Numerous stereotypes float around about how men and women act toward sex and how they feel in terms of desire:

• Men are more aggressive and women are more passive.
• Men think about sex more, women don’t.
• Men want sex all the time, women don’t.
• When women have numerous sex partners, they are labeled easy or a slut. When men have numerous sex partners, it is often revered, especially among other men.
• Men desire only women and women desire only men

These stereotypes are exploited in the pop culture movie of the 1990’s, Cruel Intentions (the juicy part starts about 1:50 in):

We see these supposed differences play out in our everyday lives, whether they are portrayed through the media or seen in interactions with others. But, do men and women actually differ biologically in terms of how they feel about sexual desire? Or are these stereotypes the products of socially constructed gender roles?

Homosexuality

Homosexuality challenges these stereotypes, because the stereotypes are often premised on men wanting only women and women wanting only men. Sexual desire does vary cross-culturally and these differences can show that what individuals desire is not necessarily in line with what our stereotypes portray. For example, in cultures such as the Azande in northern Africa and the Etoro in Papua New Guinea, men participate in both homosexual and heterosexual relationships. The homosexual relationships, often between older men and youth, are socially accepted. Indeed, among the Azande, the boys have many of the same marriage rites as women!

Still, despite the differing sexual acts these cultures allow, the sexual sphere is still largely dominated by men. Women are often looked down upon if they desire sex or engage in sex frequently. However, men are allowed to have sex with other men. This cross cultural look shows different types and expressions of desire but still focuses on male dominated sexuality, meaning that either men are more biologically driven to sex than females or society strictly limits the expression of female desire making it appear that men are more sexually driven.

These variations in sexual behavior across societies suggest that sexual desire and roles are not clearly biologically defined. However, homosexuality is often labeled as “unnatural” in the United States. Despite this negative social view, homosexuality is prevalent in many animal species and has been seen to be beneficial as well, as shown in the recent article “Can Animals be Gay?” by Jon Mooallem.

For example, it has recently been shown that the “monogamous” albatross birds actually have both heterosexual and homosexual pairs. It is thought that the homosexual pairs of birds are composed of two females whose normal mates did not return to the breeding grounds. Because two albatross are needed to incubate and raise the chick, these unpaired females pair up. Although only one of the females’ eggs can be raised, there is no way for either female to know which egg is hers after they have been laid, meaning that it is advantageous for both individuals to raise the one egg because there is a possibility that it could be hers (Mooallen 2010).

Certain homosexual acts are also advantageous for one’s own reproductive success. Certain species of dung flies will mount other males in order to tire them out so that they will have better access to females for mating. Through these examples it can be seen that the negative stigmatism placed on homosexuality by Westernized or American culture is inaccurate. Homosexual acts or relationships can actually be beneficial to certain animals at certain times.

Male and Female Differences

Because of the variability of male and female roles throughout species and societies, the differences in male and female sexual expression are not well explained by biological difference alone. Historical explanations can help explain certain differences in sexual expression as socially constructed norms. One of the reasons that many societies today limit female sexual expression is because of the emphasis that was placed on the preservation of virginity and the acquisition of a ‘pure’ or virgin wife in the past. Physically, there is no way to tell whether a male has had sex or not, whereas, the anatomy of the female body makes it easier to determine whether or not a woman has had sex. In the past, in many societies, wealth, reputation and social standing could depend on the marriage of a virgin daughter. If the daughter’s virginity was not able to be preserved, ignominy, the loss of respect, and loss of material objectives like social standing and wealth were the main consequences. Because of these ideas that were ubiquitous in the past, the idea of female virginity has been continually incorporated into modern societies.

But are there any biological differences underlying these stereotypes and societal norms? Do differences in male and female desire have some basis in biology? Certainly there are biological differences between males and females. Not all differences are created by society, as is shown in Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen: Sex and Evolution of Human Nature. He states that “we are reinforcing the stereotypical obsessions that they already have, but we are not creating them” (256). In his book, he asks whether males and females are intellectually different. Because the differences in the bodies of males and females were a result of evolution then the differences seen in their minds could also stem from this. Because of different evolutionary pressures, he argues that there are some differences between the male and female sexes.

Some of these differences are evidenced through a study done by Meredith Chivers. She shows differences between men and women’s desire, showing that men who claim to be heterosexual were aroused mainly by pornographic images of women or heterosexual sex, whereas men who claim to homosexual are mainly aroused by pornographic images of men. In contrast, women were aroused by images of heterosexual sex, homosexual female sex, homosexual male sex, as well by images of bonobo sex! Clearly there are differences in desire. Less clear is why.

Biological differences can actually arise from social conditioning, as shown by Lise Eliot in “Girl Brain, Boy Brain?” Eliot shows that there is a difference seen between men and women in the size of the straight gyrus (SG), a region of the brain associated with personal and social cognition. Adult females tend to have a larger SG than males do. It was postulated that because women are the “primary child-rearers, their brains have become programmed to develop a larger SG, to prepare them to be sensitive nurturers.” However, adolescent and pre-adolescent boys tend to have a larger SG than girls do. When studied closer, it was seen that the size of the SG depended on the individual’s overall concept of him or herself as masculine or feminine in terms of a socially constructed gender concept rather than just in terms of biological sex.

However, brain differences do not arise only through the social conditioning. As Ridley shows in his book, The Red Queen: Sex and Evolution of Human Nature, differences seen between the male and female brain can arise from hormonal differences during development. “Testosterone masculinizes the body; without it, the body remains female” (Ridley 254). It also produces differences in the male brain by “masculinizing [it]” (Ridley 254). While functions in the female brain are diffused throughout the entire brain, testosterone causes the brain functions of males to become more localized and separated into different areas of the brain. This works to more definitely separate the functions between the individual brain hemispheres in males as compared to females (Ridley 250-254).

Nature and Nurture

The bottom line is that regardless of how the differences between men and women arise, “men are not closet women and women are not closet men…men and women are different” (Ridley 270). These differences can arise through biological factors, such as differences in the brain or hormone levels, as well as differences in social conditioning. Nature and nurture need to get in on through some slash.

In the end, it is not clear how the differences between men and women actually affect sexual desire or the expression of it. Furthermore, the roles of males and females are not always clearly defined or separated in nature, as shown by the prevalence of homosexuality. The differences between men and women are best understood not by nature versus nurture but quite rightly by their coupling.

Jennie Finch can strike you out.

Janet Shibley Hyde, one of the leading proponents of the ‘gender similarity hypothesis,’ concedes that there are some marked differences between men and women, singling out throwing ability as the most pronounced among them (2007: 260; see also 2005).

Thomas and French (1985: 266 & 276), in a meta-analysis reviewing all available research on sex differences in throwing, found that the gap stood at 1.5 standard deviations at three years of age, and increased over time, widening to between three and five standard deviations by puberty. By contrast, the much discussed ‘math gap’ between boys and girls, in Hyde’s meta-analysis of 48 studies, was a +0.08 on problem solving and +0.16 on national math tests (Hyde 2005; 2007: 260). In other words, if you’re impressed by the gap in math scores (I’m not), you should be awestruck at the gap in throwing ability.

I just finished writing the draft of a potential book chapter on throwing ability for a volume Prof. Robert Sands is putting together on biocultural approaches to sports. The chapter steps off from my observations that most of my colleagues in Brazil, men included, ‘threw like girls’ even though they were incredibly talented athletes, some of the most astounding capoeira practitioners I have ever seen. The book chapter is linked to some other work I’ve been doing, so I’ve got notes enough for several chapters – I thought I might put some up on Neuroanthropology.net because they were especially related to some of the things we focus on here.

This is probably going to wind up being at least two or three posts, so in this one, I’m only going to discuss the neurological issues surrounding throwing and the likely mechanical or technical issues that make (some) women (and Brazilian men and others) ‘throw like girls.’ At least one more post is going to deal with physiological plasticity beyond the nervous system, such as the way throwing remodels the shoulder, to explore anatomical plasticity more broadly, but you’re going to have to come back later for that one…

Do all women throw like girls?

The book chapter I just submitted explores the ineptness of Brazilian men at throwing in light of the late phenomenologist and philosopher Iris Marion Young’s (1990) remarkable paper on ‘throwing like a girl.’ Young suggests that the inept throwing motion of girls arises from three signature feminine motor traits: self-consciousness, inhibition, and kinetic dis-unity of the body (although she uses more sophisticated terminology to describe each). If you’re interested in Young’s discussion and related pieces, you may want to look at a book review here and her obituary here.

I have a number of issues with Young’s analysis, although I think her work is incredibly important, a landmark piece for anyone interested in phenomenological approaches to motor learning or embodiment. When I teach about phenomenology in anthropology, it’s one of the first pieces I turn to for its clarity and persuasiveness. I may come back to some of my other objections at a later date, but here I want to specifically focus on the neural and technical dimensions of skill acquisition in throwing to offer a more neuroanthropological perspective on ‘throwing like a girl,’ one that doesn’t argue this throwing style arises from existential or essential traits of being feminine.

The reason for this is simple: since the passage of the Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act (commonly known as ‘Title IX’) – and even before, for that matter – many women have learned how to throw very hard, most without significantly jeopardizing their femininity (that’s sarcastic understatement, in case it doesn’t come through in print). (Young also wrote about Title IX in Young [1998], but she came to different conclusions than I do.)

For example, Olympic softball pitcher Jennie Finch regularly struck out any Major League Baseball batter brave (or fool) enough to take the ‘Jennie Challenge’ on This Week in Baseball (here’s a You Tube video from FSN Sport Science testing whether it’s harder to hit a baseball or a Jennie Finch pitch; Finch broke the force plate with her pitching before she dusted some poor prospect from the Arizona Diamondbacks.). And although they do not reach the highest velocities found in men’s throwing, elite female athletes reach velocities far in excess of average men, especially when we take into account their smaller size, shorter arms, and lighter musculature.

(For more on softball pitching see, Why Is It So Hard to Hit a Softball? Rob Neyer in Slate Magazine.)

An ironic footnote to the question of whether or not women can throw is the case of Virne Beatrice ‘Jackie’ Mitchell Gilbert (see the entry for Ms. Mitchell at the Baseball Hall of Fame) who pitched for the Chattanooga Lookouts Class AA minor league baseball team. In a 1931 exhibition game against the New York Yankees, she struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig back-to-back (although the Lookouts went on to lose 14-4), only to have the commissioner of baseball nullify her contract the next day because baseball was ‘too strenuous’ for women. Just this past year, a 16-year-old Japanese knuckleballer, Eri Yoshida, was signed by the Kobe 9 Cruise professional team.

If women can acquire the skill to throw overhand (witness Olympic softball fielders), then the question should be, instead of why do girls ‘throw like girls,’ why do some girls throw so poorly if they are capable of throwing well? Most students of the biomechanics of throwing would argue that it’s a technical problem: women don’t throw properly and the technique that they put together is hampered by a number of kinaesthetic problems, some of which obscure avenues of further skill development.

Learning to throw

In a series of research papers, Mary Ann Roberton explored how children learned to throw. Roberton broke with the influential model of developmental stages in learning to throw that had been proposed first by Monica Wild (1938), and later refined by other researchers. These stage models posited the existence of predictable levels of development from one type of technique to the next.

Wild had used photographs to distinguish among four different stages in the unfolding of skilful throwing. The model of stages, like Piaget’s or Freud’s more general models of cognitive and psychological stages of development, helped to illuminate the progressive nature of skill acquisition; in fact, virtually all novice throwers ‘throw like girls,’ but the more skilful ones go on to develop more sophisticated techniques. (When I say ‘virtually all,’ I simply mean that there are other ways to be incompetent; for example, the novice ‘wild pitcher’ may be overly uninhibited, flailing explosively and launching the ball in an almost random direction.)

The downside of a ‘stage’ model like Wild’s, however, is that it tends to artificially homogenize development and, at the same time, suggest that a contingent process was much more orderly than it might actually be (which was an empirical question concealed by theoretical assumption). If a person did not progress beyond a particular stage, they suffered from arrested development (my phrase, in this case)

Developmental systems theorists like Esther Thelen (see Thelen 1995; Thelen and Smith 1996) have pointed out this general problem with staged developmental models, like those proposed by Piaget; in fact, children often take very different developmental trajectories even in the emergence of basic skills like reaching or walking. Children must experiment with their own bodies and develop different facets of a whole body skill.

The fact that we eventually all learn how to walk leads some theorists to assume that the ability to walk, which emerges from almost all children’s motor learning but not in the same way, is instead pre-programmed into the person. Without a more exacting analysis, it simply appeared that women who ‘threw like girls’ had a kind of derailleur of kinaesthetic development that hampered them or that they were simply evidencing an innate feminine style of movement which could develop no further.

Roberton suggested, based on more elaborate analysis of kinematic data, that throwing ability didn’t demonstrate the clear succession of developmental stages, but rather advanced unevenly in different parts of the body (1977, 1978; Roberton and Halverson 1984; Roberton and Konczak 2001). Roberton recognized that a throw was assembled from different kinaesthetic elements, and that one part could grow more sophisticated while another part lagged behind.

For example, a child might improve his or her arm motion without necessarily developing contralateral (opposite foot) stepping. Even though the physical experimentation was likely not fully conscious (although it might be subject to coaching or self examination), children were in fact experimenting at the envelope of their kinaesthetic ability, which often produced unstable techniques, liable to vary without much control.

Roberton’s approach to throwing ability does not contradict Young’s perspective directly, but it does open up a much more subtle way of approaching the nature and origins of ineptness. Specifically, we can ask where in the throwing motion does female inferiority arise: do women actually do the same motion with less force, or do they do a different motion, as the idea ‘throwing like a girl’ suggests? (I’m not going to deal here with the question of accuracy, but will instead focus on force; if you’re interested in the ‘spatial accuracy’ issue, see especially Duffy, Ericsson and Baluch’s [2007] analysis of dart throwing, where biomechanical ability to generate force is less of an issue.)

The brain assembling the motion

Throwing is a physically demanding task, placing enormous strains on the body at elite levels, as I will discuss in a later post, but it is also a neurologically difficult task in several respects. The first, and most basic challenge is simply the complex motor management of all the muscles and joints in the body that contribute to the throw.

An expert throw is a kinaesthetic cascade that begins with a windup in which the body, counter-intuitively, swivels in the opposite direction from the eventual throw, turns the shoulder on the throwing arm back, and lifts the opposite foot to pivot backwards. The throw progresses to a forward step on the contralateral foot while the arm actually cocks in the opposite direction. Finally, during the acceleration phase, the momentum generated successively by the step, rotation of the pelvis, rotation of the torso, twisting of the shoulder, elbow straightening and wrist extending, must be transferred between body parts, stabilized, and then, suddenly, once the ball is released, decelerated and dissipated in the follow-through.

In summary, the brain and nervous system have to orchestrate a complex sequence of movements in a very short period of time; the whole movement is only around 2 seconds in a major league pitcher, and 1.5 seconds of this is the preparation, before the ball is accelerated to release.

