THE DECONSTRUCTION OF GENDER BIAS THROUGH DISCUSSIONS OF BIOLOGY
Editor’s note: In this paper, Ellie S. (‘17) discusses how biology influences gender biases.
In modern society, many people have begun to question the foundation and evolution of gender. In our class - History, Science, and the Origins of Race and Gender - we have explored how science and history overlap to discuss gender throughout history. We have discovered that both science and social context are interwoven throughout history; while the two may not seem directly connected, they often tend to develop with each other. We have read a number of authors who have primarily addressed gender so far. Many of the readings - although different in argument, purpose, and evidence - contain common themes in their discussion of gender, and sometimes race. We have explored the intersection between science and history, and uncovered connections that we often do not realize are related. Scientific facts can not be taken as a given, and each author is able to parse apart gender or racial assumptions. It is important to keep in mind the effect of assumption, presentism, and cultural context as we discuss the common themes between authors in this field.
While Dorothy Roberts explores race and Cordelia Fine explores gender, both authors claim that embodiment dismantles ideas of biological differences between races and genders. In her essay Fatal Invention, Dorothy Roberts examines female breast cancer patients in Chicago. She explains why white women are slightly more likely to get breast cancer, but twice as many black women die of the disease (Roberts, 2011, p. 123). These statistics suggest that breast cancer mortality is connected to race, however Roberts unravels this idea by explaining the idea of embodiment. She defines embodiment by quoting scholar Nance Kreiger: “the many, many, many ways that we literally incorporate the world outside of us in expression of our biology” (Roberts, 2001, p. 130). Roberts looks at African-American women’s access to good hospitals, housing situations, access to health care, and overall healthiness, and she concludes that their environment is the primary influence on their health. She argues that “race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people’s health” (2011, p. 129). There is a cause and effect over time based on the environment that one lives in, which is often connected to socioeconomic status and race. Often, a person’s environment ends up affecting their biology because of social and economic factors. Embodiment is a common theme in the discussion of gender and is used to deconstruct gender stereotypes routed in false biological concepts.
Cordelia Fine, author of Delusions of Gender, also looks at embodiment but from a gendered lens, instead of a racial lens. Fine explores performance in mathematics between men and women in different cultures. She uses the concept of embodiment to argue that different cultures set social cues, which people absorb and act upon. For example, in the United States white boys are between 1.5 and 2 times as likely to achieve between the 95th and 99th percentile in math scores compared to their white, female counterparts; however, in Asian-American children, in the 95th percentile boys had less of an advantage and there were more girls than boys in 99th percentile (Fine, 2010, p. 181). Fine explains these statics by arguing that in American society girls are told they cannot be good at math, while in Asian societies girls are encouraged to take part in math. Similarly to Roberts, Fine blames the environment arguing that cues “represented in existing inequalities; in commercials; in conversations; in the minds, expectations, or behavior of others; or primed in our own minds by the environment - alter our self-perception, interests, and behavior” (2010, p.95). There is a drip effect - comparable to Robert’s cause and effect - that is caused by constant social cues that tell girls they can or cannot perform well in math, but math is just one example of the drip effect. After time, social cues becomes so ingrained that they suggest a biological difference between sexes. While the two authors look at different cases, their explanation of embodiment and environment intersect to question where gendered behavior comes from and if race is connected to biology.
Another common theme throughout the literature, explores how male scientists have been able to move women out of power and the public sphere by fixating on their bodies. Many scientists looked at women’s sexuality or bodies to demonize or discredit them in some way. Clifford D. Conner in A People’s History of Science uses Francis Bacon’s sexual and violent description of Mother Nature to explain how women were demonized during witch hunting hysteria and ultimately barred from the public sphere. Bacon talks about conquering, subduing and “penetrating” Mother Nature (Connor, 2005, p. 364). Connor argues that this aggressive and sexual language was often used among male scientists to talk about women, and that it contributed to the demonization of female witches. In tern, this bared female “healers”, who represented the other side of science that was not dominated by white males, from the scientific field. Connor argues that a “significant effect on the witch-hunts was the support they provicded to elite doctors in their bitter rivalry with female folk healers” (Connor, 2005, p.369). Male scientists demonized women to give men more power in the scientific field.
