Gender and Choice in Education and Occupation

John Radford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415153942
• eBook ISBN: 9781134735662
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Despite many years of equality of choice, boys and girls continue to differ in both the subjects they study at school and later in the careers they decide to pursue. In this collection of papers by leading researchers from academic and practitioner backgrounds, the current evidence from a range of fields is reviewed. Drawing on both their own original research and that of others, the contributors consider topics as diverse as subject choice in secondary school, differences in brain functions between the sexes, the comparison of men and women in management and recruiting women to science and technology.

1: BRAINSEX AND OCCUPATION¹

Ernest Govier

To begin at the beginning, along with both Dylan Thomas and the King of Hearts, our gender and our choices both take their origins in hereditary endowment, that which is constituted at the moment of conception. From that point on, environment comes into play. The first environment is of course the foetus, that is to say, the mother’s body of which it is part. After birth, physiological factors, particularly the hormone system, continue to contribute to the shaping of the individual. Ernest Govier discusses some of the relationships between these factors and later choice of occupation.

Sex roles: socially learned or biologically determined?

It is, of course, a truism that males and females typically have different roles in life. It has often been argued in the psychological and sociological literature that these roles stem from social processes which operate during the development of children to mould them into behaving in ways that are sex-appropriate (Bandura 1977). This process, in turn, leads people into occupations which are seen as appropriate for their sex. This view has held sway since about the mid-1960s but recently it has been argued that, at least in part, sex-role differences, of which occupational choice is an important component, are the result of differences in brain structure and organisation. The argument runs as follows: sex-typed brains which differ in organisation and function will result in sex differences in abilities, interests, levels of aggression, motives, emotional characteristics, and so on. These differences will, in turn, influence the social roles, including the occupational role, that the sexes will feel most comfortable in filling (Berenbaum 1978; Harshman et al. 1983; Kimura 1992).

This chapter will review the evidence that there are sex differences both in the function and structure of the human brain and will go on to describe experiments in cognitive psychology involving procedures called, ‘dichotic listening tests’ which have yielded evidence that our brain organisation plays a major role in our choice of occupation. It follows from this that our ‘brainsex’ influences our job choice but, as we shall see, it does not follow that all males will want to follow the same set of occupations and females another set. In fact, there is growing evidence that there is not one single type of brain that all men share and another that all women share. The evidence is rather that the brains of males and females range from those which are very typical for their sex in functional organisation to those which are more typical of the ‘opposite’ sex. Actually, an analogous state of affairs can be seen in the range of physiques. The body types of males, range from, for example, that of a body-builder which, in terms of muscular development, is at the extreme ‘masculine’ end of the dimension, to the other more ‘feminine’ end, at which a male would be slender, with much less muscle development, narrower shoulders and proportionately wider hips. Similarly, the body types of females range from the more ‘masculine’ bodies of say, female body-builders (masculine in terms of their muscle development) to the very feminine bodies of Hollywood film starlets. These body types indicate the range in muscular development in what might be regarded as the normal population with many men and women overlapping in the development of their musculature. And so it is with brainsex. The dichotic listening data, which will be described later in this chapter, indicate that some males have brains which appear to be organised, at least in some respects, in an apparently female fashion. Similarly, some female brains appear to be more functionally male-differentiated. Thus, ‘brainsex’ may be a matter of degree, and the simple categories, female and male, when applied to brains, may be an intellectual convenience rather than an accurate reflection of brain organisation. Before developing this point further the experimental research on psychological sex differences will be reviewed.

The experimental evidence

Over the last twenty years, several lines of psychological research have converged on the notion that there are sex differences in the way in which the brain is organised. The research fields which have led to this conclusion include experimental cognitive psychology, neurophysiological and neuroanatomical research, and studies using modern brain-imaging techniques. Hitherto, most of the studies have concentrated on the task of searching for differences between males and females, either in their performance of a wide range of tasks or in the structure and function of their brains. This strategy is an understandable and obvious first step in trying to tease out the complexities of group and individual variations in brain organisation, although it does have the disadvantage of leading to, initially at least, an emphasis on, ‘the two sexes’.