Some recent research highlights how other primates also throw food, for example (see Westergaard et al. 2000), but humans significantly out-perform other primates in overhand throwing. There’s lots of nice things to say about chimpanzee brains, but don’t expect a chimp to be bowling yorkers in cricket or pitching knuckle-balls unless they make some remarkable leaps in control of their limbs.

We tend to think of our neurological difference from other primates as being primarily cognitive; we expect to be better than chimps at chess, math problems, and self-analysis. But we also have significant motor differences from our hairy brethren; the fact that we can train up our nervous system, and have the behavioural and social supports to channel our extended neuroplasticity, makes it possible to develop specialized motor abilities that other apes cannot challenge. Only a human has the brain, as well as the society and technology, to devote hours of adolescence to perfecting skateboard tricks that have no bearing on our survival chances.

When a child – boy or girl – first learns to throw, he or she is confronted by this terribly difficult coordination task, one that requires counter-intuitive motions and precise sequencing of high-speed motions fused into an integrated motor synthesis. Expert technique is quite simply impossible for a beginner to accomplish because the novice has to explore the movements, as it were, from the inside, learning about the capacities of the body and the dynamic links one can make between its parts through experience. Although this process is largely non-conscious, it can be affected by conscious processes such as coaching, self-coaching, and conceptually motivated training techniques (see Downey 2008).

Degrees of freedom as a problem

Russian anatomist Nicholai Bernstein (1996) referred to this coordination problem as an overabundance of ‘degrees of freedom.’ The human body has so many joints that it’s difficult to reliably coordinate their movement; not only do they have too much freedom, but we now know that muscle fibres themselves don’t even respond identically each time to a uniform nerve impulse.

Kari M. Newell (1996:413), drawing on Bernstein, argues that all novices contend with the ‘degrees of freedom’ problem by ‘freezing’ most of the body:

Because the basic problem of coordination is the harnessing of the extreme abundance of degrees of freedom of the system, the first stage in learning is characterized by coordination solutions that reduce the number of degrees of freedom at the periphery to a minimum. The freezing strategy effectively reduces the number of biomechanical degrees that need to be coordinated and controlled.

‘Throwing like a girl’ is not so much a defective technique as it is a normal and even effective strategy for dealing with body management when a person is not experienced coordinating certain sorts of complex whole-body movements. Even experts often engage in ‘girl-like’ throwing when asked to throw for accuracy, at short range, in an activity like darts or many classic carnival games. That is, a person’s strategy for throwing can shift depending upon the demands made of the activity.

As Roberton’s work has suggested, novice technique itself can be unstable, coming together in different kinaesthetic configurations depending upon the task environment. In other words, get a Little Leaguer trying to throw quickly in an unfamiliar position, and he (or she) is liable to lose control of parts of the motion or revert to a less sophisticated technique.

While the brain has to learn how to assemble the kinetic chain of expert overhand throwing, the experience of throwing has to reorganize, recruit, and even generate the neural resources it needs for the task. Improvement in the neurological control over muscles, for example, can lead to strength gain, even in the absence of changes in the cross-section of the muscles, as Yue and Cole (1992) showed by having subjects visualize doing hand exercises.

Research on skill acquisition suggests that training, over time, leads to reorganization of the primary motor cortex, changing its functional organization and excitability (see, for example, Adkins et al. 2006; Karni et al. 1996; Kelly and Garavan 2005; Rosenkranz, Kacar, and Rothwell 2007). Klein and colleagues (2004), for example, found in rats that the late stages of skill learning involved motor map reorganization and the generation of new synapses. They conclude that the brain changes involved in skilful action take significant time and repetition to occur.

As they write: “The results demonstrate the temporally dynamic nature of learning-dependent plasticity that occurs within a single brain region during training on a single task and show how different phases of learning may be supported by different forms of plasticity” (ibid.: 632).

Learning to throw overhand remodels neural resources to make certain forms of coordination possible; from this perspective, the ineptness of some women (and men) at throwing overhand needs less study and explanation than the transformation of bodies and brains that leads to elite athletes’ performance. Ineptness is the normal outcome of not allocating neural resources to a task.

So why do they throw differently?

For a more complete discussion of that question, you’re going to have to come back for another post. This is getting a bit long, but I want to wrap this part up. I’ll give you a bit of the punch line right now, but there will be more on this by the end of the week.

In a forthcoming article in Behavioural Brain Research, Shoshi Dorfberger, Esther Adi-Japha, and Avi Karni (forthcoming) suggest one possible answer to the question of why women throw differently: that male-female differences in performance on motor tasks may arise, not from innate ability, but from a more efficient learning process in men after puberty. They found that male subjects, post-adolescence, benefited more from training, especially after having some time to consolidate learning. Their discussion reports:

Taken together, our results therefore suggest that given a similar amount of motor training, males benefited more than females in the performance of the trained movement sequences. This effect was age dependent with the male advantage becoming significant in the post-puberty group, the 17-year-old participants. Moreover, males from all three age-groups were found to evolve significantly larger delayed (consolidation phase/between session) gains, and these were well retained for 6 weeks. Thus, the male advantage was most significant in the post-training motor consolidation and retention phase; the current results suggest therefore that males, especially after adolescence, may have an advantage, over females, in procedural memory consolidation.

There are some caveats to this research, which I’ll discuss in the later postings, but in general, I like their explanatory approach. Rather than just looking at the tail end of what might be a complex causal chain and saying, ‘Girls throw like girls because of girl-ness,’ they try to sort out more specifically what the differences might be.

To me, the failure to demand this specificity of causation is at the heart of essentialist approaches to answering problems, whether they be genetic essentialist or endocrine essentialist or phenomenological essentialist. Take a complex causal change and just ignore it with some simplistic gloss that fits the categories you already believe.

For example, an essentialist perspective might argue that men and women throw definitely because of ‘hormones,’ and then just drop the question, without explaining which endocrine processes affect what part of the throw or how. Before some commenter writes — ‘you believe there’s no difference between men and women!’ (I don’t) — I’m not against acknowledging differences between men and women; in fact, I think we should be exploring them more carefully. But the resulting story is likely to be a bit more intricate than an essentialist explanations that ‘boyness’ or ‘girlness’ causes something.

To me ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are squishy, culturally-specific gender descriptors applied indiscriminately to biological, ideological, behavioural, cultural, and other traits. To treat either descriptor of a pattern as the cause of that pattern begs all the crucial questions.

For example, in the case of throwing, we know that some of the gap between men’ and women’s average throwing velocity likely arises from limb length and muscle mass. Jennie Finch has a leverage advantage because she’s around six feet tall, and you will often find that baseball pitchers are taller than average. The averages of size and limb length clearly differ between men and women, although there’s a fair bit of overlap, and we have a pretty good understanding of some of the endocrine causes of these overall size differences between the sexes. If you control for size and muscle mass, according to researchers like van den Tillaar and Ettema (2004), you have no residual effect of a person’s sex on throwing velocity. That’s intriguing, but we still have this yawning gap in technique, not just velocity, to study and explain.

If the difference in motor learning described by Dorfberger, Adi-Japha, and Karni were the only significant cause of male-female differences in throwing, we would also expect to see it across all skilled motor activity, not just throwing. As a sometime dance instructor, I can definitively say that men do not always have an obvious advantage over women when it comes to learning motor techniques, even whole-body motor techniques.

Clearly, men and women are different, but how they are distinct, and the developmental processes that actually lead to the manifest divergences, are what I find more interesting. The error of essentialism is not saying that there are differences between men and women, but in being content with flimsy non-explanations, offering stereotypes rather than compelling accounts of the origins of patterns.

Don’t worry, this is just the intro. I want to get into the details more, including research on throwing techniques in other cultures and some of the evolutionary arguments. More soon, and I’ll post links to the successive chapters here in updates as I go…

References cited:

Adkins, DeAnna L., Jeffery Boychuk, Michael S. Remple, and Jeffrey A. Kleim. 2006. “Motor training induces experience-specific patterns of plasticity across motor cortex and spinal cord.” Journal of Applied Physiology 101(6): 1776-1782. doi:10.1152/japplphysiol.00515.2006. (pdf available here)

Bernstein, Nicholai A. 1996. “On Dexterity and Development.” Translated by Mark L. Latash. In Dexterity and Its Development. Edited by Mark L. Latash and Michael T. Turvey. Pp. 1-244. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Calvin, William H. 1983. “A stone’s throw and its launch window: timing and precision and its implications for language and hominid brains.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 104:121-135. (online version at Calvin’s homepage)
_____. 1991. “Did Throwing Stones Lead to Bigger Brains?” In The Throwing Madonna: Essays on the Brain. Bantam. (Chapter online here)

Dorfberger, Shoshi, Esther Adi-Japha, and Avi Karni. Forthcoming. “Sex differences in motor performance and motor learning in children and adolescents: An increasing male advantage in motor learning and consolidation phase gains.” Behavioural Brain Research. doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2008.10.033. (abstract)

Downey, Greg. 2008. “Scaffolding Imitation in Capoeira: Physical Education and Enculturation in an Afro-Brazilian Art.” American Anthropologist 110(2): 204-213. doi:10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00026.x (abstract)

Duffy, Linda J., K. Anders Ericsson, and Bahman Baluch. 2007. “In Search of the Loci for Sex Differences in Throwing: The Effects of Physical Size and Differential Recruitment Rates on High Level Dart Performance.” Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 78(1): 71-78. (abstract)

Hyde, Janet Shibley. 2005. “The Gender Similarity Hypothesis.” American Psychologist 60(6): 581-592. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.60.6.581 (pdf of article)
_____. 2007. “New Directions in the Study of Gender Similarities and Differences.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 16(5): 259-263. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00516.x (abstract)

Karni, Avi, Gundela Meyer, Christine Rey-Hipolito, Peter Jezzard, Michelle M. Adams, Robert Turner, and Leslie G. Ungerleider. 1998. “The acquisition of skilled motor performance: fast and slow experience-driven changes in primary motor cortex.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 95(3): 861–868, 1998. (abstract with link to pdf)

Kelly, A. M. Clare, and Hugh Garavan. 2005. “Human Functional Neuroimaging of Brain Changes Associated with Practice.” Cerebral Cortex 15(8): 1089-1102. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhi005. (abstract, pdf of article)

Kleim, Jeffrey A., Theresa M. Hogg, Penny M. VandenBerg, Natalie R. Cooper, Rochelle Bruneau, and Michael Remple. 2004. “Cortical synaptogenesis and motor map reorganization occur during late, but not early, phase of motor skill learning.” Journal of Neuroscience 24(3): 628–633. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3440-03.2004 (abstract, pdf of article)

Newell, Kari M. 1996. “Change in Movement and Skill: Learning, Retention and Transfer.” In Dexterity and Its Development. Edited by Mark L. Latash and Michael T. Turvey. Pp. 393-430. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Roberton, Mary Ann. 1977. “Stability of stage categorizations across trials: Implications for the ‘stage theory’ of overarm throw development.” Journal of Human Movement Studies 3: 49-59.
_____. 1978. “Longitudinal evidence for developmental stages in the forceful overarm throw.” Journal of Human Movement Studies 4: 167-175.

Roberton, Mary Ann, and Lolas E. Halverson. 1984. Developing Children: Their Changing Movement. Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger.

Roberton, Mary Ann, and Jürgen Konczak. 2001. “Predicting Children’s Overarm Throw Ball Velocities from Their Developmental Levels in Throwing.” Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 72(2): 91-103.

Rosenkranz, Karin, Aleksandra Kacar, and John C. Rothwell. 2007. “Differential Modulation of Motor Cortical Plasticity and Excitability in Early and Late Phases of Human Motor Learning.” Journal of Neuroscience 27(44): 12058 –12066. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2663-07.2007 (abstract, pdf of article)

Thelen, Esther. 1995. “Motor Development: A New Synthesis.” American Psychologist 50 (2): 79-95. (abstract)

Thelen, Esther, and Linda B. Smith. 1996. A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.

Thomas, Jerry R., and Karen E. French. 1985. “Gender differences across age in motor performance: A meta-analysis.” Psychological Bulletin 98: 260-282.

van den Tillaar, Roland, and Gertjan Ettema. 2004. “Effect of body size and gender in overarm throwing performance.” European Journal of Applied Physiology 91(4): 413-418. doi:10.1007/s00421-003-1019-8 (abstract)

Westergaard, G. C., C. Liv, M. K. Haynie and S. J. Suomi. 2000. “A comparative study of aimed throwing by monkeys and humans.” Neuropsychologia 38: 1511–1517. (available here as pdf download)

Wild, Monica. 1938. “The behavior pattern of throwing and some observations concerning its course of development in children.” Research Quarterly 9: 20-24.

Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. (Google book link)
_____. 1998. “‘Throwing Like a Girl’: Twenty Years Later.” In Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader. Donn Welton, ed. Pp. 286-290. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Yue, Guang, and Kelly J. Cole. 1992. “Strength Increases from the Motor Program: Comparison of Training with Maximal Voluntary and Imagined Muscle Contractions.” Journal of Neuropsychology 67(5): 1114-1123. (abstract, pdf behind subscription wall — sad, it’s a great piece.)

“He thought I was going to leave him, but of course I wouldn’t. We’re in this together.” At the time, she didn’t know quite how personal her statement would become. Just three months later Maria and her newborn daughter were also diagnosed with HIV.

“Initially I was able to handle it in the moment, but then it hits. In time, it’s become much more difficult to deal with.”

Maria certainly feels stigmatized and has refrained from telling her other children. In this Midwestern town, the needs of Maria (a pseudonym) and other women with HIV are ripe with concern and lack of viable opportunity. She told us, “What I, and other women need, is just a place to talk.”

Currently there are HIV/AIDS support groups offered locally through a community center. Our community-based student project, focused on understanding and empowering women suffering from HIV/AIDS locally, brought us to these groups. What we found was a support group for homosexual men that did not offer the support women need.

Through research concerning sexual orientation and HIV/AIDS, we discovered that homosexual men and heterosexual women have different coping mechanisms and symptoms. Women experience more illness as a result to their HIV/AIDS status than homosexual men. They also are more likely to need social support to deal with the pain and fear of being HIV/AIDS positive. (Mosack 2009:137) Although the group that exists can be literally defined as a place to talk, it may not be the best place to be heard and understood as a woman.

Those who are infected with HIV – men and women alike – bear the burden of the stigma, yet the nature of the stigma is different for each group. Homosexual men have been painting the face of AIDS since its discovery in 1981, and those who aren’t infected struggle to see women as part of this picture. It’s common for homosexual, HIV-positive men to have contracted it through unsafe sex with an infected partner. Heterosexual women, on the other hand, often contract HIV from one of a number of sources: an unfaithful spouse, rape, or drug abuse. Because their experiences are so different, men and women struggle to support each other.

Jane, a woman who currently attends a substance support group for HIV/AIDS positive people, told us in a private interview, “The support group coordinator asked me if I would be willing to share what we had talked about alone… and of course I said no…they wouldn’t understand”. The coordinator was referring to her past that included circumstances of domestic abuse. Rocking back and forth in her chair and twisting her fingers in her palm she told us, “you know…you just can’t talk to men about… you know… girl things and girl problems”

Women are not comfortable sharing their experiences in the current group dominated by gay men. They want to relate to women like themselves, women that deal with the same issues, experience similar struggles and want the same things.

