Delusions of Gender

Comic by Cat and Girl

Cordelia Fine – Delusions of Gender

Talking to a friend about my vague dissatisfaction after reading Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman, I was recommended this book, which he thought would be more up my street: a great deal less half-baked and far more vigorous than either Moran’s choice of topic or line of argumentation.

Fine, an academic psychologist, takes dead aim on the essentialist argument for the differences between men and women – you know the kind of thing: men are “just hard-wired” for maths and running the world, and women are “just hard-wired” to like babies and lower pay. Fine argues that the differences which manifest themselves in tests in the lab as well as in everyday life in the wild are not the result of biological differences but are rather the result of social conditioning (or to put it another, Beauvoir-inspired, way, none of us is born with a gendered brain: such a brain must be made). As Fine herself puts it, “social realities … shape minds” (39).

I have a feeling some readers are already switching off in thinking that this is one of my feminist polemic books which makes me irritable around men (hello, my brother! Hello, my friend E! Hello, the BF!). While it is a fine specimen of that category, it is also very much in the strain of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science (which I went bats for). Fine is as much concerned, I think, with the misuse to which real science is put by charlatan popular writers and the way such research is reported and popularly disseminated as she is with the various imbalances between the sexes. It is galling to read these sections as a person who has an interest in scientific and technological news and to see how such progress is routinely misreported (beginning with the very basic fact that research which does not show up any differences between the sexes will end up gathering dust in a drawer, whereas any research which points up differences in men and women automatically gets published — ARGH!), just as much as I find it galling as a woman to read much of the rest of Fine’s findings.

These findings are grim reading indeed: by page 85 I felt compelled to pencil “DESPAIR” into the margin. Fine writes swiftly and decisively, presenting an idea and its implications with despatch and yet totally clearly, so that by my “DESPAIR” stage we had already been through such issues as stereotype threat, the sinister power of simply feeling you don’t belong in a given environment, and various other workplace-oriented inequalities, as well as the situation in the home with “the curious split often seen between the gender-equal values people consciously endorse and the automatic gender associations that, through their influence on thought and act, can undermine those beliefs” (82) (including the totally baffling statistic which sees breadwinning women doing the vast majority of housework and childcare, even when their husbands are unemployed, to maintain their “womanliness” necessary both for their husband’s and their own peace of mind). By page 85, it was clear that we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

My friend’s recommendation was certainly right on the money: Fine need do nothing to convert me to her cause, as I have always viewed essentialist arguments as sexism in wolf’s clothing. If nothing else, I now have bountiful information to back up my own argument that biological essentialism is bunkum. But as such I can’t know how convincing it would be someone totally opposed to this viewpoint; I’m pretty sure anyone who is at all on the fence would be swayed, but it is at times so flagrantly partisan — not that I think Fine in any way massages her research to match her bias, more in the way she so vigorously argues her point — that it might well be off-putting to a proponent of essentialism*, though the sheer weight of evidence she brings to her side of the case ought to lay waste to all in her path.

On the basis of this book, I will certainly be seeking out Fine’s previous work, another psychology book called A Mind of Its Own. Fine has both a wealth of terrific research and a talent for writing complicated ideas in a very readable manner, with humour and deftness. I’m a sucker for a good popular science writer, so watch this space.

*I was tempted to make a flippant joke here about them being wrong anyway, so it doesn’t matter if we don’t get through to them, but I recently discussed the stupidity of sectarian feminist groups with a friend (she had been in a group that had, in dead seriousness, exactly reproduced the “People’s Front of Judea” / “Judean People’s Front” argument, just with “feminist” for “front” and “large British metropolis” for “Judea”) and so I won’t make it. We should be able to discuss disagreements such as these with everyone: that is how progress is effected.