Thinking Critically about Research on Sex and Gender

Paula J Caplan, Jeremy Caplan

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317342915
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Sexualidad humana en psicología

The authors first demonstrate that most of the claims about sex and gender are not well supported by research, and then provide readers with constructive critical tools they can apply to this wealth of research to come to realistic, constructive conclusions. All of this is provided in a concise, inexpensive volume by a best-selling trade author and instructor team.

Chapter
1

Introduction

The Cycle of Bias

It is virtually impossible to grow up without believing that girls and boys, men and women, differ—not only physically but also in important aspects of behavior, attitudes, and abilities. Whether or not we realize it, many of these beliefs come to us directly or indirectly from scientific research on sex and gender. Because a prevalent contemporary belief is that scientists discover and describe the truth, it may not occur to us to question what we think are scientific truths. This unquestioning taking of scientists’ results or statements about sex and gender differences at face value and accepting of journalists’ pronouncements about scientific findings affect every aspect of our private and public lives. Consciously or unconsciously, every time we interact with another person, we make assumptions about what is true and natural for people depending on their sex. Countless people invest a great deal of energy worrying about whether they are doing, feeling, and believing what members of their sex are “supposed” to do, are naturally meant to do, are destined by their genes and hormones to do. When we believe that these sex-related patterns have been proven by researchers to be pervasive and inevitable, it can be surprising to find that we, or people with whom we live or work, do not fit the patterns.

However, scientists do not simply discover and describe the truth. Like everyone else, scientists who study sex and gender grew up learning what women and men are “supposed” to be like. They might have heard, for example, that boys don’t want to play with dolls (unless the dolls carry guns) and that girls cannot play hockey. These beliefs about how people are or should be influence how scientists do their research, how they see and describe the world. A girl and a boy could be doing exactly the same thing, but because one is a girl and one is a boy the activity may be described differently. For example, a girl playing with fire may be said to be demonstrating her inborn desire to cook and nurture, while a boy playing with fire might be called a natural fireman or naturally daring. It is often mistakenly assumed that scientists are free from such bias, are “objective,” able to see the world without being influenced by their own thoughts or feelings about it. Yet many psychologists do things such as appreciatively labeling as assertiveness such behavior in men as interrupting other people, which others might call rudeness (Wine, Moses, & Smye, 1980). Whichever label one chooses in such a case reflects one’s experiences and perspective. The reality is that no one is free from bias, but sometimes scientists present their interpretations of their research as though they are absolutely and objectively true. Then, people hear researchers’ claims about sex differences, assume they are true, and raise their children accordingly; some of those children become scientists who investigate sex differences, and thus the cycle of bias continues.

This book is about how scientists have looked at women and men. Scientific research is intended to be a way of trying to understand the world, of asking questions and seeking answers. The thoughts and feelings of scientists influence what questions they ask and how they are answered. For instance, the research question “Do women’s cognitive abilities decline when they are premenstrual?” is likely to yield answers that cast women in a bad light. By contrast, the question “Do females’ and males’ cognitive abilities show cyclical patterns over time?” may yield information from which one might draw rather different conclusions. The answers we get always depend partly on the way we ask the questions.

In the midst of the current information era, it has become impossible for any one person to stay informed of the results and the strengths and weaknesses of all the research that is important in our lives. Therefore, we often accept scientists’ claims as facts, not knowing that sometimes their approaches were narrow, biased, or otherwise limited. That means that our view of reality has become distorted. The purpose of this book is to assist those who wish to expand their vision by questioning some of the “facts” most of us have heard about males and females. Practicing a questioning, thoughtful approach to issues of sex and gender, and learning some of the common pitfalls in that area, is also helpful in developing the capacity for careful thinking about other issues that are replete with bias, such as the work on race, class, age, sexual orientation, disability, and appearance. The critical thinking skills presented in this book can help us not only in knowing what to ask about research reports in scholarly journals but also in thinking about claims that are made in the popular media, by our coworkers, and by our friends and family and that can affect our feelings, our personal lives, and our experiences at school and work.