Maria, a new HIV patient, could find solace in the companionship of a woman like Jane, who has been living with the virus for ten years. Jane attributes her infection to “the lifestyle [she] was living” – a lifestyle not only haunted by domestic abuse, but loaded with unsafe sex, drug abuse, and financial issues – until she was diagnosed in 1998.

Both Jane and Maria would find inspiration from Sharon, whose drug-abusing husband infected her with HIV before he died in 1991. As a consequence of her weakened immune system, she contracted cytomegalovirus and lost her vision. Now, with a steady job and a house full of grandchildren, she craves an outlet for her emotions. She wants to talk about her boyfriend, her family, her future. She needs the support of women like Jane and Maria, and they need her.

These women’s stories are just a few examples of the hardships faced by women with HIV/AIDS. Within the community and elsewhere there is a large population of women affected by HIV/AIDS and the numbers are on the rise. Women presently account for one fourth of all new HIV/AIDS diagnoses (CDC, 2008.) What we found here is a microcosm of this national transition. As the head of a local AIDS assist organization told us, “Women are the new arena.” They are part of the new face of AIDS.

Although there are support systems in place in the community, there is no program designed to specifically address women’s needs. Their desire for a place to talk has not been recognized. Our research intersected with this inequality of services, something we are now helping local organizations to address.

If women can’t find support in the AIDS community that currently exists, they can empower themselves through solidarity. They can create their own community: a support group with their desires molding its design.

Within a safe, sympathetic environment, they will be able to create their own support group in which they can speak freely about, “girl things and girl problems”. It will welcome conversations about relationships with friends, family, and with themselves. In doing so women will be able to join together in a struggle to find a place in the realm of HIV/AIDS that hasn’t existed before. It will be a place in which they can discuss women’s health issues and concerns. It will be a group run by women, for women, a place to call their own.

Sharon can reconcile her sense of betrayal stemming from the idea that her husband’s illegal habit infected her. She will be able to do so with a whole community behind her. Jane can learn skills that will empower her to effectively communicate with her family, through the example of the women she meets. Thus recognizing her family’s concern yet defending herself against the stigma. And Maria can talk about the guilt of infecting her baby while feeling secure in the knowledge that her baby will have adequate care while seeking support. A support group will help these women by not only allowing them to open up and get advice from the women in the group, but by educating them, body, mind, and spirit.

Women need a place to talk so that they can cope with the reality that they are becoming a part of the new face of AIDS. Young women represent the real new face of AIDS, a face that is not always as visible as it needs to be. “I’m used to putting on masks,” says Maria. “I have so many different masks that sometimes I forget which one I’m wearing.” A women’s support group would allow Maria and others to unmask the true face of AIDS, a beautiful and vibrant face that deserves to be revealed and recognized.

–//–

We want to give a special thanks to our community partner who introduced us to the wonderful women we interviewed and especially to the women who came out from behind their masks to speak to us.

Image: Femme Facade, by Peggy Bonnett Begnaud

References & Further Reading:

Banzhaf , Chris, Cynthia, Marion, and Kim Christensen. 1992. La Mujer, el Sida, y el Activismo. New York, NY: South End

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2008. HIV/AIDS Among Women.

Website: HIV/AIDS Positive Stories.

Mosack, Katie E. 2009. Influence of Coping, Social Support, and Depression on Subjective Health Status Among HIV-Positive Adults with Different Sexual Identities. Journal of Behavioral Medicine 34(4): 133-144

In particular, Bergner gives us thumbnail portraits of women engaged in sex research: Meredith Chivers of Queens University (Kingston, Ontario), Lisa Diamond of the University of Utah, and Marta Meana from UNLV, although there’s also commentary from Julia Heiman, the Director of the Kinsey Institute, and others. As with so much of contemporary science writing, we get researchers as characters, with quirky personal descriptions and accounts of meeting the author, each one standing in for a particular perspective in current scientific debates.

Chivers is portrayed as arguing that women are existentially divided ‘between two truly separate, if inscrutably overlapping, systems, the physiological and the subjective,’ Diamond is made to stand in for the ‘female desire may be dictated… by intimacy, by emotional connection,’ and Meana stands in for the argument that women are narcissists desiring to submit. Whether or not these are accurate portrayals—and they might be—the model is prevalent in science writing: get characters to represent lines of thinking, even though many of us are not so clearly signed on with a single theoretical team. Here, we know the score: Diamond arguing women want intimacy, Meana that they want a real man to take them, and Chivers that women want it all, even if they don’t realize it and contradict themselves.

The irony is that, with such a tangle, the conclusion is foreordained: women will seem enigmatic, inconsistent, and irremediably opaque. As I’ll suggest in this, I think that the conclusion is built into the way the question is being asked. If a similar question were asked about nearly any group, in nearly any domain of complex human behaviour, and then a simple single answer were demanded, the questioner would face nearly identical frustration.

I must admit that, although I found the article readable, even enjoyable, the last paragraph confused me, so I can’t be entirely certain of my analysis. I’ve read the last paragraph at least four times and am still not sure I understand. I’m going to quote it just so you don’t think I’m crazy, but I’m willing to read to anyone’s comment if you think you know what it means.

Bergner was watching Dr. Chivers scrub her data of outlying data points (I remember being shocked by my girlfriend when I found her doing the same thing in her psychology research before finding it was common practice – more on this in another post.). Chivers spent hours with a graph of ‘arousal’ reported by measuring vaginal blood flow, trying to smooth a red line on a computer screen to make sense of which video images were most arousing. Bergner writes in conclusion:

It was possible to imagine, then, that a scientist blinded by staring at red lines on her computer screen, or blinded by peering at any accumulation of data — a scientist contemplating, in darkness, the paradoxes of female desire — would see just as well.

‘It was possible to imagine… a scientist blinded… would see just as well…’ Huh? What I’m getting at is not just to make sport of some tortured prose, but rather to suggest that Bergner, after reporting scads of findings highlighting a whole range of interesting phenomena connected to women’s sexuality and sexual desire, on a number of analytical levels, still wants to reach out for the brass ring, the one thing that ‘women want.’ He has to conclude that women’s desire is paradoxical, a ‘giant forest… too complex for comprehension,’ because there’s no simple answer.

One can imagine an article with the title, ‘What do diners want?’, which bemoaned the fickleness and impenetrable complexity of culinary preferences: Sometimes they want steak, and sometimes just a salad. Sometimes they put extra salt on the meal, and sometimes they ask for ketchup. One orders fish, another chicken, another ham and eggs. One day a guy ordered tuna fish salad on rye, and the next, the same guy ordered a tandoori chicken wrap, hold the onions! My God, man, they’re insane! Who can ever come up with a unified theory of food preferences?! Food preferences are a giant forest, too complex for comprehension. What do diners want?!

You get my drift. The line of questioning is rhetorically time-tested (can we say clichéd even?) but objectively and empirically nonsensical. So many of these experiments seem to be testing a series of different, related, but ultimately distinct questions: With whom do women mate? With whom do women have sex? With whom do women say they would have sex? What causes women’s bodies’ automatic arousal responses (and under what conditions)? What type of guys do women like in soft porn stories? What type of guys do women like in photographs? Do certain women get aroused by a particular type of porn movies? Does a particular woman realize or acknowledge that she is getting aroused by a particular stimulus? What affects women’s self-reported sense of sexual identity as it changes over time in women who say they are lesbian, bisexual or not sure? They’re all good questions, some better than others, and they’re all about ‘sex,’ but they are testing a whole range of different things. Can they all be glossed as, ‘What do women want?’ Yeah, sort of, but you’re going to get a hopeless answer.

Sometimes I feel like the research makes sense in context, but once it’s sampled, sound-bited, mixed and matched into a single article with the title, ‘What do women want?’, the simplification tragically robs all the individual studies of any of the insight they could have offered in the first place. Here, synthesis makes understanding impossible because the heterogeneity of what is being studied is ignored, as if all these research projects had the same research question. The reason the article is a fun read in the first place is that the research that the people being interviewed are doing is intriguing; the reason the conclusion is hopeless is that everyone is asked (or is treated as if asked) to extend their findings to cover all women in all situations.

For example, questions about women’s reactions to visual images of sex and nudity are intriguing on a number of levels. Dr. Chivers showed women videos of ‘heterosexual sex, male and female homosexual sex, a man masturbating, a woman masturbating, a chiseled man walking naked on a beach and a well-toned woman doing calisthenics in the nude,’ even a clip of bonobos mating. She sexed up the last one by adding hoots and screeching, because the female’s pleased ‘chirping’ sounds weren’t hot enough.

Chivers found at the University of Toronto that straight male subjects’ genitals (presumably college aged, by the way) responded to heterosexual and lesbian sex, female masturbation and nude callisthenics, but were less moved by male-on-male action or the ‘chiseled’ gent’s ocean side walk. Gay men were just the opposite. Neither group got aroused by hot monkey love (even with dubbed-in hooting and screeching).

The women in the study, in contrast, had increased blood flow vaginally when any sort of sex was on screen—except the bonobos. They also were aroused by the naked workout but not by the man strolling nude on the beach, and pretty much liked any footage with people in it. Except for the naked man, oddly enough.

When Chivers asked the subjects to rate how stimulating each bit of footage was, she found that women’s reports of arousal did not coincide with their vaginal blood flow spikes whereas men pretty much reported what the plethysmographs on their penises were saying.

These results, to me, are fascinating. Not only have they caused me to swear off beachcombing au naturel, at least until I find out it’s the ‘chiseled’ quality that turned off some subjects. They also spark a whole series of questions: Is it the phenomenology of male arousal that helps men to be more aware of physiological arousal? Do women report something different as ‘arousal’ when asked (that is, the research instruction was probably not, ‘push this button when your vagina swells’)? Are all women everywhere equally unaware of physiological arousal? Are men and women trained differently through exposure to different sorts of visual sexual images? Are women unaware they are aroused if having an intimate conversation with an attractive potential partner? Are women aroused by any images of human sexually aroused (after all, beachcomber guy presumably wasn’t sporting a serious chubby, although I could be wrong)? Why are both heterosexual men and women aroused by naked women doing callisthenics when gay men are not? And, perhaps most importantly, doesn’t someone find bonobos getting it on sexy?

In other words, I think Chivers research is fascinating, but when it’s paired with the question, ‘What do women want?’, it prematurely leads to some simplistic conclusions. The logic goes sort of like: ‘A number of things turn women on; therefore, we don’t know the one thing that women want. Damn, women are inscrutable.’ Uh, no, actually, we have pretty clear results on the video arousal tests, it’s just not a simple one-line sound-bite answer (nor, for that matter, does it necessarily tell us about what women desire sexually; it tells us about a certain group’s response to videos).

The gap between measured arousal and reported arousal is interesting, but it’s hardly big news that people don’t know exactly what is happening in their own perceptions or bodies. We’ve been down this road before at Neuroanthropology.net (for example, at How well do we know our brains?), but the bottom line is that there are lots of areas of life where self-reported state is out-of-step with objectively measurable physiological or neurological conditions. For example, we have very little conscious access to motor-perceptual information about our own movement and object tracking; we can move things around in people’s visual fields and they are often lousy at noticing it. This doesn’t mean we throw up our hands and say, ‘People are confused and inscrutable because they don’t even know when objects have moved.’

This is the reason that, although it’s great to hear that sexologists studying female arousal are carving out some important research results, I kept seeing some very tired old interpretive frameworks being prematurely introduced. For example, a couple of times Bergner threw in the gratuitous ‘evolutionary’ explanation that men are ‘programmed’ by evolution one way, women another (although this tendency was not NEARLY so bad as some of the other research on human sexuality we’ve discussed, and for that we’re grateful; see Chicks dig jerks?: Evolutionary psych on sex #1). At another point, we got the ‘female narcissism’ explanation for the fact that some women seem to be stimulated by the sense that they are desired more than a desirable object itself.

Fair enough, we can bring it whatever interpretation fits the data, but it seems to me that if women’s desire is really a ‘giant forest’ that is poorly understood, and if the data is multiple and contradictory, it’s likely that any blanket statement (‘Women just want to be desired.’ ‘Women only feel desire after they feel intimacy.’ ‘Women just want money.’ ‘Women use sex to get love.’) will always be inadequate. Some of the older models of an essential female sexual identity contain a partial truth, or they wouldn’t even seem plausible, but they aren’t the simple answer to the simplistic question, ‘What do women want?’

At times in the article, I was reminded of discussions of ‘My Type’ in high school and college. I’m sure you’ve heard these discussions as well, with someone going on ad nauseam about what sort of person they find arousing. Then you show up at the five year reunion, and the guy who said he liked tall, bronzed, blonde beach girls is with a short, perky, darked-haired sexologist wearing high boots and fashionable rectangular glasses (apologies to Bergner). Turns out that ‘desire’ is a more slippery term, and that our sexual arousal and sexual behaviour are in more complex relations than just desire-leads-to-arousal-leads-to-sex. If it were only that easy…

Often, when I read studies of ‘attractive faces,’ I get the same response. The research projects ask students to rate how faces in photographs look, and then make conclusions about desirable mates. But the research is really asking about attractive faces in photographs, not peering into the actual sorting mechanism that produces our mating behaviour. Thank God people don’t pick mates on the basis of their headshots, or I for one likely never would have gotten married. And I’m sure that the research subjects in these experiments would strenuously object if the researchers said that they had to pick a mate on the basis of a photo of a face only, even if they thought symmetrical, feminine faces looked good in pictures.

So often, even when we’re dealing with these research papers, we’re still only seeing a statistical majority or even less when someone is making statements about men and women (for another case, see Girls gone guilty: Evolutionary psych on sex #2). Dr. Meana points this out in her interview with Bergner when she suggests that ‘the variability within genders may be greater than the differences between genders’ in arousal and desire. Although I was pleased to read this, it was immediately followed with some blanket statements about female desire and contrasts with male arousal. The section with Meana was one of the most interesting in the whole article, with some provocative statements about women’s narcissism, the effect of female nudity, the problem of desire in committed relationships, and even sexual fantasies of submission. Don’t get me wrong—it’s well worth reading. But prefaced by this statement about variability within and difference between ‘genders,’ it sort of contains its own critique.

One of the wisest books I ever read about sex was Passionate Marriage by David Schnarch. One of the thing he points out is that the reason sexuality in marriage is a challenge is because so many psychological issues, so much of our own individual, idiosyncratic life experience, can be brought into intimacy for resolution and healing. In fact, other areas of our life are not that different. People make eating and food about all sorts of things, as they do shopping, sports, and so on. That is, the idea that a person desires some one thing in sexuality is part of the problem for understanding sexuality. I suspect that the sexologists Bergner was interviewing are well aware of this, and it’s only this journalistic framing that makes it seem so simple that the question becomes unanswerable: ‘What do women want?’ (For a subtle discussion of the complex experience of desire for drugs, see Daniel’s piece, Wanting to Craving: Understanding Compulsive Involvement with Drugs.)