Evidence from experimental cognitive psychology

One line of research, which has recently been summarised by Halpern (1992), has focused on cognitive differences between men and women. There is now some measure of agreement that there are several cognitive areas in which the sexes perform differently. For example, female performance in many tests of verbal skill has been shown to be superior to that of males. Females perform better than males in tests of speech fluency, anagram solution and general tests of verbal ability. Indeed, two verbal tasks, those of synonym generation (Hines 1990) and consonant-word matching, (Block et al. 1989) have shown such enormous female advantages that tests to determine whether they were statistically significant were unnecessary. That is to say, there was only a modest overlap between the scores of the females and those of the males. The exception to this general pattern was the male advantage in the use of analogies.

There is also a female advantage in arithmetic but a male advantage in geometry and mathematical problem-solving. These mathematical differences are small for the general population but dramatic at the highest levels of ability (the top 6 per cent) where, in mathematical problem-solving, males are thirteen times more likely to be represented than females. This finding has proved to be remarkably robust over a fifteen-year period of careful research (Benbow 1988). Among the spatial skills there is a mixed picture, mainly because researchers in this area are still trying to identify the different types of abilities involved in solving the sorts of problems posed by tests of, ‘spatial skill’. A preliminary attempt to analyse the factors involved in tests of visual-spatial ability (Linn and Petersen 1986) has indicated that they seem to be composed of three processes.

First, spatial perception: the ability to locate the vertical and horizontal while ignoring distracting context. Examples of tasks which could be said to test this are the ‘rod and frame test’ and the ‘water level test’. In the former, the subject sits strapped in a chair in a darkened experimental cubicle, with a large, illuminated rectangular frame in front of him or her. Inside the frame is an illuminated rod and these are the only things visible to the subject. The chair in which the subject sits can be tilted by the experimenter (who operates from outside the experimental cubicle), a procedure which is somewhat disorienting. The subject can, by moving a control knob, turn the illuminated rod through 360 degrees. The experimental procedure is as follows; the experimenter tilts the chair and sets the frame at an angle to the vertical whereupon the subject is required to adjust the rod to the true vertical. Of course, this requires the subject to make the judgement while compensating for the distracting information from his or her eyes and sense of balance. The error, as measured in degrees of angular deviation of the rod from the true vertical, is noted by the experimenter and the procedure is repeated for a number of trials. In general, the average error for females is greater than the average error for males. In the water level test the subject is shown diagrams of jugs or tumblers depicted as having been tilted from the vertical to varying degrees and his or her task is to draw the water level on the diagram. Again, the error can be measured, and again, the average male error is lower (Thomas et al. 1973; Kalichman 1989).

Second, mental rotation: the ability to imagine the appearance of rotated objects or how shapes would look when folded or unfolded. Typically, the subject doing a mental rotation test would be presented with a drawn target shape and would be required to choose from among several items the one which represented the target shape in a different orientation, either rotated left/right, or forward/backward, but sometimes both. Or the subject may be presented with pairs of figures and he or she is asked to decide whether the members of each pair are versions of the same figure in different orientations or mirror images (Shepard and Metzler 1971). In these tasks, response time and number correct may be noted. On average, males respond faster and more accurately, to the extent that this sort of test produces arguably the largest male advantage of all the tests of spatial ability and the size of the male advantage is similar to the magnitude of the female advantage on synonym generation tests.

Third, spatial visualisation: the ability to see simple shapes within complex patterns. This is tested using ‘embedded figures tests’. In these tests the subject is presented with a simple target shape next to a complex line-drawing which ‘contains’ the target shape and the task is to find the target in the complex drawing. The response time is noted. Again, there tends to be a male advantage in these tests (Hyde et al 1975).