Two Dangerous Assumptions

As you read and think about the research on sex differences, you will need to be aware of two major but wrong assumptions that have muddied our understanding of this work. They are

1. The assumption that if we find a “sex difference” in some ability or kind of behavior, that means that all males do a particular thing and all females do some quite different thing (e.g., all males are aggressive, and all females are passive and peace-loving). If asked directly, most researchers would probably acknowledge that in every realm of psychological research, females’ and males’ test scores or behavior overlap a great deal. Finding a “sex difference” does not mean finding that all women are one way and all men are another way (Hyde, 2005). For instance, even when a research team reports that men are more aggressive than women, that does not mean that no women are aggressive and all men are aggressive, nor does it mean that all men are aggressive to the same degree. But when we hear the term sex differences, we need to remind ourselves repeatedly that few researchers or laypeople remember how much of males’ and females’ behavior is similar—or, in other words, how much overlap there is. Hearing about a study that “proves” there is a sex difference in math ability, for instance, we often come to expect most or all females to perform worse than most or all males on math tests, although the overlap in their scores is extensive. What is commonly called a sex difference is the difference between the average score of the women who were studied and the average score of the men who were studied. An average score is reached by adding up all the individual scores and dividing by the number of individuals. Most individual women and men do not have scores (or behavior) exactly like the average score for their sex. This means that even when a sex difference is found in a study, we can’t predict how any individual will behave if all we know is their sex.

Another reason that most sex differences seem more extreme and dramatic than they really are is a result of the way most research is done. Researchers are more likely to predict that they will find differences than similarities between groups. They tend to look for differences because, if we give boys and girls a test and find that the sexes perform differently on it, we will probably get little argument if we claim to have found a sex difference. But if we give them a test and find that they do not perform differently, then it is harder to claim that there is no sex difference in what that test is supposed to measure. This is because it is hard to prove convincingly that a difference between any two groups does not exist, since it is possible that there is a difference but you missed it. People can always make such claims as, “You didn’t test enough children to get a difference; there probably is a sex difference, but it is small” or “Maybe that just wasn’t a very good test for measuring skill or behavior X” or “Maybe the children you tested are not typical of most children.” The term that is used to refer to trying to prove that there is no difference is “trying to prove the null hypothesis.”

2. The assumption that psychological sex differences are biologically based and, therefore, inevitable and unchangeable. This is an unfounded assumption. Many differences result from the different ways girls and boys are raised, and even differences that may have some biological basis—such as differences in height—have been shown to be fairly easy to modify (Hubbard, 1990; Hubbard, Henifin, & Fried, 1982). In fact, although we tend to think that nothing changes our genes, biologists now know that genes can be changed by the chemical processes in genes near to them. This means that what seems to be a simple, straightforward question—“Is a particular sex difference caused by biology or by the environment?”—is not really so simple. As biologist Margaret Thompson has said, “The environment of genes is other genes.”

It is important to understand that it is not so easy to distinguish the contributions of nature or genes from those of socialization, experience, or other environmental factors. The reason it is important is that some people are quick to claim that what is biologically caused is not only natural and inevitable but even morally right. Two conflicting forces are at work that bear on these two dangerous assumptions. On the one hand, there is antifeminist backlash, and on the other hand, there is the transgender realm. With regard to backlash, the second wave of the women’s movement, starting in the late 1960s, led many researchers to ask new kinds of research questions that were less likely to lead inevitably to “proof ” of females’ inferiority. But when more balanced questions such as the example given previously—“Do females’ and males’ cognitive abilities show cyclical patterns over time?”—yielded data that made it harder to cast women as inferior, a powerful backlash (Faludi, 1991) resulted in both the realm of scholarly research and the wider society. Those involved in the backlash have been even more eager to use research to support limitations on girls and women.

In the transgender realm, the two dangerous assumptions about sex differences have lost some of their force as a result of some decreased rigidity of sex-role prescriptions, ranging from gendered job categories to clothing styles to self-labeling as “transgendered” when asked whether one is female or male to refusing to label one’s sexual orientation. (These changes are more common in some locales than in others.) The label “transgendered” is interesting because it has the potential to reify the dichotomizing of behavior by those who say they are transgen-dered because they feel they belong to the sex “opposite” to their biological one or because they combine psychological and behavioral features of both. However, the “transgender” label also has the potential to reduce the dichotomizing, because it is sometimes used to convey the message, “I refuse to classify any aspect of feelings or behavior as either male or female. I will not consider how these things are classified by experts of any kind or by society in general” (McKenna & Kessler, 2006).