To go out on a limb, I would argue that most women, like most men, probably desire a number of things, some of which are more likely to be found in sex than others. Not all societies encourage us to seek out the same satisfactions in our relationships, nor do they all saddle us with the same psychological issues to contend with in our sexual relationships. Even within a single society, different people bring different issues to the bedroom (or wherever they deal with sex), whether they are straight, gay, bi- or other. Moreover, once we satisfy one set of desires, that hardly means we are finished with desiring, and we might seek something else in sex. Same activity, but looking for ‘something else’ within it.

I’m not convinced that what men want is all that much less complicated than what women want in sex; perhaps, men’s constellation of desires in sex seem more internally consistent because they conflict less with each other, but that doesn’t mean men only want one thing (just that getting many needs met at once might be easier). We’ve seen a change in women’s desires and how they might be met in Western society over the past half century (and longer), and I suspect that these will continue to change.

In other words, sex is a field for interaction, and arousal is a physiological phenomenon that both influences how those interactions play out, and is influenced by these interactions. Arousal doesn’t determine sexual behaviour. Every time we get aroused, we don’t have sex; every time we have sex, we may not be aroused, although, again, the interaction might end up affecting our physiological state (for better or worse). One of the things that makes humans human is that layers of other considerations can override or modify basic physiological processes like fear, arousal, anger, and panic. Stripping back or ignoring these other factors like inhibition, enculturation, and socialization doesn’t get us to ‘human nature,’ it erases so much of what makes humans distinctive.

What do women want? Lots. Just like men. And, just like men, as soon as they get what they want, women are liable to want something else. If you fine that inscrutable, or ‘semi-shocking’, you need to hang out with humans more often.

Credits:
Image by Ryan McGinley/Team Gallery from New York Times.

Where a baby sleeps is not as simple as current medical discourse and recommendations against cosleeping in some western societies want it to be. And there is good reason why. I write here to explain why the pediatric recommendations on forms of cosleeping such as bedsharing will and should remain mixed. I will also address why the majority of new parents practice intermittent bedsharing despite governmental and medical warnings against it.

Definitions are important here. The term cosleeping refers to any situation in which a committed adult caregiver, usually the mother, sleeps within close enough proximity to her infant so that each, the mother and infant, can respond to each other’s sensory signals and cues. Room sharing is a form of cosleeping, always considered safe and always considered protective. But it is not the room itself that it is protective. It is what goes on between the mother (or father) and the infant that is. Medical authorities seem to forget this fact. This form of cosleeping is not controversial and is recommended by all.

Unfortunately, the terms cosleeping, bedsharing and a well-known dangerous form of cosleeping, couch or sofa cosleeping, are mostly used interchangeably by medical authorities, even though these terms need to be kept separate. It is absolutely wrong to say, for example, that “cosleeping is dangerous” when roomsharing is a form of cosleeping and this form of cosleeping (as at least three epidemiological studies show) reduce an infant’s chances of dying by one half.

Bedsharing is another form of cosleeping which can be made either safe or unsafe, but it is not intrinsically one nor the other. Couch or sofa cosleeping is, however, intrinsically dangerous as babies can and do all too easily get pushed against the back of the couch by the adult, or flipped face down in the pillows, to suffocate.

Often news stories talk about “another baby dying while cosleeping” but they fail to distinguish between what type of cosleeping was involved and, worse, what specific dangerous factor might have actually been responsible for the baby dying. A specific example is whether the infant was sleeping prone next to their parent, which is an independent risk factor for death regardless of where the infant was sleeping. Such reports inappropriately suggest that all types of cosleeping are the same, dangerous, and all the practices around cosleeping carry the same high risks, and that no cosleeping environment can be made safe.

Nothing can be further from the truth. This is akin to suggesting that because some parents drive drunk with their infants in their cars, unstrapped into car seats, and because some of these babies die in car accidents that nobody can drive with babies in their cars because obviously car transportation for infants is fatal. You see the point.

One of the most important reasons why bedsharing occurs, and the reason why simple declarations against it will not eradicate it, is because sleeping next to one’s baby is biologically appropriate, unlike placing infants prone to sleep or putting an infant in a room to sleep by itself. This is particularly so when bedsharing is associated with breast feeding.

When done safely, mother-infant cosleeping saves infants lives and contributes to infant and maternal health and well being. Merely having an infant sleeping in a room with a committed adult caregiver (cosleeping) reduces the chances of an infant dying from SIDS or from an accident by one half!

Research

In Japan where co-sleeping and breastfeeding (in the absence of maternal smoking) is the cultural norm, rates of the sudden infant death syndrome are the lowest in the world. For breastfeeding mothers, bedsharing makes breastfeeding much easier to manage and practically doubles the amount of breastfeeding sessions while permitting both mothers and infants to spend more time asleep. The increased exposure to mother’s antibodies which comes with more frequent nighttime breastfeeding can potentially, per any given infant, reduce infant illness. And because co-sleeping in the form of bedsharing makes breastfeeding easier for mothers, it encourages them to breastfeed for a greater number of months, according to Dr. Helen Ball’s studies at the University of Durham, therein potentially reducing the mothers chances of breast cancer. Indeed, the benefits of cosleeping helps explain why simply telling parents never to sleep with baby is like suggesting that nobody should eat fats and sugars since excessive fats and sugars lead to obesity and/or death from heart disease, diabetes or cancer. Obviously, there’s a whole lot more to the story.

As regards bedsharing, an expanded version of its function and effects on the infant’s biology helps us to understand not only why the bedsharing debate refuses to go away, but why the overwhelming majority of parents in the United States (over 50% according to the most recent national survey) now sleep in bed for part or all of the night with their babies.

That the highest rates of bedsharing worldwide occur alongside the lowest rates of infant mortality, including Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) rates, is a point worth returning to. It is an important beginning point for understanding the complexities involved in explaining why outcomes related to bedsharing (recall, one of many types of cosleeping) vary between being protective for some populations and dangerous for others. It suggests that whether or not babies should bedshare and what the outcome will be may depend on who is involved, under what condition it occurs, how it is practiced, and the quality of the relationship brought to the bed to share. This is not the answer some medical authorities are looking for, but it certainly resonates with parents, and it is substantiated by scores of studies.

Understanding Recommendations

Recently, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) SIDS Sub-Committee for whom I served (ad hoc) as an expert panel member recommended that babies should sleep close to their mothers in the same room but not in the same bed. While I celebrated this historic roomsharing recommendation, I disagreed with and worry about the ramifications of the unqualified recommendation against any and all bedsharing. Further, I worry about the message being given unfairly (if not immorally) to mothers; that is, no matter who you are, or what you do, your sleeping body is no more than an inert potential lethal weapon against which neither you nor your infant has any control. If this were true, none of us humans would be here today to have this discussion because the only reason why we survived is because our ancestral mothers slept alongside us and breastfed us through the night!

I am not alone in thinking this way. The Academy of Breast Feeding Medicine, the USA Breast Feeding Committee, the Breast Feeding section of the American Academy of Pediatrics, La Leche League International, UNICEF and WHO are all prestigious organizations who support bedsharing and which use the best and latest scientific information on what makes mothers and babies safe and healthy. Clearly, there is no scientific consensus.

What we do agree on, however, is what specific “factors” increase the chances of SIDS in a bedsharing environment, and what kinds of circumstances increase the chances of suffocation either from someone in the bed or from the bed furniture itself. For example, adults should not bedshare if inebriated or if desensitized by drugs, or overly exhausted, and other toddlers or children should never be in a bed with an infant. Moreover, since having smoked during a pregnancy diminishes the capacities of infants to arouse to protect their breathing, smoking mothers should have their infants sleep alongside them on a different surface but not in the same bed.

My own physiological studies suggest that breastfeeding mother-infant pairs exhibit increased sensitivities and responses to each other while sleeping, and those sensitivities offers the infant protection from overlay. However, if bottle feeding, infants should lie alongside the mother in a crib or bassinet, but not in the same bed. Prone or stomach sleeping especially on soft mattresses is always dangerous for infants and so is covering their heads with blankets, or laying them near or on top of pillows. Light blanketing is always best as is attention to any spaces or gaps in bed furniture which needs to be fixed as babies can slip into these spaces and quickly to become wedged and asphyxiate. My recommendation is, if routinely bedsharing, to strip the bed apart from its frame, pulling the mattress and box springs to the center of the room, therein avoiding dangerous spaces or gaps into which babies can slip to be injured or die.

But, again, disagreement remains over how best to use this information. Certain medical groups, including some members of the American Academy of Pediatrics (though not necessarily the majority), argue that bedsharing should be eliminated altogether. Others, myself included, prefer to support the practice when it can be done safely amongst breastfeeding mothers. Some professionals believe that it can never be made safe but there is no evidence that this is true.

More importantly, parents just don’t believe it! Making sure that parents are in a position to make informed choices therein reflecting their own infant’s needs, family goals, and nurturing and infant care preferences seems to me to be fundamental.

Our Biological Imperatives

My support of bedsharing when practiced safely stems from my research knowledge of how and why it occurs, what it means to mothers, and how it functions biologically. Like human taste buds which reward us for eating what’s overwhelmingly critical for survival i.e. fats and sugars, a consideration of human infant and parental biology and psychology reveal the existence of powerful physiological and social factors that promote maternal motivations to cosleep and explain parental needs to touch and sleep close to baby.

The low calorie composition of human breast milk (exquisitely adjusted for the human infants’ undeveloped gut) requires frequent nighttime feeds, and, hence, helps explain how and why a cultural shift toward increased cosleeping behavior is underway. Approximately 73% of US mothers leave the hospital breast feeding and even amongst mothers who never intended to bedshare soon discover how much easier breast feeding is and how much more satisfied they feel with baby sleeping alongside often in their bed.

But it’s not just breastfeeding that promotes bedsharing. Infants usually have something to say about it too! And for some reason they remain unimpressed with declarations as to how dangerous sleeping next to mother can be. Instead, irrepressible (ancient) neurologically-based infant responses to maternal smells, movements and touch altogether reduce infant crying while positively regulating infant breathing, body temperature, absorption of calories, stress hormone levels, immune status, and oxygenation. In short, and as mentioned above, cosleeping (whether on the same surface or not) facilitates positive clinical changes including more infant sleep and seems to make, well, babies happy. In other words, unless practiced dangerously, sleeping next to mother is good for infants. The reason why it occurs is because… it is supposed to.

Recall that despite dramatic cultural and technological changes in the industrialized west, human infants are still born the most neurologically immature primate of all, with only 25% of their brain volume. This represents a uniquely human characteristic that could only develop biologically (indeed, is only possible) alongside mother’s continuous contact and proximity—as mothers body proves still to be the only environment to which the infant is truly adapted, for which even modern western technology has yet to produce a substitute.

Even here in whatever-city-USA, nothing a baby can or cannot do makes sense except in light of the mother’s body, a biological reality apparently dismissed by those that argue against any and all bedsharing and what they call cosleeping, but which likely explains why most crib-using parents at some point feel the need to bring their babies to bed with them —findings that our mother-baby sleep laboratory here at Notre Dame has helped document scientifically. Given a choice, it seems human babies strongly prefer their mother’s body to solitary contact with inert cotton-lined mattresses. In turn, mothers seem to notice and succumb to their infant’s preferences.

There is no doubt that bedsharing should be avoided in particular circumstances and can be practiced dangerously. While each single bedsharing death is tragic, such deaths are no more indictments about any and all bedsharing than are the three hundred thousand plus deaths or more of babies in cribs an indictment that crib sleeping is deadly and should be eliminated. Just as unsafe cribs and unsafe ways to use cribs can be eliminated so, too, can parents be educated to minimize bedsharing risks.

Moving Beyond Judgments to Understanding

We still do not know what causes SIDS. But fortunately the primary factors that increase risk are now widely known i.e. placing an infant prone (face down) for sleep, using soft mattresses, maternal smoking, overwrapping babies or blocking air movement around their faces. In combination with bedsharing, where more vital normal defensive infant responses and may be more important to an infant (like the ability to arouse to bat a blanket which momentarily falls to cover the infants face when its parent moves or turns) these risks become exaggerated especially amongst unhealthy infants. When infants die in these obviously unsafe conditions, it is here where social biases and the sheer levels of ignorance associated with actually explaining the death become apparent. A death itself in a bedsharing environment does not automatically suggest, as many legal and medical authorities assert, that it was the bedsharing, or worse, suffocation that killed the infant. Infants in bedsharirng environments, like babies in cribs, can still die of SIDS.

It is a shame and certainly inappropriate that, for example, the head pathologists of the state of Indiana recommends that other pathologists assume SIDS as a likely cause of death when babies die in cribs but to assume asphyxiation if a baby dies in an adult bed or has a history of “cosleeping”. By assuming before any facts are known from the pathologist’s death scene and toxicological report that any bedsharing baby was a victim of an accidental suffocation rather than from some congenital or natural cause, including SIDS unrelated to bedsharing, medical authorities not only commit a form of scientific fraud but they victimize the doomed infant’s parents for a third time. The first occurs when their baby dies, the second occurs when health professionals interviewed for news stories (which commonly occurs) imply that when a baby dies in a bed with an adult it must be due to suffocation (or a SIDS induced by bedsharing). The third time the parents are victimized is when still without any evidence medical or police authorities suggest that their baby’s death was “preventable,” that their baby would still be alive if only the parents had not bedshared. This conclusion is based not on the facts of the tragedy but on unfair and fallacious stereotypes about bedsharing.

Indeed, no legitimate SIDS researcher nor forensic pathologist should render a judgment that a baby was suffocated without an extensive toxiological report and death scene investigation including information from the mother concerning what her thoughts are on what might or could have happened.

Whether involving cribs or adult beds, risky sleep practices leading to infant deaths are more likely to occur when parents lack access to safety information, or if they are judged to be irresponsible should they choose to follow their own and their infants’ biological predilections to bedshare, or if public health messages are held back on brochures and replaced by simplistic and inappropriate warnings saying “just never do it.” Such recommendations misrepresent the true function and biological significance of the behaviors, and the critical extent to which dangerous practices can be modified, and they dismiss the valid reasons why people engage in the behavior in the first place.

For More Information:
A Popular Parenting Book
Sleeping With Your Baby: A Parent’s Guide To Cosleeping by James J.McKenna (2007). Platypus Press.

