Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (27 page)

How
do
they diverge? Differences between the sexes at birth are small, so it is unlikely that they could drive parental behavior. But there is a big difference in the way parents view and treat the two sexes. The first question asked after a birth, the first news, is the one that couldn’t be answered for Herculine Barbin: girl or boy? It’s as if we need that label to know how to act toward a newborn, and even to know how to
see
it.
In monkeys,
the first reaction to a birth in many species is that adults inspect and sniff the baby’s genitals.

This perception shapes adults’ behavior. In experiments, the same baby brings out very different adult responses if it is dressed in pink or blue, and the same audio of a child’s mischievous remarks draws amusement and encouragement from adults who think the child is a boy but more negative comments from matched adults who were told it was a girl. There is even a test for parents’ gender stereotypes, the Parental Sex Typing of Newborns, or PASTON, Scale. Fathers do more of it than mothers, but both stereotype.

There are also differences in behavior early on. In a study of three-week-old infants and their mothers in middle-class U.S. homes, boys cried more, were more active, looked at their mothers more, and slept and vocalized less than girls, but maternal behavior also differed: mothers of boys held, burped, rocked, stimulated, aroused, stressed, looked at, talked to, and smiled at their baby more than mothers of girls did. Such differences could easily have affected the infants by the age of three weeks; for instance, boys may have slept less because their mothers aroused them more.

Three or four years later, in early childhood, children use developing cognitive skills to label themselves male or female, partly by identifying with same-sex adults, partly through stereotypes. Because young minds tend to split the world, they are less flexible about girls’ and boys’ roles than they will be later. Confirming older studies on other ethnic groups, May Ling Halim and her colleagues in 2013 found rigid gender typing at age three (as shown by dress-up play among other things) in African-American, Mexican-American, and Dominican-American children. Rigid thinking increased at age four in all three ethnic groups but declined in some ways by age five. Also in 2013, Carol Martin and her colleagues published a study of same-sex playmate preference in 292 children (about two-thirds Mexican-American) in Head Start programs. As in other ethnic groups, same-sex
preference was strong, but part of the reason was common attraction to gender-typed activities.

Fortunately, these stereotypes weaken. Clare Conry-Murray and Eliot Turiel, in a 2012 study called “Jimmy’s Baby Doll and Jenny’s Truck,” found that children aged four, six, and eight were able to show some flexibility about gender; they thought that girls and boys should be allowed to choose and this flexibility increased as they got older. Yet self-segregation by sex continues throughout childhood. Since friends and playmates, not just parents and teachers, socialize children, voluntary sex segregation can reinforce stereotypes. Psychologist Eleanor Maccoby thought of same-sex groups as two cultures of childhood that sustain stereotypes even when adult models are neutral.

There are also other influences. In our society, television affirms gender stereotypes. Cartoons, commercials, and other televised materials shape behavior. According to Common Sense Media, in 2011, over a third of babies under age one in the United States watched television at least once a day, over 70 percent by ages two through four. About 40 percent had a TV in their bedroom, and the same percentage lived in a home where the TV was always on. They watched an average of an hour and forty-five minutes a day, not counting video games, online content, tweets, and other media with similar messages, although TV continued to dominate. Repeating the study in 2013, the researchers found a dramatic increase in the use of mobile devices. The amount of time spent using them in all children under age eight had tripled, from five to fifteen minutes a day. The percentage of kids under two who had used a mobile device went from 10 to 38 in two years. Total screen time declined by around twenty minutes, to just under two hours a day, and TV still dominated, with 58 percent of all children watching at least once a day.

Clearly this kind of exposure has the potential to create gender stereotypes. Yet certain sex differences have been seen in so many different cultures for so long—physical aggression and nurturance,
for example—that they can have little to do with electronic media. But what if parents the world over were trying to
produce
the same sex differences? In one cross-cultural study, child-training practices were rated from ethnographic descriptions in the databases of the Human Relations Area Files, whose members include nonindustrial cultures chosen to represent the world of traditional societies. Parents in 82 percent of cultures
expected
more nurturance from girls, 18 percent expected no difference, and
none
expected more from boys. Parental expectations for achievement and self-reliance were also consistent but in the opposite direction, with 87 percent expecting more achievement from boys and only 3 percent expecting more from girls. This study did not look at aggressiveness training, but in nurturance, at least, widespread child-rearing practices reinforce a biological tendency.

Though not always. In anthropologist Carol Ember’s classic study of Luo children in rural Kenya, boys and girls were assigned different kinds of chores. Girls got water and firewood, made fires, cooked, served food, and tended younger children. But some families had too few girls for these chores and gave them to boys instead. In standard observations, these boys showed less aggression and dominance, more altruism, and less dependence than boys who had not been assigned girls’ work, shifting their behavior toward that of girls. In particular, boys who had done a lot of baby tending showed very little aggression.

Since it was only by chance that a family lacked daughters, it is likely that the boys who did girls’ work actually changed because of it—that training and experience can make boys more nurturing and less aggressive, whatever the underlying biology. Big increases in fathers’ involvement with children in the West in the past few decades and the success of parenting-education programs for fathers point the same way, as do experiments showing that even male monkeys can become more nurturing as they gain experience with infants.

So although biology causes boys to be more aggressive and less nurturing even before puberty, these predispositions are further shaped by experience, training, and expectations. But training and expectations in many cultures widen biological divergences. Anthropologists John and Beatrice Whiting showed many years ago that cultures with frequent combat separate fathers from wives and children—until their sons are old enough to join the separate men’s houses, where they begin to train for war.

