Neurosexism is an alleged bias in the neuroscience of sex differences towards reinforcing harmful gender stereotypes. The term was coined by feminist scholar Cordelia Fine in a 2008 article and popularised by her 2010 book Delusions of Gender. The concept is now widely used by critics of the neuroscience of sex differences in neuroscience, neuroethics and philosophy.
Definition Neuroscientist Gina Rippon defines neurosexism as follows: Neurosexism' is the practice of claiming that there are fixed differences between female and male brains, which can explain women's inferiority or unsuitability for certain roles." For example, "this includes things such as men being more logical and women being better at languages or nurturing."
Fine and Rippon, along with Daphna Joel, state that "the point of critical enquiry is not to deny differences between the sexes, but to ensure a full understanding of the findings and meaning of any particular report." Many of the issues they discuss to support their position are "serious issues for all areas of behavioral research", but they argue that "in sex/gender differences research... they are often particularly acute." Nonetheless, the common factor influencing logical maturity between males and females is the maturity of the frontal cortex, which matures at the age of 25, at the earliest. The topic of neurosexism is thus closely tied to wider debates about scientific methodology, especially in the behavioral sciences.
History The history of science contains many examples of scientists and philosophers drawing conclusions about the mental inferiority of women, or their lack of aptitude for certain tasks, on the basis of alleged anatomical differences between male and female brains. In the late 19th century, George J. Romanes used the difference in average brain weight between men and women to explain the "marked inferiority of intellectual power" of the latter. Absent a sexist background assumption about male superiority, there would be nothing to explain here.
Despite these historical pseudo-scientific studies, Becker et al. argue that "for decades" the scientific community has abstained from studying sex-differences. Larry Cahill asserts that today there is a widely held belief in the scientific community that sex-differences do not matter to large parts of biology and neuroscience, apart from explaining reproduction and the workings of reproduction hormones.
Although overtly sexist statements may no longer have a place within the scientific community, Cordelia Fine, Gina Rippon and Daphna Joel contend that similar patterns of reasoning still exist. They claim that many researchers who make claims about gendered brain differences fail to provide sufficient warrant for their position. Philosophers of science who believe in a value-free normative standard for science find the practice of neurosexism particularly problematic. They hold that science should be free from values and biases, and argue that only epistemic values have a legitimate role to play in scientific inquiry. However, contrary to the value-free ideal view, Heather Douglas argues that 'value-free science is inadequate science'
Examples in science
Prenatal hormone theory Contemporary research continues in a more subtle vein through Prenatal Hormone Theory. According to the Prenatal Hormone Theory, "male and female foetuses differ in testosterone concentrations beginning as early as week 8 of gestation [and] the early hormone difference exerts permanent influences on brain development and behaviour." Charges of neurosexism may then be moved against the PHT if these alleged hormonal differences are interpreted as causing the male/female brain distinction and in turn are used to reinforce stereotypical behaviours and gender roles.
Empathising–systemising theory
The notion that there are hard-wired differences between male and female brains is particularly explicit in Simon Baron-Cohen's empathising-systematising (E-S) theory. Empathy is defined as the drive to identify and respond appropriately to emotions and thoughts in others, and systematising is defined as the drive to analyse and explore a system, isolate the underlying rules that govern the behaviour of that system, and build new systems. These two characteristics can be seen amongst young girls and boys. Girls have a tendency to play with baby dolls when they are young, enacting their social and emotional skills. Boys tend to play with plastic cars, illustrating a more mechanical, system-driven mind. This may be of course due simply to the environment and to social norms. However, the empathising-systematising theory posits three broad brain types, or organisation structures: type E, the empathiser; type S, the systematiser; type B, the 'balanced brain'. Given that females are twice as likely to display brain type E, and males are twice as likely to display brain type S,Auyeung, B., Wheelwright, S., Allison, C. et al. J Autism Dev Disord (2009) 39: 1509. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-009-0772-x he labels these brain 'types' the 'female brain' and the 'male brain', respectively. This type of analysis suggests therefore that most (or at least some) differences in skills and occupation between males and females can be explained by virtue of them having different brain structures.
Baron Cohen's theory has been criticised because it presents a clear-cut dichotomy between male and female brains, whilst this is not necessarily the case: there are females with 'male brains', and males with 'female brains'. Using the gendered labels makes it significantly more likely that evidence of gendered brain differences will be over-stated in the media, in way that might actively shape the gender norms within society.