The Scientific Perspective
McKenna, J., Ball H., Gettler L., Mother-infant Cosleeping, Breastfeeding and SIDS: What Biological Anthropologists Have Learned About Normal Infant Sleep and Pediatric Sleep Medicine. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 50:133-161 (2007)

McKenna, J., McDade, T., Why Babies Should Never Sleep Alone: A Review of the Co-Sleeping Controversy in Relation to SIDS, Bedsharing and Breastfeeding (pdf). Paediatric Respiratory Reviews 6:134-152 (2005)

As I pointed out in the previous post, however, many commentators suggest that it is not the gap in average test scores that really matters; rather, these critics argue that the different variance in boys’ and girls’ scores explains the disproportionate number of boys who produce exceptional scores (as well as exceptionally bad scores), and thus the marked gap of men and women in PhD math programs, in prestigious prizes for physics and related subjects, and in related fields like engineering. In the earlier post, I argued that even if this greater variance showed up reliably across all testing populations, what exactly was being illuminated was still not clear; that is, many other explanations–other than that men had better ‘math modules’ in their brains, or greater ‘innate’ mathematics ability, or something like that–could explain even very stable differences in math performance. At the time I suggested a number of other possibilities, such as sex differences in stress response during testing, as other possible explanations for even a universal ‘math gap’ (which still had to contend with studies like the two in Science which severely undermined the assertion of universality).

As if on cue, I stumbled upon a video and accompanying article in Science Daily on differences in stress responses among men and women: Neuroscientists Find That Men And Women Respond Differently To Stress (but don’t click on that link — keep reading!). Stress is a good candidate to explain a test-taking gap because the observable physiological processes offer abundant evidence that men and women don’t respond to stress in exactly the same way (although there are underlying commonalities). For example, stress causes different diseases in men and women, and some long-term psychological disorders that demonstrate sex-linked disparities seem to emerge from stress.

Unlike the ‘black box’ explanation that boys and simply better at math or evidence greater variability in innate ability, with no observable neural correlate or plausible explanatory mechanism, in variation in stress response we have a clear candidate for male-female difference that plausibly affects their performance and even physiology (for example, in different stress-related diseases).

Ironically, when I tracked down the original article that the Science Daily piece was likely based on (there’s no citation, so I can’t be certain), I had to delete all the quotes from the Science Daily article from the draft I was writing for this post (that’s why you shouldn’t link to it).

I give science writers a bit of stick from time to time, but in this case, the explanation of the research was not merely misunderstood, it was simply wrong, not even consistent with the abstract from the article I think the popular piece is based on (Wang et al. 2007). So even though the erroneous Science Daily article put me onto this thread, I’m only going to work from the piece published by Jiongjiong Wang and colleagues at the end of 2007 in the journal, Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience.

Stress responses in men and women to arithmetic tasks

In the abstract, Wang and colleagues explain that they tested 32 subjects using both fMRI and endocrine salivary screening. In the experiment:

Psychological stress was elicited using mental arithmetic tasks under varying pressure. Stress in men was associated with CBF [cerebral blood flow] increase in the right prefrontal cortex (RPFC) and CBF reduction in the left orbitofrontal cortex (LOrF), a robust response that persisted beyond the stress task period. In contrast, stress in women primarily activated the limbic system, including the ventral striatum, putamen, insula and cingulate cortex.

The researchers also found that the men tended to have more intense responses in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) system (e.g., the release of cortisol). According to the researchers, the increased activity in the men’s right prefrontal cortex (RPFC) under the acute stress condition was the most significant finding of their experiment, forming a biomarker for a distinctly masculine acute stress response.

What to make of all this? The researchers use a general description of these two different stress responses, first proposed by Taylor et al. (2000), as ‘flight-or-fight’ in men and ‘tend-and-befriend’ in women. At first read, I just groaned, and I’m still opposed to the essentialist and evolutionary mythology being touted as explaining an observable difference in performance. I’m not even going to start down the well-trod path I’ve beaten criticizing ‘evolutionary psychologists’ for naturalizing observed differences between men and women, simultaneously conjuring away the problem of explaining these differences by assuming that they are ‘inherent’ and attributing them to some dramatic fantasy of evolutionary selection — we’ve been here before (say at Girls gone guilty: Evolutionary psych on sex #2 or Chicks dig jerks?: Evolutionary psych on sex #1).

In fact, their data is much more interesting. For example, Wang and colleagues point out that the difference in brain activation patterns might result from different stress coping strategies or from different response to high- and low-stress situations (see Wang et al. 2007: 237-8). Ironically, as Wang and colleagues discuss, the difference in men’s and women’s stress responses depended upon the stimulus being used to produce stress: some experiments used social rejection; others, like the Wang-led team, use arithmetic problems to create stress. Likely, different sorts of stressful situations produce subtle distinctions in stress responses, some evoking more social anxiety, for example, and others creating a greater sense of physical peril. The group offers a path for future research, suggesting that neuroimaging studies of stress responses on different sorts of cognitive tasks might help sort out what’s specific to mathematical problems or might be more general difference between men and women: ‘Given the sensitivity of stress responses to specific context and intensity, we are cautious to generalize the current finding to different types of stress’ (ibid.: 238).

These different stress responses likely affect other mental activities in a variety of ways; we know that not all responses, in parallel fashion, affect health or cortisol production or other physiological correlates of stress. In addition, it’s quite likely that men and women don’t read the situations as equally stressful, either for innate reasons or for encultured ones–the two would be very difficult to disentangle in adults as the physiological effects would be identical. For example, girls and boys might interpret a testing situation in different ways because of peer, family, social, or other dynamics.

But I’m just going to hold my nose about the ‘ev psych’ part of this and plow onward (my objection being the ontogenetic simplifications of how a trait might emerge rather than a phylogenetic objection to saying that men and women might have been subjected to different evolutionary pressures — someday I’m going to have to do a post on this). So, onward with nose held…

Differing stress responses: ‘fight-or-flight’ or ‘tend-and-befriend’

The ‘fight-or-flight’ response ‘invokes resources that increase focus, alertness and fear, while inhibiting appetitive goals to cope with the threat or challenge’ (Wang et al. 2007:236). This pattern shows up in the increasingly active RPFC, associated with vigilance and negative emotion, and the suppression of activity in the LOrF, linked to hedonic behaviour and positive feedback. In other words, in the ‘fight-or-flight’ response, according to this interpretation, an individual becomes very alert to potential dangers and anticipating dire consequences, much less capable of focusing on pleasure-seeking.

Female response, in contrast, ‘primarily involves the limbic system including ventral striatum, putamen, insula and cingulate cortex’ (ibid.). This pattern was labeled by Taylor and colleagues ‘tend-and-befriend,’ and included parts of the brain receptive to oxytocin, vasopressin, dopamine and endorphin, systems that have been linked in previous research to social relations, attachment, and maternal behaviour. The researchers suggest that this social rewards system may blunt the acute stress response, leading women to respond in similar fashion to both high- and low-stress situations.

Wang and colleagues do point out that there are a lot of parallels between male and female responses, including very similar endocrine response, in spite of the predictions of the ‘fight-or-flight’/'tend-and-befriend’ contrast. The point being that, as in many human traits, male and female differences tend to appear in some lights as oppositions, but upon closer examination often reveal instead a largely common, underlying pattern (although the RPFC response was distinctive of their male subjects). Even the differences that do exist, such as a divergence in cortisol feedback due to the effects of reproductive hormones, may or may not be linked to observable differences, such as patterns of ‘ruminative thinking,’ as the researchers discuss. And the study itself didn’t turn up some patterns of activation that the researchers expected, such as a more prominent role for the amygdala (see, for example, Paul Mason’s discussion of the Role of Emotions in Brain Function).

Stress and cognitive function

Turning away from the more general effects of stress, focusing instead on the parts of the stress response that might affect must profoundly cognitive processing, we find that:

Activation of RPFC and right parietal regions [the pattern more pronounced in men] has been associated with various cognitive control tasks, including working memory, response selection and task switching, as well as inhibitory functions …. Ventral striatum along with several limbic regions [both pronounced in women under stress] have also been involved in learning in addition to tasks related to reward, motivation and emotion…. The different computational roles subserved by these brain regions may contribute to the observed gender differences in central stress responses. Although somewhat controlled in the regression analyses, this possibility (e.g. inhibiting incorrect responses in males and updating task strategies in females) cannot be completely ruled out, especially in the direct comparison of average stress responses between men and women.

Wang and colleagues specifically indicate recent research on mathematics and science ability (Hyde and Linn 2006) and suggest that the variation in stress response might underwrite pronounced differences in test results.

The RPFC, for example, is especially associated with executive functions (such as inhibiting emotional responses) and with strategic thinking, which might suggest a particular pattern of responding to stress. If women were more likely to focus on updating the possibility of reward, their own emotional states, and their motives while under stress, this might lead to lower scores when they were stressed by a time-constrained testing format. I’m still not persuaded that this is innately male or inherently impossible for women to achieve. If this is a pattern of brain activity especially likely to lead to certain test scores, and if some women are able to achieve extremely high test scores, than perhaps some women are able to learn this cognitive strategy. After all, it’s not like women don’t have these same parts in their brains. Likewise, I suspect that you could train patterns of response to stress in boys; certainly, the people I work with in sports training are convinced this is the case.

Implications for test-taking

First off, the experiment was ideal for exploring a possible stress-related contributor to the ‘math gap’ because it actually used mental arithmetic as the stimulus. Although not a perfect fit for a test-taking environment (where you don’t do the arithmetic in your head while holding still in a giant fMRI scanner), I doubt we’re going to get much better than this until the imaging technologies make some major jumps.

Second, in general, women after puberty have a lower threshold for perceived stress. The irony is that perceiving that one is stressed can often exacerbate one’s stress response. If you think you are anxious, you can make yourself more anxious. One can easily see how this might affect women’s performance on standardized tests. I never recall being all that stressed out on things like the SAT or GRE (I think I fell asleep during the GRE when I finished one section early), but for some people, this significantly influences their performance. I need to point out that Wang and colleagues specifically controlled for this effect in their research, so it’s not such a factor in their data, but it’s not hard to imagine that, especially given the length of a standardized test and the possibility that difficult questions might heighten stress during the course of an exam, this might become a factor in test score differences.

But the bottom line is that, if boys’ and girls’ brains respond differently to stress, this might disproportionately affect tests exploring various subjects. Female stress response might make their mathematics problem solving drop off more than men’s in timed tests (of course, we still have the much-less-discussed ‘reading gap’ to deal with, too). This sort of pattern does seem to show up in the gap between women’s performance on standardized testing in relation to men’s, and their across-the-board higher averages in marks on university courses (since broader admission of women into universities).

But stress might also lead to a narrowing of girls’ variance on standardized tests. It might diminish ability to perform at an extremely high level, but it also might lift the scores of the lowest scoring, least-motivated individuals. Lack of stress on a standardized math test — the situation boys might be more likely to find themselves in — might improve some young men’s scores, but it also might lead low performers to be even more blasé about their situation. Even the high RPFC activation in men might show up in boys as a clear-headed strategizing about the irrelevance of doing well on a standardized test if they know that they are not high performers in mathematics.

In other words, even a different pattern of brain activation (elevated activity in the RPFC) may simply provide the emotional environment in s stressful environment in which a boy might perform especially well, or calmly assess that the exercise was pointless given what he already knew about his ability. The result would be indistinguishable from an innatist argument that ‘boys have higher variance in innate math ability,’ but the underlying causal mechanism would be subtly different (and thus require different remedial projects if someone tried to address the variation).

One indicator of the possibility of these sorts of subtle mechanism that a Scientific American article by Halpern and colleagues cites is the fact that preschool children score similarly on cognitive tests of quantitative thinking and geometrical reasoning. The start to diverge when the children get to school. Innatist explanations suggest that the ‘true nature’ of boys and girls emerges when they enter school, but it’s just as likely that peer dynamics, including strong sex-stereotyping among kids, starts to really kick in when they are exposed to school. My point is not to argue that an innatist position is untenable, only that the pattern we see is equally consistent with other ways of thinking about how differences might arrive.

More on higher variance arguments

The Scientific American article also looks at the ‘higher variance’ of math ability argument that a number of proponents of innate ability gaps put forward (which I discuss at length in the previous post on math tests). The gap is profound, but the trend in that gap is also interesting. The authors reflect on data that was first assembled in the early 1980s on SAT scores:

There were twice as many boys as girls with math scores of 500 or higher (out of a possible score of 800), four times as many boys with scores of at least 600, and 13 times as many boys with scores of at least 700 (putting these test takers in the top 0.01 percent of 12- to 14-year-olds nationwide).

Although it has drawn little media coverage, dramatic changes have been occurring among these junior math wizards: the relative number of girls among them has been soaring. The ratio of boys to girls, first observed at 13 to 1 in the 1980s, has been dropping steadily and is now only about 3 to 1. During the same period the number of women in a few other scientific fields has surged. In the U.S., women now make up half of new medical school graduates and 75 percent of recent veterinary school graduates. We cannot identify any single cause for the increase in the number of women entering these formerly male-dominated fields, because multiple changes have occurred in society over the past several decades.

Although 3 to 1 is still a very large gap, it’s also startling to see that the gap can close from 13 to 1 to as little as 3 to 1 in a bit more than two decades. There may be an innate gap in math ability, but with all the change in these figures, it seems a bit premature to suggest that we know for certain that we’ve ascertained it and cannot affect change in the performance gap any further.

In addition, specialized courses designed to remedy the women’s specific deficits in visuospatial skills at the Michigan Technological University led to marked improvement among women in this area, one of the abilities considered to be strongly sex-linked, and to higher retention of women in university science and math programs. (I don’t have specifics on this intervention yet, but I will post more information when I get it.)

Again, this doesn’t prove that there are not innate differences between men and women: the origin of the gap in visuospatial skills is not at all clear. Because I’m more of a developmental systems theorist than an innatist, I would tend to look in the developmental trajectory of boys and girls for the difference rather than assume math ability springs from a gene or hormone. Thinking of the child as a developmental system, the gap may arise in an odd, indirect way; for example, boys relatively lower verbal abilities might lead them to compensate by developing visuospatial skills, or girls play patterns — whether due to innate tendencies or socialization — may give them less experience with visuospatial manipulation. Because the gap is mutable and the skills deficits at least partially remediable, I’d say that the burden of proof starts to fall on the innatists; show us where the innate visuospatial ability actually lives in the brain and how it comes into the world pre-destined if a whole host of studies are showing gaps are mutable.

In the end, I suspect that there are biological differences in girls’ and boys’ brains that contribute to differences in test score variance, but these differences may not be where we expect them. For example, they may have more to do with something that indirectly affects math testing like stress response or motivational structure in education. Innatist thinking is too easy, too inconsistent with the actual way that brains and cognitive abilities develop in an unfolding of the human organism in relation to a social and learning environment. There’s a lot of ‘mights’ in my account, but the fact that there are other plausible explanations for something like the math gap — even if it is universal (which the Science papers question) — shows overly glib assertions of innate difference to be a sloppy way out of what are really a whole set of interesting theoretical and empirical questions.

Stumble It!

References
Halpern, Diane F., Camilla P. Benbow, David C. Geary, Ruben C. Gur, Janet Shibley Hyde and Morton Ann Gernsbacher. 2007 (November). Sex, Math and Scientific Achievement: Why do men dominate the fields of science, engineering and mathematics?. Scientific American (available online here)

Hyde, Janet Shibley, and Marcia C. Linn. 2006. Gender similarities in mathematics and science. Science 314 (5799): 599–600. (pdf available here)

Phipps, Alison. 2008. Women in Science, Engineering and Technology: Three Decades of UK Initiatives. Trentham Books.

