Abandoning Sex-Difference Thinking
What I read: What sex-difference science misses about the messy reality of sex by Jeffrey W Lockhart. Published August 17, 2022.
We live in a world where men and women have historically been compartmentalized into discrete sex identifiers. That person is a man. That person is a woman. That’s what I heard, read, and was taught growing up. These days we all hopefully know that those stark binary distinctions are lacking in usefulness and accuracy.
Nowadays we increasingly understand the world is rarely just this or that. Men and women are not the drastically different creatures of the Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (please don’t buy this book unless it’s for research purposes) era of thinking. There is an abundance of books, articles, experts, politicians and their operatives, and religious zealots who will attempt to maintain our worship of the male/female binary. Many of them claim as their justification sex-difference science research.
Enormous scientific and publishing resources go to studying differences between male and female; findings of sex differences get outsized media and public attention. And while sex is an important part of our biology and society, the search for biological differences can lead us astray, too.
It’s time to start pushing back on these binary perspectives because sex-difference science and the resulting assumptions are highly flawed, not very useful, and often quite damaging.
There is a long history of discounting women as somehow entirely foreign creatures from the men who walk the planet. Women were excluded from clinical trials until relatively recently. That exclusion spawned the narrative that since women were excluded from medication study trials, we didn’t know how those medications would affect women and therefore it was somehow necessary to study the differences between women and men.
The search for sex differences has generated a breathless flurry of new results – more than 1,100 research papers per year by my last count, along with whole new academic journals and professional societies dedicated to sex differences. Based on the same logic, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) added to the frenzy in 2016 by making the study of ‘sex as a biological variable’ a stipulation of their research funding, which totals more than $41 billion and reaches more than 300,000 researchers annually.
In 1986, the United States changed course and no longer suggested excluding women from such trials. They codified this inclusion recommendation into law in 1993. That was a good development.
However, over the past three decades of including women in clinical trials, almost no differences between the sexes emerged. After all those studies, only one single medication is recommended per the US Food and Drug Administration to dose differently for men and women. Just one. So, from a medication research perspective, the sex-difference narrative was proven to be unfounded.
Despite growing evidence of the differences between men and women being less than imagined and far more nuanced (which makes some people uncomfortable), studies about sex differences still abound. Sadly, some researchers seem to proceed from either a cultural sexist bias or because they wish to consciously or unconsciously serve their own political or religious agenda.
The Cambridge scholar Simon Baron-Cohen says he does sex-difference research and public engagement because he would like to give men ‘a resurgence of pride’. Baron-Cohen argues there is an ‘essential difference’ between male and female brains, where male brains are excellent at jobs like engineer, banker and lawyer, and female brains as better at jobs like primary school teacher, therapist and personnel staff.
I don’t pretend to know Baron-Cohen’s motivations and why he does such research, but I stand by most such research being quite unhelpful and potentially damaging to society. Some researchers contend that men and women aren’t innately different, but somehow have different preferences. Ugh. That sure seems like sexism ensconced in research hypotheses. Confirmation bias seems to be at play here, at least it seems that way to me.
Scientists are not immune from the cultural and physical worlds in which they do their research. As a result, for decades scientists have tried to prove that women are not just different from men but also inherently inferior. Some in our society eat that sort of sexist perspective up, craving a steady stream of supposed proof that men and women are radically different.
Most of those studies don’t stand up to the necessary scientific standard of replication. Solid science requires that studies be replicated by other researchers to solidify the original study’s claim. Binary sex differences are the raw meat that the frenzied media craves to proliferate and exaggerate. But there is good news.
In trying to understand these failures and counteract the influence of sexist cultural assumptions on research, scientists have ended up debunking essentialist theories of sex in every field, including endocrinology (the study of hormones such as testosterone); neuroscience (brain research); genetics; psychology of cognitive abilities, personality and behaviour; pharmacology; cellular research; and reproductive health.
Despite all of the studies disproving the binary, sexist origins of essentialist sex-difference research, the media still publishes and touts an onslaught of them. This hurts society and damages scientific credibility.
When someone reads about an essentialist scientific study’s results, it fosters gender stereotypes that infect our society in so many ways. The Right-wing grabs on to such research as justification for their sexist views. So much of Right-wing politics and religious culture has a vested interest in keeping women second-class citizens.
Our minds play tricks on us. We think we perceive information objectively, but we don’t. Right-wing elements take advantage of such mental vagaries. Neurogenetic essentialism encourages someone hearing about a biological difference to wrongly assume all differences are biological.
Hearing about even an unrelated or spurious biological difference between groups such as ‘male’ and ‘female’ can strengthen people’s belief in four key aspects of neurogenetic essentialism: first, the uniformity of groups, eg ‘all women are the same’. Second, the discreteness of groups, eg ‘men and women do not overlap’. Third, that there is an underlying essence of groups, eg ‘men have different brains or genetics’. And fourth, that those essences cause people’s appearances and behaviours.
All of the misconceptions and misguided beliefs about the differences beween men and women have consequences. Such biases can create hostile work environments. Women can be passed over for hiring or promotion. Women end up being dissuaded from entering fields of study and work.
So, what can we do. For starters, we must accept that sex is a complicated thing biologically. Of course, researchers should not entirely ignore sex in their work, but it must be seen as the complex, contextual, messy reality it is. We should also accept that scientific explanations often don’t underpin what we should actually be caring about in our society.
When we talk about equal opportunities in education and the workplace, sexual harassment and discrimination, the division of household labour, or sport and bathroom access, we are not talking about gametes. In these conversations, we do not worry whether the one-in-20 men who are infertile should count as men or if the one-in-three women who undergo a hysterectomy are still women. Sperm and eggs are not the point, and extrapolating all of the social differences we care about for men and women from the gametes they do (or do not) produce is precisely the error of neurogenetic essentialism.
The truth is most of us do not and should not care too much about the claims of tenuous sex-difference research conclusions. Sex differences are not binary or fixed. I’m not even going to get into the topic of the growing awareness of gender expression, but it’s clear that the younger and more savvy among us are beginning to accept the lack of a sex binary truth.
But for those who continue to point to questionable sex-difference research as justification for their sexist views, whether driven by an agenda or simply the result of being acculturated in a historically sexist culture, they are continuing the spewing of falsehoods or inaccurate thinking and it does real damage to people’s personal, professional, and social lives.
No doubt more studies finding major sex differences between men and women will continue to be published, but scientists and the public should be wary of these overhyped and often later-debunked claims. It is time to get past ‘men are from Mars and women are from Venus’. We are all on Earth, where sex is messy, dynamic and socially situated.
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