We’ve already seen that parents and teachers are not the only cultural shapers of gender. The sexes self-segregate by age three and increase their distance throughout childhood, even as they explicitly
define
gender
less
rigidly. This paradox has yet to be explained, but I’m inclined to think that while kids become too smart to hold on to the extreme stereotypes of early childhood, they continue to want to play with others like themselves—who look and dress like them, prefer the same toys and games, and are growing up to become either women or men. Maccoby highlighted these “two cultures,” and as shown by anthropologists Alice Schlegel and Herbert Barry, they decisively diverge by adolescence in most societies. Although children in hunting-and-gathering cultures spend a lot of time in mixed-sex, mixed-age groups, there are some separate games for boys and girls even there.

The availability of same-sex playmates limits options, but with enough children, self-segregation happens. Adults can
make
girls and boys play together, but we have to be pretty controlling to prevent them from drifting apart. Even in cultures with coed schools, children choose separation in free play. In the cross-cultural study by Schlegel and Barry, as girls get older they also tend to hang with adult women, rather than forming teenage groups, but boys tend to form peer groups and keep aloof from men. These patterns make the sexes diverge even more.

So males and females start life with the tendency to be different, yet the sexes always overlap for any measure, and every behavior is
influenced by culture. Girls and boys can theoretically be molded to be more feminine, more masculine, more divergent, or more similar. Although no culture has tried to reduce sex differences to zero, except in some parts of the West in recent decades, it is theoretically possible to do this or even, perhaps, to reverse some biological inclinations. But we now know the answer to a famous question of Margaret Mead’s: What would happen if boys and girls were raised exactly alike? This is currently being tried, and although it is not an orderly experiment, we have learned enough to say that when they are raised alike, they turn out different.

Many of us who have refused to bring home toy guns have watched our sons and their friends pick up sticks in the backyard and “shoot” each other. Girls who have never been dressed in a feminine way may ask for frilly clothes. Some parents who have given Jenny her toy truck and Jimmy his baby doll have watched in amazement as they swapped their presents. That doesn’t mean that these preferences are universal. As a small boy, my wife’s nephew wanted a toy tea set; his parents wouldn’t get him one, but my wife, Ann, did. He immediately wanted to play with it but, touchingly, he hesitated. “Annie,” he asked, “can boys play with tea sets?” She told him they could, and he eagerly did. Incidentally, today he’s a typically masculine young man fresh out of college. And if he weren’t, that would be fine with us, though it wouldn’t be because he used to play with a tea set; that line of reasoning, we now know, is based on a wrongheaded notion of how gender develops.

As we saw in
chapter 1
, fundamental gender identity and sexual orientation are partly independent of each other and of child training; they are grounded in genetic, neural, and hormonal events that we are coming to understand; this knowledge should make us feel comfortable in our skins and proud of who we are. One of the most impressive discoveries of the last decade in child development research is that when babies of either sex are adopted by lesbian or gay couples—and this has now been studied very extensively and carefully—the main
way the resulting children differ from controls raised with a father and a mother is that they turn out to be less homophobic. A 2014 study by Susan Golombok and her colleagues also suggested that gay adoptive fathers are more involved and positive about parenting than are heterosexual controls, but they don’t seem to influence their children’s gender development. There are serious limits to how much we influence the gender identities or sexual orientations of our children by providing models, environmental influences, or training.

Boys and girls really are different, and so are the men and women they become. It is not, for me, a cliché or a pleasantry to say that I think we are very fortunate as a species to be able to acknowledge that. It is a deep biological and philosophic insight, and although I did not at first accept it—I was a strong cultural determinist in my youth—I am glad to embrace and defend it now. We will see in the next chapter how to make better use of it than we have throughout history—by providing children of both sexes with every opportunity and by focusing on something we really can make a difference in: their sense of equality and fairness. But the difference will endure, and it is not one that favors men.

One of this book’s most distinguished predecessors was Ashley Montagu’s
The Natural Superiority of Women.
Montagu was a biological anthropologist who contributed to our understanding of adolescent growth and the evolution of childhood, but he was also a steady, helpful voice in the great ideological debates of the twentieth century. He did much to combat the myths of race that scarred that century and to challenge the idea that human beings are hopelessly prone to violence and war. Because he understood biology, he was able to fight those who used it as a weapon against the weak. He lived from 1905 to 1999, nearly spanning the century.

His book on women was perhaps his most exceptional contribution to the conversation about biology and society. He was adamant:
women were not just equal, they were superior, and every apparent piece of evidence to the contrary—the first edition was published in 1953—was the simple result of men’s bullying, envy, dissembling, oppression, and abuse. But the book was not mainly about how men kept women down. It was about women’s intrinsic biology and why it is just plain better.

Of course, he recognized men’s biological advantages: greater size and muscle mass, a higher basal metabolism, the ability to make sperm throughout life, performance in sports that demand speed, muscle, and fierce bursts of energy. But women’s advantages were much more impressive; women were longer-lived than men, had lower mortality at all ages, and were more resistant to many diseases, both infectious and chronic. This implies greater fitness and better adaptation. And there were specific achievements as well, even in sports. Because of their fat stores and specialized metabolism, they are superior at long-distance swimming and other endurance challenges. In a dramatic demonstration of this, Diana Nyad, in the summer of 2013, became the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage; she was sixty-four.

Most importantly, women had in their bodies the ability to reproduce—really reproduce, not just donate a micropacket of genes. They could conceive, carry a hugely burdensome pregnancy to term, cope with its massive physiological challenges, give birth with great courage in the face of pain and danger, and produce, for years if need be, a nourishing, disease-suppressing fluid from their bodies that is the ideal food for human infants. And in most cultures they did all this without slowing down very much in the rest of life.