The Washington Post has been filled with gender of late. On December 5, a front-page article trumpeted successes in getting toy stores to eliminate separate boys’ and girls’ aisles. The British branch of Toys “R” Us has been won over online as well, removing gender labels from its website, though the U.S. site retains them—according to a spokeswoman, parents shopping online are still more likely to shop by gender than by age, brand, or category of toy.
Days before, the Post heralded a scientific study showing that human brains could not be neatly distinguished as male and female. Most individual brains have a “mosaic” of features, some more common in females and some more common in males. The gender binary had been overturned. The lead author of the study, Daphna Joel, told the Post that she hoped her research would help do away with “assumptions about gender differences.” Elsewhere Joel has said that research on sex differences can make her “blood boil.”
Joel is likely to need tranquilizers for some time to come, because such research is burgeoning. There is a new journal, the Biology of Sex Differences; a second edition of Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine with more than 100 contributors from all over the world; and the evolutionists spreading throughout the hard and social sciences who see sex differences as central. What might seem surprising is the sex of these scientists: When Robert Pool wrote a book about sex differences some years ago, he concluded that most of the cutting-edge research on the subject was done by women.
Joel’s grievance is sex differences research, but the women who spearheaded such research did so because of their own grievances. Columbia University physician Marianne Legato is a prime example. She discovered that the female heart functions differently from the male heart—a major problem given that the existing scientific consensus on the human heart was based on the study of men. (The sex differences researcher Larry Cahill notes that “to this day, neuroscientists overwhelmingly study only male animals.”) The longstanding assumption had been that men and women could be considered the same, aside from the differences in sexual organs and function. So scientists studying the heart could use male subjects and avoid the complications of women’s hormones.
Legato was upset by the bias toward male subjects. She looked beyond heart research and eventually edited Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine. Similarly, Biology of Sex Differences, the new journal, is a publication of the Society for Women’s Health, which describes itself as “the thought-leader in promoting research on biological differences in disease.”
Such differences seem to be popping up everywhere, as 60 Minutes noted in a 2014 program. Take the heart: Men’s heart attacks usually bring sharp chest and arm pain; women are more likely to report nausea, fatigue, even pain between the shoulders. “Typically men get clogs in major arteries that are easy to see on an angiogram. But many women get blockages in tiny microvessels inside the heart,” the show reported. And stem cells: “Men’s are less powerful to begin with,” and they decay pretty dramatically with age. In women, stem cells remain relatively stable through life. And the brain: Women at risk for Alzheimer’s and dementia decline twice as fast as at-risk men, and after undergoing anesthesia, older women suffer greater declines in cognition and function than older men.
Men and women respond to drugs differently, too, a discovery delayed by the fact that until recently, all the studies focused on males. Noting that the standard dosage for the leading sleep aid, Ambien, leaves women half asleep in the morning, the FDA recently cut the recommended dose for women in half. The Government Accountability Office reports that 8 of the 10 prescription drugs pulled from the market between 1997 and 2001 “posed greater health risks for women than for men.” As Cahill points out, facts like these imply studying biological sex differences should be a boon for women especially.
What about Joel’s findings on the brain? Cahill says we have known for over 40 years that males and females are exposed to both masculinizing and feminizing influences. But “we aren’t unisex, and every cell in the brain of every man and every woman knows it.” In her book Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget, Legato quotes the Institute of Medicine’s expert committee: “Sex does matter. It matters in ways that we did not expect.”
Granted, feminists are not threatened by studies showing men and women have different hearts and livers. It’s deep-seated differences in emotions, talents, and interests that they know would destroy their worldview—that sex differences are few and usually arise from nurture, not nature. But sex differences encompass matters of the mind as well. Men are at greater risk for autism and schizophrenia, women for anxiety and depressive disorders. Men are more likely to have a gift for spatial reasoning, important in technological fields. Women have greater verbal facility and are superior at “reading” people’s faces—gifts helpful in a host of “people” professions, such as family medicine. Of course there are marvelous female engineers and male clinicians, but the sex differences on average are significant. It is fortuitous that the sexes’ interests are more likely than not to follow their talents.
How can one get to the bottom of the nature-nurture debate? Cahill is as impressed as I am by the brilliant research of Richard Udry. Udry found that women in their thirties who had been exposed to more testosterone in utero were more masculine than women who had been exposed to less. Such women had more interest in careers and less interest in babies, for example. Udry also collected information on whether the parents of these women had encouraged their daughters more toward masculine pursuits, such as careers, or feminine ones, such as homemaking and having children. He found that parents’ encouragement of more feminine pursuits was effective with most women, but not those who had been exposed to higher testosterone levels before birth. For them, parental encouragement of femininity actually backfired; high-testosterone women with femininity-oriented parents ended up less feminine in their interests and behaviors than did high-testosterone women whose parents had not emphasized femininity. Testosterone apparently boosts resistance to social construction. Biology matters.
As one might suspect on the basis of Udry’s research, differences in hormones do more to explain the most politically sensitive sex differences than differences in brain structure. Testosterone discourages nurturing of infants; thus men and high-testosterone women are less inclined to nurture young children. Oxytocin has the opposite effect. Women have more oxytocin than men, especially after puberty, in pregnancy, and during breastfeeding. Thus, breastfeeding mothers feel worse and are quicker to respond when their babies cry than mothers who are bottle-feeders or “thwarted breastfeeders,” who planned to breastfeed but were unable to. Another study found that 12-year-old girls who had gone through menarche were more interested in pictures of infants than girls of the same age who had not.
These hormonal factors also give rise to children’s varying preferences in toys. Most young girls love dolls, while young boys love trucks and Legos. So too with young primates. When introduced to human toys, female monkeys were more likely to be drawn to a doll and a pot, whereas the males were more likely to gravitate to a car and a ball.
Feminists, however, are convinced that socially constructed gender roles, not hormones or brain structure, explain the maternal inclinations that lead so many talented women to quit or cut back on their careers when they have young children. This is why they get so excited about children’s toys. Their battle for gender neutrality in toys may prove futile. In her book The War Against Boys, Christina Hoff Sommers described what happened when the toy company Hasbro tested a playhouse the company hoped would appeal to both boys and girls. The girls dressed the dolls and played house. The boys catapulted the toy baby carriage from the roof.
Feminists persevere, however: According to news reports, one kindergarten teacher on Bainbridge Island, Washington, allows only girls to play with Legos because boys’ passion for them leads to high-paying scientific careers and women need to catch up.
But it’s not women who need to catch up. Boys are disproportionately likely to languish in slow-learner classes, and men have been less likely than women to earn a four-year college degree for more than 30 years now. Amid these trends, misguided feminism chugs on; it dominates the mainstream media and the educational establishment. When will sex difference deniers begin to face the scorn that climate change deniers do in mainstream circles? It’s past time.
Steven E. Rhoads is professor of politics emeritus at the University of Virginia and the author of Taking Sex Differences Seriously.