Taylor, Shelley E., Laura Cousino Klein, Brian P. Lewis, Tara L. Gruenewald, Regan A. R. Gurung, and John A. Updegraff. 2000. Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight. Psychological Review 107(3): 411–29. (abstract on Pub Med, pdf available here)

Wang, Jiongjiong, Marc Korczykowski, Hengyi Rao, Yong Fan, John Pluta, Ruben C. Gur, Bruce S. McEwen and John A. Detre. 2007. Gender difference in neural response to psychological stress. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2(3):227-239. doi:10.1093/scan/nsm018

A recent report in Science by Janet S. Hyde and colleagues, ‘Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance,’ used a mass of standardized testing data generated under the No Child Left Behind program to compare male and female performance and found that the scores were more similar than different. The gap in average performance on math tests has shrunk significantly since the 1970s, disappearing in most states and grades for which the research team could get good data. According to Marcia C. Linn of the University of California, Berkeley, one of the co-authors of the study: ‘Now that enrollment in advanced math courses is equalized, we don’t see gender differences in test performance. But people are surprised by these findings, which suggests to me that the stereotypes are still there.’

From the way that this report has been discussed, it seems clear that the data has not settled this question in many people’s minds. Tamar Lewin of The New York Time covered the story in (‘Math Scores Show No Gap for Girls, Study Finds‘) provoking comments on a wide range of websites, including some who insisted that the team led by Hyde missed entirely the point being made by Summers or that Lewin had misread the study (some accusing her of feminist bias). In contrast, Keith J. Winstein of The Wall Street Journal focused not on the average scores, but on the results at the top end of the bell curve, writing, Boys’ Math Scores Hit Highs and Lows, which highlights the discussion of variance in boys’ scores.

Although I briefly want to go over the study and the way its being interpreted, I’m more interested in the shift in test scores over time because I think that the movements in these numbers, including gaps that disappear over time (or don’t), point to a basic problem in the tests themselves. Well, not a problem in the tests—they’re very sophisticated instruments for assessing certain kinds of performance on selected tasks—but rather with the common assumption about what these tests actually reveal and the nature of ‘math ability.’ For me, this larger point is more important for neuroanthropology because it applies to far more than just the ‘math gap.’

The gap in test scores: sample bias?

The gap between boys and girls in standardized math tests in the 1970s and 1980s seemed to open wider as children grew older. From a statistical dead heat early in grade school, a pronounced inequality developed by high school that only grew worse at successive stages, up to a near total male dominance of PhDs, math contests, and high status faculty positions in fields like engineering, physics, and mathematics. A number of people point to the results of things like mathematics olympiads or major prizes for theoretical physics to show that, at the upper end of ability, male dominance is complete.

Although some explained the ‘math gap’ as the result of brain differences (such as differences in spatial sense or abstract reasoning) in boys or girls that affected math ability, others insisted that the inequality was caused by social forces, stereotypes, or other factors. One explanation was that the ‘math gap’ was a self-fulfilling prejudice; the assumption that boys would do better both encouraged boys’ performance and discouraged girls from developing ability in mathematics. Another argument was that girls were discouraged from publicly demonstrating academic gifts in general as they brought stigma (as a geeky young man, I find it hard to believe that my female peers were more severely stereotyped, but that’s a different story). Some critics pointed to the way that changing patterns of enrollment in advanced math classes steadily seemed to be eating away at the ‘math gap’; they felt that if girls pursued the same educational opportunities, they would have similar results.

But another explanation for the ‘math gap’ in performance was a sample bias problem that Hyde and colleagues sought to address in this study. The research team pointed out that only college-bound students took the SAT (and ACT) traditionally , and more girls than boys took the test (100,000 or so more every year for the SAT). The lower average for girls’ test scores might have arisen from the fact that the larger number of girls taking the tests meant that their scores reflected a deeper dip into the talent pool, with a larger percentage of female students being scored. The additional students — perhaps not the most intellectually gifted girls — were pulling down the girls’ average score.

Changing policies for administering standardized tests, especially making them mandatory, might provide a better sample, less prone the bias of one group participating at a higher frequency. For example, in 2002, Colorado and Illinois mandated that every graduating high school senior take the ACT; the gender gap between boys and girls disappeared when girls were no longer over-represented in the test. In fact, girls demonstrated a slightly higher average math score than boys. As the research team writes: ‘These findings support the conclusion that the male advantage on the SAT mathematics test is largely an artifact of sampling.’ In other words, boys scored better because fewer took the test.

Research results from the Hyde team on US scores

The No Child Left Behind program forced states to administer standardized tests broadly. The team led by Hyde, drawn from faculty at the University of Wisconsin and the University of California, Berkeley, contacted all 50 states to try to get access to these scores, but only 10 gave them enough information to make their samples useful. Based on test scores for 7 million students, the research team found no difference in the average math scores; this seemed to be the culmination of a trend of girls steadily gaining ground in math scores, first among younger age groups and recently through adolescence. The following chart shows the gaps at different grade levels for the ten states:

This chart originally appeared in Science magazine with the article. From the UC Berkeley News website, we have the following explanation:

Each square represents a grade level in one of 10 U.S. states. At the center of the chart (the 0 mark), the two genders performed equally in math, with increasing differences between boys and girls toward the left (where girls outperformed boys) and right (where boys outperformed girls). When researchers averaged the results, they found no difference between the two genders in their math proficiency. The 10 states were New Mexico (olive), Kentucky (fuchsia), Wyoming (tan), Minnesota (blue), Missouri (red), West Virginia (lavender), Connecticut (green), California (yellow), Indiana (aqua), and New Jersey (purple).

Hyde’s earlier work (e.g., Hyde 2005) also tested the ‘innate sex differences in math ability hypothesis,’ but the meta-analysis of extant studies is just never going to get the traction that 7 million test scores will. The current study seems to show convincingly that there is no inherent difference between boys and girls on average in mathematics proficiency. This hardly demonstrates that boys and girls have identical brains or thought processes, nor does it really refute the kind of argument that Harvard’s president Summers was making, but it does seem to suggest that the stereotype of girls being unable to do maths is widely inaccurate (not just in a few exceptional cases).

Math and reading gaps and gender equality globally

In fact, the story of the change in the ‘math gap’ in the United States seems to mirror a pattern that is also seen across cultures: changing status of women seems to correlate pretty strongly with the math gap. When women are treated more equally, it shows up in girls’ math scores. Studies of students in different societies show that the difference between boys’ and girls’ averages is not constant, and can be reversed. The Economist recently ran a story on gender achievement gaps in different places based on another Science report by Luigi Guiso of the European University Institute in Florence and colleagues: Diversity: Culture, Gender, and Math.

Guiso’s team used results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). A total of more than 275,000 15-year-olds took the PISA exam in 40 countries. The gap between girls and boys on math was, on average, 2 percent, although the results varied, and the size of the gap correlated with measures of gender inequality. In addition, girls scored on average 7 percent higher than boys on reading, with average boys’ reading scores matching girls’ in not a single country.

The diagram shows a pattern that continued across the pool (see the supplementary data to the original report for the averages on all of the countries participating in the PISA testing).

Interestingly, the gap between boys and girls in geometry was immune to the effects of social equality: boys enjoyed a consistent advantage in the subject. And the female ‘reading gap’ actually grew with greater equality for women, suggesting that greater equality led to better education for girls, and better performance, across subjects (not a real surprise). As the conclusion to Guiso’s paper makes clear:

This evidence suggests that intra-gender performance differences in reading versus mathematics and in arithmetic versus geometry are not eliminated in a more gender-equal culture. By contrast, girls’ underperformance in math relative to boys is eliminated in more gender-equal cultures. In more gender-equal societies, girls perform as well as boys in mathematics and much better than them in reading.

If the math gap explains male dominance in physics and math, and academic hiring was relatively unbiased, then why isn’t there an even more pronounced preference for admitting women into PhD programs and hiring them as faculty in fields like English literature, law, and history?

The gap between men and women in reading scores also suggests another explanation for the math gap: if choice of career is based on comparative advantage (rather than just absolute fitness), then women would likely choose a career where there much greater advantage in literary skill might produce a clearer superiority. That is, even if their math scores go up, their reading scores go up too, so they still enjoy a greater comparative advantage over men in fields that might be considered ‘traditionally female.’

Performance at the extremes

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, in a post titled, Summers Vindicated (again), highlights the crucial issue of variance in test scores. That is, for understanding the highest achievers, the averages don’t really matter; we’re talking about the extremes, the geniuses, the Nobel Prize-winning physicists. If the variation in boys’ performance is larger than that of girls, more boys will likely wind up in the ‘upper tail’ of performance, posting the highest scores (and lowest), while the averages could be dead even (or for that matter, male averages could even be lower).

Among white students, Hyde and the team from the University of Wisconsin and the University of California, Berkeley, found that the ratio of girls to boys in the top percentile was 1 to 2 ; twice as many exceptional scores (99 percentile scores) were turned in by white boys as white girls. Among Asian students, however, more girls than boys reached the top percentile (but only slightly more, statistically). Not enough Latino or African-American turned in scores in the top percentile to provide a ratio. (Another interesting wrinkle was that white boys significantly outperformed Asian and Pacific Islanders, both boys and girls, running against stereotypes in some parts of the United States, but that’s for another day…)

The Wisconsin-Berkeley team go on to suggest that the gap in achievement, although it might explain part of the disparity between men and women in certain occupations, doesn’t explain the severe gap in some fields. For example…

If a particular specialty required mathematical skills at the 99th percentile, and the gender ratio is 2.0, we would expect 67% men in the occupation and 33% women. Yet today, for example, Ph.D. programs in engineering average only about 15% women.

I don’t find this a particularly compelling argument — if the specialty required mathematical skill at a slightly higher proficiency, then there’s no inherent reason why 15% would not be the ‘right’ ratio of women to men in a program, but we’ll come back to that…

Some commentators point to this gap between (white) boys and girls in the top percentile to argue that, in fact, Summers’ tempest-provoking speech was inadvertently supported by the report in Science. Whereas the NYTimes report says boys and girls are equal, Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute begs to differ:

Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. Either the Times is deliberately concealing the results of the study or its reporter cannot understand the most basic science reporting.

According to MacDonald’s reading, ‘Science’s analysis of math test scores only confirms the hypothesis that cost Summers his Harvard post: that boys are found more often than girls at the outer reaches of the bell curve of abstract reasoning ability.’ Or, as Alex Tabarrok puts it more directly, ‘we can expect that there will be more math geniuses and more dullards, among males than among females.’

MacDonald and others, like Luboš Motl at The Reference Frame, argue that, even this ‘upper tail’ effect underestimates the impact of higher male variance because these tests are simply too simple, too easy, to illuminate the differences between men and women’s brains at the extreme of performance. In my day, if you scored over about a 700 on the SAT math test (I believe — please don’t quote me on that one, it’s been more than a couple decades), you were in the 99th percentile. In fact, a lot of variety was masked by the ‘same’ percentile score. This lack of resolution makes it difficult to study the really extraordinary performers from these tests.

Moreover, the Wisconsin-Berkeley researchers found that most standardized state math tests did not include the most difficult sorts of problems, those demanding complex reasoning or problem solving ability, so it is unlikely that the test even could differentiate among elite levels of performance. In addition, the simple problems are a sad commentary on the state of American secondary education and the stultifying effect of the No Child Left Behind testing regimen, which demands students be tested but encouraged dilution of the tests to make sure that states met goals for funding through a set of perverse incentives.

Luboš Motl, who writes as a ‘conservative physicist,’ takes Hyde and her colleagues to task for not really focusing on measures of extraordinary mathematical talent (Motl’s pretty negative on the research, alleging that the authors have been ‘writing similar cargo cult scientific papers for quite some time.’). Motl, in Janet Hyde: boys = girls in math? Not really, points to the extreme gender gap in winners in the US Mathematical Olympiads, major math prizes, and other more elite forums for demonstrating math ability than the SAT. As he puts it near the end of his post, ‘the more selective your math-related tests become, the lower percentage of females you will obtain (the boys have a greater variance of the distribution).’ Some of the disparities are startling; you can’t even call some ‘disparities’ as there is simply no female representation in the history of certain prizes, and this dominance persists in spite of social change, changes in education, and a host of other factors.

Motl serves up a fair amount of vitriol for ‘political correctness’ and references a study showing that certain fields in the humanities and social sciences have higher numbers of faculty espousing ‘politically correct’ views (see ‘Defining Political Correctness and Its Non-Impact’ on Inside Higher Ed). Although Motl’s attacks on ‘political correctness’ may be heavy handed, I found it fascinating and ironic that one of the key views that the reserachers on ‘political correctness’ used as a diagnostic was specifically about the ‘math gap.’ That is, one of the key questions used to identify which professors were ‘politically correct’ was whether the professor believed that ‘gender gaps in math and science fields are largely due to discrimination.’

What to make of this research and the critiques?

In the first place, the research by Hyde and colleagues tends to poke a gaping hole in the argument that there is an unvarying difference between all girls and all boys in mathematics ability (please note before you start writing hate mail: I know that this is not what most of the bloggers critical of the studies are arguing for…). Although the argument for sex differences may have shifted so that the current debate is focused on variance and extreme performances, let’s not forget that for a very long time, and still in a lot of people’s minds, this basic argument—boys are better at math than girls, period.—was taken for granted because of the ‘math gap’ in the average scores. That gap is now gone.

The Science article makes this case using a new data set (from the NCLB program) to overcome a sample bias in tests like the SAT. On this front, the case is pretty compelling, as is the Guiso-led research on European scores. I would hope that people supporting Summers’ perspective with reference to the data on extreme male performance in Hyde’s study (such as Winstein in The Wall Street Journal) will be equally passionate about denying this very common ‘boys-are-better-than-girls-in-math’ argument as they are about the alleged higher variance of boys.

Summer’s defenders have argued that his comments (and their defense) focus only on extreme performance, only on math geniuses; although the Hyde study discusses the 2 to 1 gap in achieving scores in the 99th percentile among white students, the authors argue that this gap does not explain an even greater disparity in women’s participation in PhD programs and faculty positions in mathematics-related fields. As I suggested above, I don’t find this part of the Wisconsin-Berkeley team’s argument terribly compelling. The 99th percentile cut-off is arbitrary; if it required an even rarer level of mathematics achievement, then, following from this logic, the disparity would be justified. The 2 to 1 gap in performance with such a large pool of (white) students is statistically significant.

But maybe because I work at a university, I don’t think university academic hiring is always a process of finding geniuses (god, I wish it were). Even if there are more male math geniuses, I’m still not sure that explains disparities in hiring or PhD programs; I’d want to see some proof that university professors are reliably geniuses or some concrete studies of social conditions within departments in these fields before I’d rule out the possibility that the gender gaps are at least partially ‘due to discrimination’ (Does that make me PC, or would I need to be more one-sided?). That is, even if women were participating at higher rates, it seems to me that studies of hiring and promotion are more convincing in demonstrating discrimination (or its absence) than statistical arguments about distribution in the field. In fact, there is statistical evidence to argue both ways (see, for example, studies of promotion and hiring compared to the percentage of female candidates in the pools).

