Kieran Healy

Gender Humbug

Via Maria Farrell I see that yet another psychologist is laughing all the way to the bank with a book and multiple choice quiz about essential differences in the brains of men and women. A significant commonality in the brains of men and women is an endless appetite for tests of this sort that comfortingly reinforce what you already know. Men, clever boys that they are, typically have a high “systemising quotient” because their brains are “hard-wired” for understanding and building systems. Women, the soppy girls, are hard wired for empathy and sensitivity and caring. While men are driven to “extract underlying rules that govern the behaviour of a system; and the drive to construct systems” women are out in the hall yakking on the phone.

All kinds of things about this kind of pop gender research bug the living shite out of me. How big is the within-group variation compared to the between-group variation? Before rushing to infer hard-wired differences between brains, is there any effort to control for role structure and culturally-driven expectations about appropriate gender behavior? And do you think these are leading questions:

If I were buying a car, I would want to obtain specific information about its engine capacity.

I am fascinated by how machines work.

If I were buying a stereo, I would want to know about its precise technical features.

When I read the newspaper, I am drawn to tables of information, such as football league scores or stock market indices.

That last one is my favorite. Compare and contrast them to the following questions I just made up:

If I were buying bedsheets, I would want to obtain specific information about the threadcount.

When I go grocery shopping, I bring a detailed list with me and tend to keep track of how food prices change from week to week.

When I watch football games on television, I often get very excited or emotional about them.

I keep my house clean, tidy and well-organized.

The following are left as exercises for the reader: (1) Suggest how swapping in a few of the new questions would change the balance of results on the test, and thus our inferences about hard-wired-for-eternity differences between the sexes. (2) The great thing about gender-role typing is its immense abliity to rationalize awkward cases as deviant or account for them in a way that preserves the core idea about fundamental differences. Show how each of the new questions can be interpreted within a stereotypical framework of gender roles provided we’re not too concerned about consistency with the other questions, thus making us feel better again.

(Incidentally, I don’t want any comments to the effect that the above complaints make me some kind of cardboard-cutout PoMo blank-slater. That wouldn’t be very analytical of you.)

Mars, Venus, and Surveys

So you know how men are from Mars and women are from Venus? Well, Kieran Healy explains how you rig the survey questions to get the answers you want to hear in order to make it true.On the other hand,…

Hey, great post, thanks! I’ve posted a follow-up (no trackback option for me) here:
http://www.esztersblog.com/archives/00000296.html

Great post! I love the bedsheets-threadcount question. To which I might add the following:

“When I bake a cake, I am careful to measure each ingredient accurately and precisely.”

THANK YOU. I took the tests yesterday out of curiosity and was overwhelmingly irritated with the questions myself.

Someone on Theresa Nielsen Hayden’s blog (from where I got the links) also asked a good question: cannot emotions be understood as a kind of system themselves? Why are they considered anti-systematic?

You PoMo blank slater, you.

OK, but a serious question. I’ve always been a little bugged by the emphasis on between group vs. within group differences. Even if there’s lots of within group variation, and I think there always would be in any study of human behavior, isn’t between group variation still of interest? Within group variation doesn’t invalidate between group variation, does it?

(Assuming, of course, that all the statistics are properly drawn etc. etc. I’m just asking as a hypothetical, nothing to do with the acutal quiz at hand.)

Good post—essentially much of this type of pop research might as well be based on second-rate comedians’ jokes about pulling over and asking for directions.

As for Kevin’s question—all data is good data and should be exploited. You want to use both and hopefully exploit it to answer what might commonly driving in-group and between group variation. In simple terms, are demographics of members of the different groups with similar scores similar or different? So a man who stays home with kids might consistently be lower on some scale as are women in similar situations. Quick example so don’t overanalyze it.

Suppose they asked questions like these instead:

A. When I buy a jock strap, I care deeply that the color be a beige, deep blue or black rather than pink, but care little about the details of its manufacture.

B. When I buy makeup, I study the ingredients, paying particular attention to details about its chemical composition.

Some of My Best Friends Are Numbers

Kieran Healy has a great post that makes clear the extent to which the social sciences often simply reinscribe norms and prejudices in their own language and with their peculiar authority. This raises an ethical point, I think, about the status of the …

Life Considered as a Series of Multiple Choice Questions

So, while waiting for a simulation to finish running, I’ve just taken the “Essential Differences” quiz at the Guardian. According to my (unfeigned) answers, I’m an emotionally normal woman (which my wife finds laughable) and an autistic man. How I…

Kevin, the obvious answer is that a large between/within group variation ratio would indicate that the group membership tag carries more information, compared to working with the groups pooled into a single group.

1) For example, let’s consider marketing/market research. If the male/female between-group differences were very large, compared to the within gender differences, then knowing if somebody was male or female would be a more useful marketing datum, than if the opposite were true.

2) If the the between-group differences are small, compared with the within-group variation, then the quality of the survey will be important – measurement error and bias could easily dominate.
As Kiernan, Invisible Adjunct and QrazyQat have pointed out, changing the questions could easily lead to flipping the results around.

3) If the the between-group differences are small, compared with the within-group variation, then the effects of environment will be important, and the data will reflect socialization, not inherent differences. To the extent that somebody is treated differently from birth depending on their genitals, true inherited genetic effects are swamped by socialization effects (i.e., measured heritibility is lowered).

In short, the conclusions resulting from bad science should be taken with a grain of salt.

To be fair, they do have the question,
“When I look at a painting, I’m interested in what technique was used” in there.

Barry, in an otherwise very good answer I think your third point has a non-sequitur. Surely what you mean is that effects which vary within the group will be more important than effects that vary between the groups. But it says nothing about whether such effects are environmental or hereditary.
I’ve never understood the allergy of social science people to arguments from heredity. Surely the real point to make is the one you made earlier – that group membership (whether membership is hereditarily or environmentally determined) tells us little where within-group variance is large relative to between-group variance.

More on that puzzle..

THERE’S BEEN A LOT of commentary on that puzzle I linked to on the weekend from more learned bloggers such

Elusis asks “cannot emotions be understood as a kind of system themselves?” – yes: emotions are part of the limbic system.

i for one loathe psychometrics. :) the tests are easy to fake, people often understand the questions differently, there’s hardly ever any situational context…and so on.

I think the problem, DD, is that arguments from heredity are usually (and hopelessly) caught up in almostly purely societally constructed concepts, up to and including the concept of gender itself. (Not the male vs. female part, but the attributes that those represent). It is possible, of course, to make a point about heredity, but the question of underlying assumptions makes it far more difficult and prone to error than most would find comfortable.

My question is simple: why on earth do people think that human behavior and the human mind is so easy to glean from such simple materials? I’m all for surveying, when done properly (this wasn’t), but the only system I can think of that’s more complex than the human mind is a large group of them.

Today I’m a Pink Construction Worker

Cool find by Bob. The Gender Genie is, of course, irresistible. Feeding a bunch of my posts into it reveals me to be about 75% female. After about five posts, I could pretty much predict when I’d be male (here and here, for example). I also tried a cou…