Even in what we might think of as intermediate-level skills there are sex differ-ences. Garai and Scheinfeld (1968) have shown that females’ hearing is more acute than males’ and about six times as many females as males can sing in tune. McGuiness (1976) has shown that females see better in the dark and are more sensitive to the red end of the spectrum, while males see better in very bright light than females. Males have a narrower visual field but have a better sense of depth. Hutt (1972) and Reinisch et al. (1987) have shown that females react faster and more acutely to pain but their ability to withstand chronic discomfort is greater than that of males. McGuiness (1976) has shown that females have a tactile superiority as measured by the ability to detect pressure on the skin, such that the least sensitive female is more sensitive than the most sensitive male. Garai and Scheinfeld (1968) also found that females were more sensitive than males to bitter flavours like quinine and preferred sweeter tastes than males. Reinisch et al. (1987) point out that the female sense of smell is superior, a largely ignored field of study but one which underlies extraordinary sex differences in perfume buying behaviour, and possibly in strategies for mate selection. Finally, males are better at simple, manual tracking tasks in which, for example, the subject is required to watch a dot move across a television screen and press a button as it coincides with a line on the screen (Smith and McPhee 1987; Schiff and Oldak 1990). This skill, together with their much higher levels of aggression, may, in part, account for the young male’s delight in computer games and the general male obsession with competitive ball games!

It will be apparent from this brief review of the experimental cognitive sex-difference literature that researchers have assumed homogeneity within the categories, ‘male’ and ‘female’. Typically, samples of females and males are recruited, often from among student populations, a test of some skill or ability is administered and the results analysed for between-sex differences. In fact, there is always a range of scores among the males which overlaps with the female range and, depending on the shape of the distributions and the number of subjects used, the statistical analysis will indicate a between-group difference even when there is substantial overlap. This overlap has largely been ignored but represents a large number of people whose brain organisation ought to provide useful insights into the factors which influence men and women to behave in gender-atypical ways. As we shall see later, these people have provided extremely useful insights into the relationship between cognitive organisation and life-choices.

Evidence from neuroscience

Researchers at Yale University have recently used a technique which allowed them to produce pictures of living, active brains showing the areas of greatest activity. The technology which has made this possible is very new and extremely expensive. It is called Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) and early in 1995 the team at Yale reported what many researchers in the field of sex-difference research see as a landmark study. Sally and Bennett Shaywitz and their colleagues studied nineteen males and nineteen females, each of whom was tested in an FMRI machine. The subjects lay inside the four-foot long tube which, with its accompanying computers, was able to accurately map the activity in the subject’s brain while he or she decided whether pairs of nonsense words presented visually on a screen, rhymed. The subjects did not have to say the words out loud, they just had to think about how they would sound. An example of a nonsense word pair was loke and jote. The results were startling; in each of the nineteen male subjects a region in the left inferior frontal gyrus became very active while the subjects were working on the task but in the female subjects not only did that area’s activity increase but the equivalent area in the right hemisphere also became more active. This demonstration of bilateral brain involvement in a verbal task in females but not in males is congruent with the female verbal advantage described earlier in this chapter as well as findings from the dichotic listening studies described later. Moreover, although all of the males’ brains behaved similarly, only eleven of the nineteen females showed the clear bilateral pattern, eight of the female subjects produced brain activity which was similar to the male pattern; a finding which supports the view that our ‘brainsex’ is not a simple categorical attribute but rather may better be conceptualised in dimensional terms. Clearly, in this study eight of the females had brains which were, in this respect, more male-like. Again, this finding has important implications for the interpretation of the data from the dichotic experiments described later in the chapter.

