Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

Building on previous evidence about the plasticity of behavior and the pressure of implicit versus explicit attitudes, Fine examines early-childhood gendering. Even very young babies can be shown to have a preference for the familiar; infants prefer their familial mother tongue (perhaps from having heard it in utero), and by three months of age, babies prefer the faces of the races and sexes they’re most familiar with (197). Babies have particularly strong responses to parental expressions of encouragement or discouragement, and their parents’ reactions heavily influence what toys they choose.

One interesting study of racial attitudes in children demonstrated that kids watching videos of people of different races interacting were more affected by implicit racial attitudes in body language (eye contact, leaning forward or away, a firm or a reluctant handshake) than by what the actors in the video said about race (199). Implicit attitudes are, as has been repeatedly shown, out of our conscious control and are more likely to take over in situations of stress or exhaustion—conditions that are common among parents, as Fine notes. As a result, it’s no surprise that studies often show a divergence between what parents say they believe about gender and what their children seem to have learned about gender. For instance, when asked what their “mommy” would think about their playing with an opposite-sex-coded toy, young children often think mommy wouldn’t like that much at all, even if their mother herself says she would encourage it. Even if the children themselves do not have a strong concept of gender, they are sponges for the implicit attitudes of their caretakers.

Children aren’t only implicitly encouraged to adopt gendered behaviors, they’re born into a world in which a male/female distinction is foundational—and, as they grow, they become “gender detectives,” seeking out information about how this seemingly crucial line is drawn. Fine points out that many of the ways in which we’re used to identifying gender are arbitrary and were instated in response to anxieties about gender. (The pink-for-girls and blue-for-boys tradition was once the other way around and only solidified in its current form in the middle of the 20th century.) Evolutionary psychologists make up spurious “biological” explanations for such preferences only after the fact; the truth is, these distinctions are made to teach children how gender is performed (209).

Fine uses a vivid thought experiment, replacing “boy” and “girl” with “right-hander” and “left-hander” and demonstrating how deeply embedded boy/girl distinctions are societally: If you were a child, and your parents dressed you differently depending on your handedness, and your teacher greeted you every day with “good morning, left-handers and right-handers,” you’d swiftly get the sense that this was a distinction to pay attention to (210). Indeed, children do: Around preschool age, kids start actively seeking to understand gender distinctions, often overshooting along the way—for instance, believing that boys drink tea and girls drink coffee because of their parents’ preferences (212). “It’s hardly surprising,” writes Fine:

They are born into a world in which gender is continually emphasized through conventions of dress, appearance, language, color, segregation, and symbols. Everything around the child indicates that whether one is male or female is a matter of great importance (213).

As demonstrated in the previous chapter, children become fascinated with gender difference as they begin exploring their place in the world. The culture that they encounter is eager to offer them answers. In a broad survey of children’s media, Fine discovers pervasive gender stereotyping. Male characters greatly outweigh female characters in children’s books and movies, and what female characters do exist are likely to be represented in traditional roles (219). Even in those moments in children’s stories when gender boundaries are crossed, female characters are far more likely to be doing the crossing: Researchers comparing a selection of children’s books found “it was the taking up of masculine traits, roles, and leisure activities by female characters that set apart the supposedly nonsexist books from the sexist ones” (221). Children internalize these attitudes and often police them vigorously among themselves; boys are more likely to be scolded for “girly” behavior than vice versa (218). As a result, even a five-year-old child can “classify different shapes, textures, and emotions as male or female” and will:

confidently declare that a spiky brown tea set and an angry-looking baby doll dressed in rough black clothing are for boys, while a smiling yellow truck adorned with hearts and a yellow hammer strewn with ribbons are for girls (224).

This, Fine continues, is remarkable: “even before they reach school, children can go well beyond the surface of gender associations and make inferences about nothing less than male and female inner nature itself” (224).

A final piece in the puzzle of childhood gender behavior is the sheer pressure to belong to a group and the relief of such belonging. A study of adults demonstrated that merely being assigned to a value-neutral category—as a person who underestimates when they try to guess the number of dots on a screen, or a person who overestimates—will lead to positive feelings toward the other people so grouped (227).

The pressure is much stronger for children. One study that separated preschoolers into “Red” and “Blue” groups demonstrated that, if teachers left the division at that, it made no difference to the children’s feelings—but if teachers made a big fuss about the distinction between red and blue, addressing the groups separately and pitting them against each other in teams, the students developed a strong group feeling (228). It only makes sense, then, that an intensely gender-divided world would place pressure on children to pick their team. While children typically (but not always) develop a little more flexibility around these ideas as they grow, the training they receive early in their development will remain with them in the form of the implicit attitudes they carry with them for life—the very attitudes that Fine identifies repeatedly throughout Delusions of Gender.

Fine sums up her preceding arguments, retracing her path from the fluidity and malleability of identity through the difficulties of accurate brain research and into childhood identity formation. She reminds the reader that “when researchers look for sex differences in the brain or the mind, they are hunting a moving target. Both are in continuous interaction with the social context” (236). On such hard-to-pinpoint and ever-moving grounds, “neuroscience is used by some in a way it has often been used in the past: to reinforce, with all the authority of science, old-fashioned stereotypes and roles” (237).

Far from accepting stereotypical, flawed, and biased research as a rebellious cry against “political correctness,” Fine argues, we should see it as just the opposite: an attempt to uphold an oppressive status quo. Fine ends with a call for reason and for change: “Our minds, society, and neurosexism create difference. Together, they wire gender. But the wiring is soft, not hard. It is flexible, malleable, and changeable. And, if we only believe this, it will continue to unravel” (239).