A Whole New Way of Thinking

In 2005, psychologist Janet Shibley Hyde published a groundbreaking paper challenging the “differences model,” according to which “males and females are vastly different psychologically” (p. 581). The differences model has dominated both research and the popular media. Hyde proposed a dramatically different hypothesis, that “males and females are similar on most, but not all, psychological variables.” More specifically, she predicted that most psychological sex differences would be close to zero or small, a few would be moderate, and very few would be large or very large. To test her hypothesis, she reviewed 46 meta-analyses, each of which was, itself, a combined analysis of many studies of a particular topic. These 46, Hyde wrote, were “the major meta-analyses that have been conducted” about psychological sex differences and included cognitive variables such as abilities, verbal or nonverbal communication, social or personality variables, well-being, motor behavior, and various others, including moral reasoning (p. 582). Together, they comprised more than 7,000 separate studies.

By analyzing numerous studies of sex differences about the same entity, such as mathematical ability or aggression, one finds what is called effect size, which indicates the magnitude of the sex difference. Thus, a tiny effect size might be an average sex difference of 1 point on a 100-point test, and a large one might be an average difference of, say, 15 points. Hyde found that 30 percent of the effect sizes were close to zero, and another 48 percent were small. Of the remaining effect sizes, 15 percent were moderate, 6 percent were large, and only 2 percent were very large.¹ The largest were in motor performance, specifically, throwing velocity and throwing distance, especially after puberty, but of course these are not even psychological differences, so it is curious that they were included in the study.

As we shall discuss later (Chapter 3), there are some limitations of meta-analyses. However, the importance of Hyde’s work cannot be underestimated. This is especially because studies that get published are vastly more likely to show sex differences than not to show any, and Hyde’s were virtually all published ones (the “file drawer problem”; see end of Chapter 3), so real sex differences might be even fewer and smaller than those she found. In the vast majority of this book, we look at a small number of studies in each chapter, and it is important to keep in mind that many of these studies were done from the “differences model” approach rather than from the context of Hyde’s similarities model. It will be useful to immerse yourself in each of the studies we address but at the beginning and end of each one to pull back and remember that, as Hyde showed, the vast majority of measurements of psychological sex differences are small or nonexistent.

What You Will Learn

In this section we explain the details of the main goal of this book: to teach you to think critically about sex and gender. Subsequent chapters provide various ways to achieve this goal. The chapters constitute a cumulative learning experience, but each stands on its own as well. To be able to deal adequately with the science of men and women, it is important to be aware of the variety of factors that are involved in the scientific process. In this way, you will learn the essential skills for making critical judgments of your own.

As one of us has written elsewhere (Caplan, 1994), no one need fear that they won’t be able to think critically. In fact, they already can:

I am always dismayed to hear people assert that they don’t know how to think critically or that they don’t like to question authorities because they don’t know where to begin. I find this distressing because most critical thinking involves simple logic or common sense. If you went for a walk one day and saw a dog “fall” up, you would immediately wonder what force had been strong enough to oppose the downward pull of gravity. If your child wants to swallow a wild mushroom when you are in the countryside, you first find out whether it is poisonous, and you check to make sure that there are no animal droppings on it. There is no important difference between this kind of questioning attitude and critical thinking about what authorities and experts say and do. (p. 90)

In this book, as you learn to think critically about the scientific study of sex and gender, our specific goals are for you to:

1. learn how science is conducted—both actually and ideally;

2. become increasingly able to evaluate scientists’ work (for example, to recognize that no scientist (including the authors of this book!)—and, therefore, no science—is completely free of prior expectations);

3. develop the conceptual tools you need in order to think critically about research;

4. question people’s (especially scientists’) expectations of and perspectives on women and men;

5. develop an awareness of the limitations of any individual perspective and use this awareness to analyze the limitations in perspective of all sources of information: T V, newspapers, the Internet, scientific journals, and other types of media. This means ascertaining and questioning every author’s frame of reference;

6. come to treat your own and others’ expectations of men and women not as facts but as theories which may be confirmed or challenged by the use of logic and evidence;

7. become able to evaluate these hypotheses, or working assumptions, for their usefulness in exploring some scientific issue;

8. learn to discuss all the different ways any given hypothesis could be tested;

9. increase your awareness of the scope or limitations of the methods used to test any particular theory (i.e., if a different test had been used, how might the results have been different?);

10. strive to generate as many different interpretations of the evidence as possible;

11. apply your critical analysis to statements made by scientists, or by people in everyday life, about the nature of women and men;

12. examine how language influences our perceptions of men and women, as well as how our perceptions of women and men influence our use of language about them;

13. explore the impact our beliefs about women and men have had on scientific theory and practice; and

14. consider how scientific theories of sex and gender have affected, and continue to affect, our lives.

Everyone ...