The people with the highest math scores don’t necessarily wind up with careers in mathematics. Back in 2006, Jake Young at Pure Pedantry wrote an excellent post on the problems with the ‘upper tail’ hypothesis, Debunking the Upper Tail: More on the Gender Disparity, arguing that it depends upon two key assumptions that don’t hold: a) that you have to perform in the upper tail to go on to a career in these professions, and b) people with high scores in tests of mathematical ‘aptitude’ wind up in math, physics, and engineering. Check out his post for an excellent discussion (see the comments as well).

In the case of certain sorts of awards for creativity in scientific theory (like the Nobel Prize in physics), ability to do mathematics at the highest level may not (may not) be the key intellectual quality that produces the performance. That is, theoretical creativity may be a constellation of factors, including some personality traits as well as abilities considered classically ‘intellectual,’ that trumps pure mathematical problem solving ability. Ironically, male dominance in these awards may not be due to an advantage in mathematical ability (although this advantage might still exist) but because of other characteristics, which may or may not be innate or attributable to being male. In order to know this, we’d have to actually study Nobel Prize winners (we run into a similar issue with study of elite athletes being treated as representative of gender or ethnic groups when we don’t really have a clear sense of why these athletes are winning and whether there’s a consistent source of superiority).

Testing and changes in group ability over time

The bigger point for me, however, is that I’m still not convinced that math tests are testing innate ability. The whole shift in the US ‘math gap’ over time, like the shifts in European countries linked to greater gender equality, is a powerful demonstration that intellectual qualities of an entire group, as measured by standardized tests, can shift over time, even on a scale so enormous that one might reasonably expect environmental factors to be swamped. The fact that the math gap between boys and girls shrank so markedly between the 1970s and 2003, where the clear causes are educational and social, puts the burden of proof squarely on those who want to argue that mathematics abilities are genetic. Even the Flynn Effect, the fact that IQ scores tend to rise over time (discussed here and here at Neuroanthropology), strongly suggests that ‘intelligence’ is a moving target, likely a synergy of different abilities and traits, some of which are plastic.

The terribly consistent geometry gap has the hallmark of some sort of innate difference, but even this might be deceptive. Science Daily recent ran a story, Plastic Brain Outsmarts Experts: Training Can Increase Fluid Intelligence, Once Thought To Be Fixed At Birth, detailing how one dimension of intelligence thought to be relatively fixed, in fact, could be molded by training (and not terribly demanding training at that, unlike a really good mathematics education).

Even if girls and boys had identical mathematics scores, that wouldn’t mean that we’ve proven their brains are indistinguishable (they’re not), nor even that they both have the ‘same’ mathematical ability (they may be achieving comparable scores in different ways). The Hyde-led research team tried to determine whether boys and girls were doing better or worse than each other on different types of questions, but the tests were too remedial to even discern this kind of effect because they had no demanding test questions (although the Guiso-led team’s information on a ‘geometry gap’ being resistant to change is suggestive).

In this sense, I agree strongly with Luboš Motl: the big story here is not the scores, but the fact that the tests are so watered down, likely reflecting the disintegration of high expectations and rigorous mathematics training. I have a suspicion that, no matter how bad the overall education, you’re likely to still get some exceptional performers, but the effect on the vast majority of children will be tragic. Without rigorous math training, one of the opportunities we have to encourage students to develop a whole range of neurological capacities is being squandered.

One neuroanthropological perspective on ‘intelligence’ (or ‘mathematic ability’)

As a neuroanthropologist, I have no problem acknowledging differences between men and women; I think it’s simply a statistical fact that men and women are performing differently, as Motl points out. Nor would I deny that there might be significant cognitive differences between groups of people, including men and women, or that these differences might be grounded in biological differences in the brain. But there seems to be a very quick rush to believing that these tests demonstrate some constant and innate difference between boys and girls; the changes highlighted in both studies published in Science should, at the very least, slow the quick jump from a disparity in scores to assumptions about permanent sex differences. The gap in math scores (and reading scores for that matter) moves, shrinks, changes, grows, or even disappears over time; one would think that this might give those who think ‘intelligence’ is innate reason for pause.

My greater objection in some of the discussion is the lack of a more fine-grained analysis of how any particular difference (such as on a test) arises—it’s often simply attributed to a kind of ‘boy-ness’ or ‘girl-ness.’ Yes, a difference in elite performance might arise because there’s more ‘math power’ in a boy’s brain, but that still leaves us begging a whole lot of questions: what is ‘math power’? how did they get it? why don’t all boys have it? can we give it to girls, or to more boys? do the exceptional girls, however rare, have the same mental ability? if the girls do, is it specifically ‘male’ in some sense, or is it just more likely to occur in boys’ brains?.

For example, there’s often an assumption that greater variance in boys is either genetic or hormonal, and although that could be the case, there are other potential explanations, including mixed explanations that partially, but don’t wholly rely on genetic or hormonal explanations.

We could offer an explanation that tips towards social psychology; for example, just as the boy math geek may be less stigmatized than the girl math geek (as some people argue), the boy math tragedy may be more de-motivated than a girl performing badly. Boys’ exit from education may be supported by male peers or even influenced by innate non-mathematical factors, like having a stronger temper, more pronounced need to defend the sense of self, or more well developed ‘screw-school’ independence. In the ‘math prodigy’ boy, the same temper, desire to defend the self, and independence could boost achievement, especially mathematical creativity.

We could offer an explanation that relies more on the fitness for the testing dynamic itself rather than brain ‘math power’; for example, the high pressure and tight time constraints of very challenging tests (the kinds in math contests) could reward certain kinds of behavioural patterns (high risk, ‘sloppy’ but quick problem solving) or a specific constellation of traits in addition to mathematics ability, so that they are testing other behavioural traits or intellectual abilities in addition to problem solving. Boys’ bodies might respond differently to stress than girls’, producing a better mental state in which to take tests. These other traits might even be ‘innate’ differences between boys and girls (they might not be), but they would be recorded on the test as ‘mathematical ability.’

That is, showing greater variance, even showing that it’s rooted in inherent male-female differences, still doesn’t demonstrate that male brains are inherently better at specific math functions. The effect of other sorts of differences may be indistinguishable on a test, but the implications are profound for how you might redress inequality, test ability, or even how you might teach mathematics to the boys who don’t do well.

In addition, although someone’s liable to criticize this line taken out of context, I’ll write it: there’s an assumption that math tests are testing ‘math ability’ when they might be testing something else in addition to ‘math ability’ (like behavioral responses to stress, test taking strategy, or a number of other things). That is, there’s an assumption that a math test tests a trait, ‘math ability,’ and that it’s distinguishable from other traits, like ‘reading ability,’ in some meaningful sense. I think that it’s more likely that math tests test the ability to take math tests; not only does this include other traits, but even ‘math ability’ itself may be composed of a cluster of functions and abilities, which are themselves diverse in terms of how a psychologist might describe them (‘fixed’ or ‘fluid’ intelligence, ‘procedural’ and ‘propositional’ memory, etc.). Likely, not everyone who does well on a math test is doing the same thing. When I won a math test without a calculator, and the guy who finished second used one, I’m pretty sure that we were engaging in different calculating practices and techniques as we moved through the question.

Although some people may be uninterested in these differences between ways that people achieve solutions in mathematics (perhaps because they’re more interested about differences between boys and girls), from a neuroanthropological perspective, this variation is crucial. Because we are interested in cognitive variation, and in how different practices (like variations in mathematics pedagogy) shape distinct forms of competency, identical scores may actually mask significant cultural-cognitive (or gender-cognitive, for that matter) differences. It may be as important to analyze the apparent parities as to mind the gaps….

I’m going to do another post on ‘intelligence’ soon. This one has taken me too much time to finish, and it’s gotten too long. If you’re in the mood for more, however…

Additional resources
Read more at No Gender Differences In Math Performance and at CNN: Study: Girls equal to boys in math skills. On the blog Ars Technica, Math gender gap gone in grade school, persists in college by Yun Xie (interesting thoughts in that one).

P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula also has a post on a closely related debate (on science, as well as mathematics, and gender disparity): Motivating students (and motivating women) to pursue science careers. Myers does a nifty rhetorical judo take-down on those who use test scores to argue for innate differences; if test scores demonstrate unchangeable ability, then why don’t Americans stop spending money on math and science education for US students and import more Asian kids?

I would never want to be accused of not giving opposing perspectives adequate space: along those lines, there’s a discussion of bias in the sciences over at the ‘Tierney Lab’ at The New York Times website: Intellectual Dishonesty on Sex Bias?

Stumble It!

Still haven’t had enough? There’s an update: Women on tests update: response to stress.

Credits:
Chart 1: Univ. of Wisconsin and UC Berkeley; published in Science magazine; downloaded from http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/07/24_math.shtml on 31 July 2008.

Chart 2: The Economist, Education and Sex: Vital Statistics.

Photo from a University of Michigan news release from 2003.

References

Guiso, Luigi, Ferdinando Monte, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales. 2008. Diversity: Culture, Gender, and Math. Science 320 (5880): 1164-1165. doi 10.1126/science.1154094

Hyde, Janet Shibley. 2005. The Gender Similarities Hypothesis. American Psychologist 60(6): 581-592. doi 10.1037/0003-066X.60.6.581.

Hyde, Janet S., Sara M. Lindberg, Marcia C. Linn, Amy B. Ellis, and Caroline C. Williams. 2008. Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance. Science 321 (5888): 494-495. doi 10.1126/science.1160364

Today, I’m going to discuss a different set of articles, this time on ‘female guilt,’ sparked by research done by Prof. Anne Campbell, a psychologist at Durham University. Prof. Campbell surveyed people online and found that women regretted ‘one-night-stands’ more than men. This has led her to argue that women are ‘ill adapted’ for promiscuity, that the ‘sexual and feminist revolutions’ didn’t work because women couldn’t shake their inherent nature, which is to long for committed relationships and loathe themselves if they act like cheap floozies.

I delayed posting on this because I cannot get to the original article (my university library has a six-month delay on the journal Human Nature; Springer press release here). I hate posting on second-hand versions, but I feel like I don’t want to wait six months to write #2 in my series on ev psych stereotypes…. I mean, ‘perspectives’ on human sexuality or to put in my own two cents worth of opinionation. So I have to base most of my discussion on the press release from Durham University about Prof. Campbell’s recent article.

I can’t imagine that I’m EVER going to persuade the hardened core of evolutionary psychologists that there is not a thing called ‘human nature’; I’m not opposed to the concept for political, feminist reasons but because I don’t think living organisms have ‘essences,’ especially when it comes to behaviour. Nothing I can say, no theoretical point or comparative data from around the world of human variation, will convince the evolutionary psychologists because they know, they just know, that human nature — especially sex — has been shaped by evolution, hardened and set in our genes (or brains or hormones…), to rear it’s head when we do something against our nature (like a woman having sex and not trying to find a mate).

But if you’ve clicked through the link, you’ve signed on, at least for a bit, so I’ll try to be mildly entertaining.

To repeat my most serious objections to the ‘bad boys get more action’ research from my previous post (there were eight, although several had multiple points), they included: a confusion about how one would test ‘reproductive success,’ questions about whether jerk traits are actually genetically determined, and whether there were other, more proximate, less strained explanations than ‘evolution’ for why these ‘dark’ men reported more sexual partners than ‘nice guys.’ Although I’m no authority on sex research, I brainstormed a few ideas that didn’t require resorting to Mother Evolution, such as the men’s expressed intention to have many partners might lead to them having more partners (but evolution is so much more plausible as an explanation…), the men’s potential inability to maintain long-term relationships, women discovering men had the ‘dark triad’ and throwing them out…

Ev Psych: Repeating stereotypes, making headlines

Even with these problems, however, the ‘girls dig bad boys — evolution makes it so’ story had great legs, showing up all over the place. Likewise, today’s story — we’ll call it, ‘bad girls feel regret’ — got around faster than a greased pig in a sausage factory. The BBC, for example, discusses it under the headline, Sexes split over one night stands, The Telegraph offers, Women have more regrets than men over one night stands, Salon gives us, Men: Score! Women: Whoops! (having fun with the title), and The Independent gives us the resounding, Men like casual sex more than women – scientific fact (and an Indy Blog entry, too). I’d link to more, but the articles are virtually identical, evidencing the way that a story like this can circulate with minimal critical comment being able to get traction.

Bloggers also picked up the study published in Human Nature, although they are much more critical: check out Echidne of the Snakes, The Dawn Chorus, Noli Irritare Leones (and again the next day), and Dante and the Lobster (nice blog name!). I’ll try not to just repeat some of the many objections that these bloggers raise to this study, but there’s a lot of good ones being offered.

What does the study say?

According to the press release put out by Durham University, and echoed verbatim by virtually every major press outlet to pick up the story:

THE sexual and feminist revolutions were supposed to free women to enjoy casual sex just as men always had. Yet according to Professor Anne Campbell from Durham University in the UK, the negative feelings reported by women after one-night stands suggest that they are not well adapted to fleeting sexual encounters. Her findings are published online in the June issue of Springer’s journal, Human Nature.

Okay, men have ‘always’ enjoyed casual sex? Really? Always? Are you sure? No society anywhere, at any time, has had anxiety about ‘casual sex’ among men? You get what I mean…

And, in addition, before I go further, was the ‘feminist revolution’ really about enjoying casual sex? I seem to remember something about equal pay, property rights, suffrage, you know… like things other than casual sex…

Prof. Campbell explains that her research is designed to test two opposing views of how women would have been shaped by evolutionary pressures. An older evolutionary psychology idea held that women should be very choosy and demand fidelity out of men with whom they mated because pregnancy and child rearing were such intensive, demanding processes. More recently, some biologists who have studied genetic evidence of paternity (and found that many ‘monogamous’ species are much less so than once thought) have argued that female promiscuity might be adaptive; as Campbell explains, women’s promiscuity ‘would increase the genetic diversity of their children and, if a high quality man would not stay with them forever, they might at least get his excellent genes for their child.’

To test whether women were adapted to casual sex, Campbell surveyed people after they had a one-night stand: 1743 people answered questions about how they felt after a ‘one-night stand.’ Now this is where I REALLY regret not having access to Human Nature; I can’t really answer any of the many questions I have about the data collection. An on-line survey about feelings after a one-night stand? Really? And how did they know it was a ‘one-night stand’ if they reported immediately following the event? Oh, the mind races…

But let’s stick with the study. The results were compelling, irrefutable: ‘Eighty per cent of men had overall positive feelings about the experience compared to 54 per cent of women.’ Wait, 54% had overall positive feelings?! Somehow, I don’t think that the headlines are going to be ‘Majority of women pretty okay about one-night stands’ or, for that matter, ‘One-fifth of men programmed by evolution to regret meaningless nookie.’