Similarly, Londa Schiebinger in her essay, Why Mammals Are Called Mammals, discusses the origin of the term mammal in context of female sexuality and the anti-wet nursing movement, which pushed women out of the public sphere. The term mammal, coined by Carolus Linnaeus, means breast. The term is used for both males and females, but it highlights a sexualized feature of female anatomy. As male scientists were able to demonize women in the witch hunts, here male scientists were able to hone in on a specific aspect of a woman’s body. Coincidentally, in Europe a political movement against anti-wet nursing was getting lots of attention at the time. Schiebinger argues that “for the enlightened of Europe, the breast symbolized the synthesis of nature and society, the bond between the private and public world” (2010, p. 70). The anti-wet nursing movement resulted in women being forced to stay at home to look after their children, and although Schiebinger does not explicitly say male scientists intentionally tried to highlight the anti-wet nursing movement by focusing on female breast, it is hugely coincidental. The combination of the political movement and scientists using the new term mammal contributed to women being placed in the private sphere as post revolutionary Europe assigned new societal roles.
Lesley Dean-Jones also talks about how females were excluded from the public sphere by Ancient Greek scientists who used female bodies to justify male superiority. She uses two texts, the biology of Aristotle and the Hippocratic Corpus, which both explicitly reference women’s bodies. In her essay, The Cultural Construct of the Female Body in Classical Greek Science, Dean-Jones claims that “science used menstruation to construct a female body inherently weak and capable of exerting influence on her emotions and intellect, thereby buttressing her subordinate and restricted her position in society” (2003, p. 7). She argues that this information was not scientifically proven, hence they were able to cast women off as weaker on false assumptions constructed around social ideas. This fixation on the female body to determine women’s place in the world is a common thread between Connor, Schiebinger, and Dean-Jones. They all argue that in some way male scientists were able to render women incapable of performing in the public sphere and inherently inferior through sexualizing and fixating on aspects of their bodies.
An important conversation in gender studies is the discussion of binaries and where the male and female binary originated. Cordelia Fine and Diane Bolger construct arguments that dismantle the male and female binary and trace the origin all the way back to hunter gatherer societies. In her piece, Delusions of Gender, Fine addresses cultural assumptions of women as girly-girls, empathetic, soothing, nurturing, and the primary homemaker. She challenges the idea that men work harder and longer by saying that women have more responsibility and arguably work harder in their “Second Shift” looking after their children (Fine, 2001, p. 92). This is just one stigma attached to the female side of a binary which people assume is explained by science. “Hardwiring” is an old idea that at eight weeks old male brains shift away from female brains along with a surge of testosterone, which determines a man’s character (Fine, 2001, p. 177). Hardwiring is not scientifically proven, and, in fact, Fine argues that the brain is easily modeled by a person’s environment. Neuroplasticity is the term used to describe a brain’s ability to shape over time due to environmental factors. Fine compares math scores of males and females from the United States and Asia to dismantle the idea that women are not as good as math. Her findings uncover that Asian-American girls perform better than white girls, confirming the idea that environment and social surroundings affect a girl’s brain, not the biological difference between them and boys.
Diana Bolger in Gender in Early Agricultural Societies of the Near East also deconstructs the gender binary by looking at early hunter gatherer societies. Similarly to Fine, Bolger addresses binaries, but she looks at them from a historical standpoint. She suggests that early hunter gather societies did not have the same gender binaries that exist in the modern world, and that we can not assume these binaries existed then. She challenges the idea of “man the hunter” by claiming that women and men did both hunting and gathering and that there is no evidence to explain which job contributed more to society (Bolger, 2001, p. 506). Females in hunter gather societies chose their mate, insinuating that women had social power in this early society (Bolger, 2001, p. 507). There is some evidence of worn female toes suggesting that they were often grinding grains inside the house, but the evidence is not consistent, meaning different societies evolved independently of each other (Bolger, 2001, p. 510). She summarizes by arguing “we need to abandon once and for all the stereotypical, polarized conceptions of male and female behavior that have been so firmly embedded” both in society and the anthropology discipline (Bolger, 2001, p. 526). Both Bolger and Fine are able to dismantle the gender binary that defines and constructs so much of the society that we live in today.
The common theme across each reading is the connection and intersection between science and history in the discussion of gender. Embodiment, fixation on female anatomy, male dominated societies, gender binaries, and many other factors have all contributed to the separation of the sexes. Throughout history men and women have been put on very different paths, and it is almost impossible to establish a definite beginning to sexist gender roles. Science has been influenced so greatly by social concepts of how men and women should act; and similarly, society has tried to use science to confirm these social conventions. The question then becomes how do we separate the two? In an age where the gender spectrum continues to become increasingly complicated, uncovering the true biological differences and deconstructing society's predisposed paths and expectations for men and women seems more important than ever.
