Such dramatics aren't necessary to show how differently we treat boys and girls. In a British study, the same baby was dressed alternately as a boy or girl. As a girl, the baby was held and cooed at: "Aren't you pretty?" The "boy," on the other hand, was not held, encouraged to explore, cheered on. Which reminds Barbara Ehrenreich, biologist, author, and essayist, of something that happened when her son was around two years old: "He had long, blond hair, and a waitress came up to us and said, 'Oh, she's so cute. What a sweetie,' and so on. And I said, 'Well, he's actually a boy.' The waitress, without missing a beat, said, 'Tough little guy, huh?'"
Now you or I might look at all this and take it as a front-row seat at the Nature/Nurture Open; still, there are those, such as Kimura, who don't buy it. "The conventional wisdom has been that behavioral differences between the sexes are learned," she says. But they are really "stamped into our brains before birth." Early hormonal events, she says, have a "lifelong, irreversible effect on behavior." What behavior? "Men are more accurate in tests of target-directed motor skills [discus throwers take note]. Women tend to be better at rapidly identifying matching items (like socks from a dryer?), a skill called perceptual speed. They have greater verbal fluency and are faster at certain precision manual tasks, such as placing pegs in designated holes on a board [something I know I've always been proud of]."
Like Kimura, the list of differences is precise, authoritative, firm. But is it suspect? Aside from the language of researchers, isn't the datum itself contradictory, depending on one's vantage point?
As I researched this topic, I found that various people I talked to argued for significant innate sex differences, just like Kimura. Parents in particular repeatedly insisted (eyes raised heavenward) that boys run around more, talk less, are more destructive, while girls chatter, are more biddable and cuddly. "And I treat my kids exactly the same," they all say.
Short of accusing one's friends of lying, all one can do is wonder. If little Johnny showed a predilection for pink hair ribbons or nail polish, wouldn't these same gender-blind parents gently but firmly dissuade him? And if little Kathy ladies mud soup out of a tiny dish and pretends she's Mommy, isn't she just the cutest thing? While I absolve the parents of any malice, I agree with anthropologist Stephen Jay Gould, who remarked that theories are most successful when they let us believe that our "social prejudices are scientific facts after all."
In the wacky world of sex versus gender differences, the demarcation lines are as clear as any Yugoslavian border, particularly in these enlightened, polarized times: You're either a politically correct stooge unwilling to accept that biology is destiny or you're a strong-minded scientist, studying hormones or the hypothalamus. In which context, incidentally, aforesaid strong-minded scientist can ramble on about his or her own personal experiences and call it empirical evidence.
Take this 1991 Time magazine cover, for instance: "Scientists are discovering that gender differences have as much to do with the biology of the brain as the way we are raised." Inside, however, University of Chicago psychologist Jerre Levy relates how watching her 15-month-old daughter convinced her of the genetic base for behavior: "I had dressed her in her nightie and she came into the room with this saucy little walk, cocking her head, blinking her eyes, especially at the men. You never saw such flirtation in your life."
Pardon me? A 15-month-old? Flirting? Ah, let's project complex adult erotic feelings onto a small child, why don't we? Kimura doesn't hesitate to use herself as backup, either, describing her use of landmarks to find her car in a crowded parking lot as being "stereotypically female" behavior. Interesting that if you or I use personal experience, it's anecdote. But not here.
Throughout all of this, I can't help noticing how pathetically meager is the range of attributions for female behavior. If girls play with cars, they're ersatz boys. They aren't attracted to cars because the automobile represents freedom, power, status, speed.
Even more infuriating is how sex-difference research always manages to denigrate women. In the early 80s, for instance, Camilla Benbow and Julian Stanley analyzed 10,000 SAT scores, whereupon they announced to the world that males are "inherently" superior at math. The world was clearly impressed. "Do males have a math gene?" wondered Newsweek. (Good old math gene. Wonder if there's a sense of humor gene, too?) Benbow herself even remarked that "many women can't bring themselves to accept the sexual difference in aptitude. But the difference in math is a fact."
(The best riposte I heard to this was Jane Pauley's, on the Today show. Does this mean, Pauley sweetly asked two male biodeterminist guests, that men who can't do math aren't "real men"?)
Call me curmudgeonly, but last I heard, SATs measured learning, not innate ability. And recently, the questions themselves have come under fire for their gender bias. For instance, 27 percent more boys than girls correctly answered a question based on basketball scores. And when an analogy began "Mercenary is to soldier as...," boys outscored girls by 16 percent. (I guess Barbie just never found the right outfit for the French Foreign Legion.)
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