that is certainly not to say that objective variations do exist. It is a fact to say men and women behave differently, but it is wrong to assume that it is entirely due to nature or nurture.

A rule of thumb when dealing with people is, if the answer seems simple, it’s probably not the whole story. A fascinating body of work has come to show that the way baby boys and girls are treated differs very early on, even before birth. So, when reading a finding, don’t forget to ask yourself, “okay, this exists, but why?”

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