Neuroimaging In Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine criticises work by Ruben and Raquel Gur and collaborators. In the context of explaining the under-representation of women in science and mathematics, she quotes them as claiming that "the greater facility of women with interhemispheric communications may attract them to disciplines that require integration rather than detailed scrutiny of narrowly characterized processes." This contention is however corroborated by a 2014 study about the structural connectome. The study used 949 youths to establish novel sex differences, establishing the key difference that male brains are optimised for intrahemispheric communication, while female brains are optimised for interhemispheric communication. Furthermore, the development timeframe of male and female brain are vastly different. However, this study used youths from age 8 to 22, where the brain is still developing so the results may not be conclusive enough.
In a 1999 study, Gur et al. found a link between the amount of white matter in a person's brain and their performance on spatial tasks. Fine points out that the sample size of ten people is a small sample size, and the researchers tested for thirty-six different relationships in this sample. Fine argues that results like these should be treated with caution, because, given the sample size and the number of relationships tested, the correlation found between white matter volume and performance in the tasks could be a false positive. Fine accuses the researchers of downplaying the risk of a false positive after conducting many statistical analyses of past research projects, she argues that using their results as the basis of an explanation for why women are under-represented in scientific fields is inadequate here.
Fine also discusses a 2004 neuroimaging study by neuroscientist Sandra Witelson and collaborators. This study was taken to support sex differences in emotional processing by Allan and Barbara Pease in their book Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps and by Susan Pinker in her book The Sexual Paradox. Fine argues that, with a sample size of just 16, the results could easily have been false positives. She compares the study to a famous 2009 study in which, to illustrate the risk of false positives in neuroimaging research, researchers showed increased brain activity in a dead salmon during a perspective-taking task.
Dispute between Fine and Baron-Cohen A notable dispute in 2010 between Fine and neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen in The Psychologist magazine centred on a study into sex differences in the responses of newborn babies to human faces and mechanical mobiles. The research took babies under 24 hours old and showed them a human face, or a mechanical mobile. If they were shown the human face first, they were then shown the mechanical mobile and vice versa. The babies responses were recorded, and judges coded the eye movements of the babies to discern which, if either, of the stimuli the babies looked at for longer. The study concluded that female babies looked at human faces for longer, and male babies looked at mechanical mobiles for longer. Therefore, this study concluded that female brains are programmed towards empathy whereas male brains are more inclined towards practicality and building systems. This theory suggested that an individual can be characterised into having a certain "brain type" where empathising was called the brain type E, and systemising was called the brain type S. However, some individuals can be equally strong at empathising and systemising and therefore, they possess a "balanced brain". This has the brain type B.
Fine criticised the study, arguing that because the babies were shown one stimulus first and then the other, they may have become fatigued, affecting the results of the study. Furthermore, Fine also argued that the panel of judges watching the babies' eye movements may have been able to guess the sex of the baby, for example if the baby was dressed in certain clothing or had particular congratulatory cards present, giving rise to confirmation type biases. Baron-Cohen has countered these criticisms. Baron-Cohen replied to the fatigue argument by explaining that the stimuli were shown in randomised order, so as to avoid the problem of specific stimuli fatigue in either sex. In response to the claim about bias, he argued that the judges were only able to assess the babies' eye movements by watching a video of the eye area of the baby, through which it would have been almost impossible to derive the sex of the baby. Notwithstanding this, Fine argued that the effort to conceal the babies' sex from the experimenters in the room with the babies was "minimal", allowing room for implicit bias, rendering the results unreliable.
Congenital adrenal hyperplasia
Rebecca Jordan-Young provides a good case study of neurosexism in studies of those with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). Because Prenatal Hormone Theory posits early steroid hormones during fetal development as conducive to sex-typical behaviours, studies of genetic females with CAH are important to test the feasibility of this hypothesis.
Jordan-Young conducts a comprehensive review of these studies, finding them to neglect four broad categories of variables that plausibly affect psychosexual development: "(1) physiological effects of CAH, including complex disruption of steroid hormones from early development onwards; (2) intensive medical intervention and surveillance, which many women with CAH describe as traumatic; (3) direct effects of genital morphology on sexuality; and (4) expectations of masculinisation that likely affect both the development and evaluation of gender and sexuality in CAH."