Sex differences in the functional activity of the brain have also been found in subjects solving mathematical problems. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is another form of brain-imaging technique which can discriminate areas of intense brain activity from areas which are less active. A study of twenty-two male and twenty-two female students revealed an intriguing pattern of results. Eleven males and eleven females were chosen because they had scored over 700 on a standard maths test while the other half of each subject sample scored around 540. While they were solving maths problems the high-scoring males showed markedly increased brain activity in the temporal lobes compared to the lower-scoring males but no differences in brain activity were observed between high-and low-scoring females (Haier and Benbow 1995). The mathematicallyable females did not seem to be using any more ‘neural effort’ than the females with average ability while the able males seemed to be using much more than the less-able males. Although it is difficult to interpret these patterns of activity they do indicate functional differences in the way the male and female brains in this sample operated on these particular maths problems.

But, modern brain-imaging techniques have not just been used to investigate the biological correlates of cognitive sex differences. Perhaps the most marked sex differences are in interests, motivation and emotions. Raquel Gur and Ruben Gur have used PET scans to measure brain activity in males and females while they were looking at male and female faces. The subject’s task was to judge whether the faces were showing happiness or sadness. Both males and females were equally good at picking out happiness and recognising sadness on male faces but the females were over 30 per cent better than males at recognising sadness on female faces. The PET scans showed that the limbic system in the female brains was less active while they were making these judgments than the limbic system of the male brains (Gur et al. 1995).

Mark George and his colleagues PET-scanned the brains of ten males and ten females while they were imagining sad events such as funerals or divorces. The limbic systems of both the male and female subjects increased their activity while engaged on these tasks but the area of increased activity was eight times bigger in the female brains than the male brains (George et al. 1996).

Interpretation of the results of these studies is difficult. But, clearly, the answer lies in the tasks in which the subjects were required to engage; the recognition of emotion on the faces of others is very different to experiencing emotion. Nevertheless, it is clear that there are differences in brain activity which are related to sex. In fact, there has been a recent explosion in research into sex differences in brain activity as researchers have discovered that their results are much easier to interpret when male and female results are analysed separately. In one very recent study in which males and females performed a cognitive task, Mansour et al. 1996 found seven brain regions showing sex differences in activity. These studies are in their infancy but as they become ever more sophisticated they will be crucial not just in demonstrating that the brains of men and women function differently but in clarifying the functional differences within each sex.

As well as the very modern and powerful brain-imaging techniques, sex-related structural brain differences have been found using the older neuroanatomical methods. Although many minor differences in structure between male and female brains have been noted since the 1880s, differences are now emerging which seem more fundamental. For example, in 1991 Laura Allen and Roger Gorski studied 146 brains from cadavers and found that the anterior commissure, which is an axonal connection between the left and right halves of the cerebral cortex, is generally larger in women than men. This finding has been interpreted as providing some of the physiological underpinning for the view that the two cerebral hemispheres of female brains are capable of more efficient co-operation on some tasks than are the two hemispheres of male brains. This, of course, fits well with the finding of Shaywitz et al. (1995) and the dichotic listening experiment described next.

Dichotic studies and occupation

It has been argued (Berenbaum 1978 and Harshman et al. 1983) that the sex differences in brain organisa...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: BRAINSEX AND OCCUPATION
• 2: GENDER AND SUBJECT CHOICE IN SECONDARY EDUCATION
• 3: USING STEREOTYPES TO DISPEL NEGATIVE PERCEPTIONS OF CAREERS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
• 4: THE RATIO OF MALE TO FEMALE UNDERGRADUATES
• 5: ENTERING HIGHER EDUCATION OLDER STUDENTS’ CONSTRUCTIONS OF SELF AS LEARNERS
• 6: GENDER ISSUES IN EMPLOYMENT SELECTION
• 7: CHOICE: CAN WE CHOOSE IT?
• 8: AN EQUAL CHANCE TO SUCCEED?: COMPARING WOMEN AND MEN IN MANAGEMENT
• 9: WHY CAN’T A WOMAN BE MORE LIKE A MAN, OR VICE VERSA?