According to Campbell’s survey, in addition:

Men were more likely than women to secretly want their friends to hear about it [the one-night stand] and to feel successful because the partner was desirable to others. Men also reported greater sexual satisfaction and contentment following the event, as well as a greater sense of well-being and confidence about themselves.
The predominant negative feeling reported by women was regret at having been “used”. Women were also more likely to feel that they had let themselves down and were worried about the potential damage to their reputation if other people found out. Women found the experience less sexually satisfying and, contrary to popular belief, they did not seem to view taking part in casual sex as a prelude to long-term relationships.

We’ll come back to these interesting wrinkles, details that don’t fit under the heading, ‘evolution means girls don’t just want to have fun.’ With all of these conflicting, intriguing facts from an Internet survey, fortunately we have evolution to explain everything.

Why women just aren’t down with the sexual revolution: ev psych explains

Prof. Campbell helpfully explains how ‘evolution’ gives us emotions so that we do what’s good for us:

Evolution often acts through positive or negative emotions which draw us towards adaptive behaviours or drives us away from harmful ones. For example, we enjoy other people’s company but get depressed if we spend too much time alone. Basic emotions guide us down pathways that have been advantageous for our ancestors. It seemed obvious that if our female ancestors really were adapted to short–term relationships they ought to enjoy them, just like men do.

That sound you hear is me pulling clumps of hair from my scalp and running around the room shrieking; yes, I’m far away in Australia, but listen carefully… Okay, let’s try this again: are we using the Internet survey on our female ancestors?

Seriously, where do I begin on this one. Let’s do it nicely, if we can. For this to be true, the following would have to hold:
1) All or at least the vast majority of emotions would have to correlate with being ‘good for us’ (uh-oh, see recent story on ‘part of the brain’ which allegedly makes us want to ‘try new things,’ like say, those delicious-looking red mushrooms with white spots in my yard).

2) Emotions would need to be pretty inflexible in their development and it shouldn’t be too easy to develop strong emotions about irrelevant issues for survival (like, say, shame at being naked or phobias about things that didn’t seem to correlate to survival issues, like fear of the number ’13′ or of elevators).

3) It would be helpful if there weren’t more proximate causes for the social emotion that might better explain it, like, oh say, hundreds or maybe even thousands of years of religious teaching, literature, popular stories, social mores, patriarchal structures, and the like that might, just might, be a viable way to explain why someone might feel a bit ‘negatively’ about ‘casual sex’ (which already seems to me like a term that casts the behavior in a negative light; how about ‘entrepreneurial sex’ or ‘adventure sex’ or ‘high efficiency sex’ or ‘New Sex Lite with a 1/3 less commitment!’…).

4) If ‘evolution’ made it so, then it should be pretty uniform in the species, right!? So why do 54% of women and 80% of men feel positive about casual sex? If evolution makes it so, why isn’t that closer to, I don’t know, 0% and 100% respectively?

5) I know ‘basic emotions’ are supposed to lay down clear instructions for life, but there’s another possibility for women being almost evenly split after a one-night stand: maybe their feelings depend on the quality of the event. Or, maybe people feel ambivalently about ‘one-night stands.’

5) And although this isn’t really in the whole ‘evolutionary psychology’ framework: isn’t the press release confusing two different arguments? What was that stuff about the ‘feminist and sexual revolutions’ changing attitudes towards sex? We don’t have an internet survey on one-night stands done in 1880 or anything, but do you think there’s a chance that, if we did, the numbers might look a little different?

Ignoring the loose ends: Ev Psych goes silent

Buried in the later parts of the press release, unexplained by the ‘evolution makes chicks choosy’ argument, are all these little bits that never show up in the popular press version. For example, according to Campbell, ‘Women found the experience less sexually satisfying and, contrary to popular belief, they did not seem to view taking part in casual sex as a prelude to long-term relationships.’ Hmmm… Is this another potential explanation for the disparity in how men and women felt? Perhaps 80% of men had a good time, and 46% of women found the whole event ‘less sexually satisfying’ than the blokes.

That is, if you went in with a different framework for explanation — like, ‘too many guys in one-night stands don’t know how to satisfy women’ or ‘women are better at sex than men’ — you could construct another story around this data that was equally plausible — no, more plausible — than women are programmed to want long-term relationship (errrr… except for the majority 54% who had positive experiences and the fact that they didn’t see casual sex as a prelude to long-term relationships. Again, can someone explain to me why the evolutionary-programmed fembots were doing one-night gigs at all as it is inherently against their programming?).

The kicker for me in the press release is the discussion of what emotions the women actually did feel. Did they feel emotions that were clearly linked to mating and reproduction, to those driving ‘basic emotions’ programmed into us by evolution to lead us down ‘pathways that have been advantageous for our ancestors.’ No, they felt mostly social emotions and some complex ambivalence about their own sense of identity:

The predominant negative feeling reported by women was regret at having been “used”. Women were also more likely to feel that they had let themselves down and were worried about the potential damage to their reputation if other people found out. Women found the experience less sexually satisfying and, contrary to popular belief, they did not seem to view taking part in casual sex as a prelude to long-term relationships.
“What the women seemed to object to was not the briefness of the encounter but the fact that the man did not seem to appreciate her. The women thought this lack of gratitude implied that she did this with anybody,” Professor Campbell explained.

This account seems to me to be far richer than ‘Mama-evolution-makes-girls-feel-guilty-about-getting-jiggy.’ The emotions described are not ‘basic emotions.’ Those would be fear, anger, happiness, anxiety, panic, surprise… Instead we have complex social emotions like regret at having been used, worry about potential damage to reputation, a sense of having ‘let themselves down,’ objecting to being under-appreciated, and concern that a lack of gratitude suggested they were indiscriminate in sexual choices. That last one requires a pretty sophisticated sense of self, desire to been seen in a particular way by others, and attribution to others of specific attitudes. As I reread it, I’m not even sure that I can follow it, let alone feel it in the compelling sort of way that it can guide me on the right ‘pathway.’

The survey wouldn’t really tell us anything terribly new without the ‘evolution’ framework propped up around it; in fact, I was kind of surprised to hear that only 46% of women regretted ‘one-night stands,’ that distinctly anxiety-producing Western sexual encounter, so often defined in the negative and fueled by booze in the bizarre forums where unmarried people try to sort out sexual lives. (And by this, I don’t mean to imply that married ways of sorting out sexual lives are any less bizarre, just that they don’t tend to get sorted out in the same places — I can’t say whether booze is more or less likely to be involved.) Campbell’s data is still interesting, but a bit of longitudinal leverage might give us a clearer sense of whether attitudes toward ‘one-night stands’ are changing among men or women.

But I can imagine that the only reason that this piece got the mileage it did was because the ‘evolution’ story was tied to familiar sex-role stereotypes. I’ve already had a couple of goes at evolutionary psychology for tagging labored evolutionary ‘explanations’ onto normal (often stereotyping) psychology research (for example, Bad brain science: Boobs caused subprime crisis and Craving money, chocolate and… justice). It’s hard to know sometimes whether to just laugh at the stuff or to cry, but when stories like this get so much attention, it’s hard not to wind up with the weepies.

Finally, I just have to take issue with the title of one of the popular accounts of Prof. Campbell’s research. The Daily Record (UK) titled its piece, Science finds evolutionary reason behind women’s hatred of one-night stands. Let’s just get this clear: ‘Science’ didn’t find the ‘evolutionary reason,’ like it was hidden behind the shrubs or fallen between the couch cushions, or even like one ‘finds’ a new species or a neurotransmitter. Evolutionary psychologists tend to assume from the very first moment that social phenomena will have ‘evolutionary reasons,’ and then discover them. All Prof. Campbell found was what her survey data gave her; she interpreted it the way she did — the ‘evolutionary reason’ — although there are other, at-least-as-plausible non-evolutionary reasons that the data might look this way. As a genetics researcher recently said in an article I discuss in a later post (Bench and couch), ‘finding’ this sort of explanation is sort of like packing your own lunch box and then getting surprised by what you find when lunch rolls around.

References

Campbell, Anne. 2008. The morning after the night before. Affective reactions to one-night stands among mated and unmated women and men. Human Nature 19(2) 157-173. doi: 10.1007/s12110-008-9036-2

Credit: Graphic from Despair Inc., Demotivators (Regret).

Cartoon from www.gapingvoid.com archives. Hugh MacLeod is great — check out his site.

In June, Jan Hoffman of the New York Times wrote “When Thumbs Up Is No Comfort,” reflecting on Ted Kennedy’s diagnosis with cancer and the ways in which the public obliges cancer patients to remain hopeful and strong while they ‘battle’ the ubiquitous and relentless disease.

Senator Kennedy presented an unfailingly upbeat attitude throughout his bout with a brain tumor, aided by such media images of him flashing a ‘thumbs-up’ to a crowd after a recent sailing race.

“Whether you’re a celebrity or an ordinary person, it’s obligatory, no matter how badly you’re feeling about it, to display optimism publicly,” said Dr. Barron H. Lerner, the author of “When Illness Goes Public.”

That optimism reassures anxious relatives, the public and doctors, regardless of whether it accurately reflects the patient’s emotional state. “If Ted Kennedy wanted to stick up his middle finger,” Dr. Lerner added, “that would be the more appropriate finger, but he’s doing what he is supposed to.”

Our ethnographic research with breast cancer patients here in South Bend, Indiana suggests that women are also fighting back against this so-called tyranny of optimism. Not by flashing the middle finger but by laughing!

Ostensibly, this humor seems to reflect that patients are cheerful and hopeful, just as the public obliges for women ‘battling’ breast cancer. But after thirty interviews and multiple participant observation sessions, we discovered that the use of humor among breast cancer patients extends far deeper. Essentially it is a covert rejection of these cheerful expectations ascribed to breast cancer patients.

In fact, these ‘bad gals’ of breast cancer described how personalized and often crude humor, relating to everything from hair loss to hot flashes to breast reconstruction, is a proud way of asserting one’s individuality and personality. It also forces others to acknowledge that cancer is a painful reality, and one that deserves recognition.

Breast cancer patients arguably have to deal with the expectation of cheeriness more than any other group. For the last fifteen years, it has been virtually impossible not to drive a car, enter a supermarket, or live through the month of October without feeling entangled in a web of pink ribbons. The arsenal of the pink ribbon acts as the unanimous symbol of support, as unwavering as the marches and speeches that go along with it. And this pink ribbon campaign consistently portrays the image of a middle-aged, white, beautiful woman whose life has been tragically put on hiatus while she valiantly fights the disease.

Somewhere between the ribbons on yogurt lids and rear bumpers of cars, society has lost touch with the reality of breast cancer and who suffers from it. In the United States breast cancer is affecting women (and men!) of all races, ages, socioeconomic statuses, and sexual orientations, leaving the many who do not fit the pink ribbon mold to have to reassert their personal identities and disavow themselves from society’s false pretenses.

How does humor act to reverse this growing trend?

Take an example from Jeannie. “Wait ‘til you see my double D’s!” she proudly proclaimed after receiving a partial mastectomy.

Or Marjorie, dealing with work because there was no easy hiatus from getting on with her life. A colleague, seeing her hair loss after chemotherapy, commented, “Marjorie, I see you got a new hair-do.” She gave a laughing in-your-face reply, “Yeah, well that’s what happens when you get CANCER! Ha!” The startled man began to apologize profusely while she just laughed at the situation.

For Marjorie, this teasing reply showed she was “just being herself.” Just being herself meant being an African-American woman, getting over cancer, working hard at her job, and going about her daily life with a bald head. Humor allowed Marjorie to exude her true personality, to show others that she was enduring a struggle and trump the overly demure and impersonal image of that pink-ribbon patient. She made no apologies if that startled people or appeared out-of-context.

But wait- Breast cancer is… funny?

Well, no. In fact, there is nothing humorous about chemotherapy, mastectomies, hysterectomies, and the looming fear of death. But when a breast cancer patient initiates humor, especially with those outside of ‘cancer-world,’ she is forcing the receiver of the humor to recognize that there is more to her than just the disease, the doctors, and thumbs-up enthusiasm.

Much of the humor used by patients and survivors revolves around such dreaded side effects such as hair loss, breast deformation, and hot flashes (for the actual humorous accounts, pick up a copy of Underneath it All: Humor and Breast Cancer at Memorial Hospital South Bend). Humor acts as a blunt affirmation that a woman has accepted cancer, recognizes the struggle, and wants others to know that while it is difficult, she will prevail — on her own terms. So, what may seem like inappropriate or out-of-place laughter is really a lighter way of proclaiming that a woman is still a woman.

In addition to being overly-patronizing, the forceful expectation of being constantly positive heightens the anxiety of cancer by demonstrating that patients are essentially not entitled to their human feelings of pain and worry. One patient described this frustration with the public’s assertion of optimism because it completely blots out the entire struggle and makes it seem as if the pain of cancer is not happening. “Cancer sucks!” she said bluntly. “There’s nothing that can change that.”

Frustrated with the rosy-colored glasses- er, ribbons- that kept people from acknowledging what was truly happening in her life, humor helped this woman to both express her great efforts and trump the falsely-idyllic image of breast cancer patients.

No one ‘scripts’ cancer into their life, so when it hits, a patient strives to have as much power over the seemingly uncontrollable disease. Yet very real constraints set on by biomedical regiments of chemotherapy, surgeries, and radiation make the reality of taking control a Sisyphean task. The issue is exacerbated when patients lack the ability to express their emotions, concerns, fears, and triumphs by an overbearing social expectation.

Certainly hopefulness is a very real and necessary aspect of dealing with the hardship of cancer, but patients feel a significant drain when they feel like being positive is a duty. Moreover, such an obligation keeps cancer patients from feeling worried, angry, depressed – all of which are normal human emotions.

Humor lets women acknowledge these feelings and also exert their own sense of control—to laugh at that which threatens. Not always at first, when the diagnosis and chemotherapy strike hard, but over time yes. Laughing showed they were human, a person who was alive, not caught between a deadly disease and forced societal optimism.

When we take a ‘stand’ against breast cancer, are we really telling breast cancer patients that we care about their struggle, about who they are and what they feel? Perhaps next time, along side that pink ribbon, we ought to share a laugh with a patient. For that woman, having her true voice heard could be the best support available.

Image from: www.save2ndbase.com
Thanks to: Margaret McKinney-Arnold and African American Women in Touch for their support, and the other students–especially Stephanie Pelligra, Caroline Nally, and Katie Carroll–who helped with this research.

Graphic from Slate

Of course, there are cognitive differences between men and women, but the punchline of almost all sex difference research is that the extent of the difference between any two individuals, be they male or female, tends to vastly outweigh the average difference between the sexes.

Furthermore, while some of these books suggest the differences are innate many studies have found the differences change markedly over time and are influenced by cultural or social factors.

The series is well-researched, easy to digest and looks at the areas of communication, empathy, maths ability and development during childhood. It’s also accompanied by a three-part video discussion, which tackles similar issues.

And, as a bonus, when you link through to the material on Slate, there’s heaps of other links, including related book reviews, video segments, and other items (although some of it is not as solid as Schaffer’s work).
Graphic from Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2194486/entry/2194488/.