{"id":27391,"date":"2017-03-17T08:00:58","date_gmt":"2017-03-17T13:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=27391"},"modified":"2017-03-17T08:06:16","modified_gmt":"2017-03-17T13:06:16","slug":"guest-post-delusions-of-dimorphism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2017\/03\/17\/guest-post-delusions-of-dimorphism\/","title":{"rendered":"Delusions of Dimorphism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n

Add to the list of new books to read Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference<\/em><\/a>, by Cordelia Fine. Feeding my interest in the issue of\u00a0sexual dimorphism<\/a> in humans \u2014 which we work so hard to\u00a0teach<\/a> to children \u2014 the book is described like this:<\/p>\n

\n

Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Cordelia Fine debunks the myth of hardwired differences between men\u2019s and women\u2019s brains, unraveling the evidence behind such claims as men\u2019s brains aren\u2019t wired for empathy and women\u2019s brains aren\u2019t made to fix cars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Good reviews here<\/a> and here<\/a> report that Fine tackles an often-cited study<\/a> of newborn infants\u2019 sex difference in preferences for staring at things, by Jennifer Connellan and colleagues in 2000. They reported:<\/p>\n

\u2026we have demonstrated that at 1 day old, human neonates demonstrate sexual dimorphism in both social and mechanical perception. Male infants show a stronger interest in mechanical objects, while female infants show a stronger interest in the face.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And this led to the conclusion: \u201cThe results of this research clearly demonstrate that sex differences are in part biological in origin.\u201d They reached this conclusion\u00a0by alternately placing Connellan herself or a dangling mobile in front of tiny babies, and timing how long they stared. There is a very nice summary of problems with the study here<\/a>, which seriously undermine its conclusion.<\/p>\n

However, even if the methods were good, this is a powerful example of how a tendency toward difference between males and females is turned into a categorical opposition between the sexes \u2014 as in, the \u201creal<\/em> differences between boys and girls<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

To illustrate this, here\u2019s a graphic look at the results in the article, which were reported in this table:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>They didn\u2019t report the whole distribution of boys\u2019 and girls\u2019 gaze-times, but\u00a0it\u2019s obvious that there is a huge overlap in the distributions, despite a difference in the means. In the mobile-gaze-time, for example, the difference in averages is 9.7 seconds, while the standard deviations are more than 20 seconds. If\u00a0I turn to my handy normal curve spreadsheet template, and fit it with these numbers, you can see what the pattern might look like (I truncate these at 0 seconds and 70 seconds, as they did in the study):<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Source: My simulation assuming normal distributions from the data in the table above.<\/em><\/p>\n

All I\u2019m trying to say is that the sexes aren\u2019t opposites<\/strong>, even if they have some differences that precede socialization<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you could show me that the 1-day-olds who stare at the mobiles for 52 seconds are more likely to be engineers when they grow up than the ones who stare at them for 41 seconds (regardless of their gender) then I would be impressed. But absent that, if you just want to use such amorphous differences at birth to explain actual<\/a> segregation<\/a> among real adults, then I would not be impressed.<\/p>\n

Originally posted in September, 2010.<\/em><\/p>\n

Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He writes the blog\u00a0Family Inequality<\/a>\u00a0and is the author of <\/em>The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change<\/a>. You can follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0Facebook<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday. Add to the list of new books to read Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, by Cordelia Fine. Feeding my interest in the issue of\u00a0sexual dimorphism in humans \u2014 which we work so hard to\u00a0teach to children \u2014 the book is described like this: Drawing on the latest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1926,"featured_media":70072,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[664,218,223,55,23676,23692,2099,274,675],"class_list":["post-27391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-biology","tag-bodies","tag-childrenyouth","tag-gender","tag-gender-binary","tag-gender-biology","tag-gender-childrenyouth","tag-methodsuse-of-data","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2017\/03\/infant-gaze-distributions-e1489755949680.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1926"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27391"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70071,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27391\/revisions\/70071"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}