While Dorothy Roberts explores race and Cordelia Fine explores gender, both authors claim that embodiment dismantles ideas of biological differences between races and genders. In her essay Fatal Invention, Dorothy Roberts examines female breast cancer patients in Chicago. She explains why white women are slightly more likely to get breast cancer, but twice as many black women die of the disease (Roberts, 2011, p. 123). These statistics suggest that breast cancer mortality is connected to race, however Roberts unravels this idea by explaining the idea of embodiment. She defines embodiment by quoting scholar Nance Kreiger: “the many, many, many ways that we literally incorporate the world outside of us in expression of our biology” (Roberts, 2001, p. 130). Roberts looks at African-American women’s access to good hospitals, housing situations, access to health care, and overall healthiness, and she concludes that their environment is the primary influence on their health. She argues that “race is a political category that has staggering biological consequences because of the impact of social inequality on people’s health” (2011, p. 129). There is a cause and effect over time based on the environment that one lives in, which is often connected to socioeconomic status and race. Often, a person’s environment ends up affecting their biology because of social and economic factors. Embodiment is a common theme in the discussion of gender and is used to deconstruct gender stereotypes routed in false biological concepts.
Cordelia Fine, author of Delusions of Gender, also looks at embodiment but from a gendered lens, instead of a racial lens. Fine explores performance in mathematics between men and women in different cultures. She uses the concept of embodiment to argue that different cultures set social cues, which people absorb and act upon. For example, in the United States white boys are between 1.5 and 2 times as likely to achieve between the 95th and 99th percentile in math scores compared to their white, female counterparts; however, in Asian-American children, in the 95th percentile boys had less of an advantage and there were more girls than boys in 99th percentile (Fine, 2010, p. 181). Fine explains these statics by arguing that in American society girls are told they cannot be good at math, while in Asian societies girls are encouraged to take part in math. Similarly to Roberts, Fine blames the environment arguing that cues “represented in existing inequalities; in commercials; in conversations; in the minds, expectations, or behavior of others; or primed in our own minds by the environment - alter our self-perception, interests, and behavior” (2010, p.95). There is a drip effect - comparable to Robert’s cause and effect - that is caused by constant social cues that tell girls they can or cannot perform well in math, but math is just one example of the drip effect. After time, social cues becomes so ingrained that they suggest a biological difference between sexes. While the two authors look at different cases, their explanation of embodiment and environment intersect to question where gendered behavior comes from and if race is connected to biology.
Another common theme throughout the literature, explores how male scientists have been able to move women out of power and the public sphere by fixating on their bodies. Many scientists looked at women’s sexuality or bodies to demonize or discredit them in some way. Clifford D. Conner in A People’s History of Science uses Francis Bacon’s sexual and violent description of Mother Nature to explain how women were demonized during witch hunting hysteria and ultimately barred from the public sphere. Bacon talks about conquering, subduing and “penetrating” Mother Nature (Connor, 2005, p. 364). Connor argues that this aggressive and sexual language was often used among male scientists to talk about women, and that it contributed to the demonization of female witches. In tern, this bared female “healers”, who represented the other side of science that was not dominated by white males, from the scientific field. Connor argues that a “significant effect on the witch-hunts was the support they provicded to elite doctors in their bitter rivalry with female folk healers” (Connor, 2005, p.369). Male scientists demonized women to give men more power in the scientific field.
Similarly, Londa Schiebinger in her essay, Why Mammals Are Called Mammals, discusses the origin of the term mammal in context of female sexuality and the anti-wet nursing movement, which pushed women out of the public sphere. The term mammal, coined by Carolus Linnaeus, means breast. The term is used for both males and females, but it highlights a sexualized feature of female anatomy. As male scientists were able to demonize women in the witch hunts, here male scientists were able to hone in on a specific aspect of a woman’s body. Coincidentally, in Europe a political movement against anti-wet nursing was getting lots of attention at the time. Schiebinger argues that “for the enlightened of Europe, the breast symbolized the synthesis of nature and society, the bond between the private and public world” (2010, p. 70). The anti-wet nursing movement resulted in women being forced to stay at home to look after their children, and although Schiebinger does not explicitly say male scientists intentionally tried to highlight the anti-wet nursing movement by focusing on female breast, it is hugely coincidental. The combination of the political movement and scientists using the new term mammal contributed to women being placed in the private sphere as post revolutionary Europe assigned new societal roles.
Lesley Dean-Jones also talks about how females were excluded from the public sphere by Ancient Greek scientists who used female bodies to justify male superiority. She uses two texts, the biology of Aristotle and the Hippocratic Corpus, which both explicitly reference women’s bodies. In her essay, The Cultural Construct of the Female Body in Classical Greek Science, Dean-Jones claims that “science used menstruation to construct a female body inherently weak and capable of exerting influence on her emotions and intellect, thereby buttressing her subordinate and restricted her position in society” (2003, p. 7). She argues that this information was not scientifically proven, hence they were able to cast women off as weaker on false assumptions constructed around social ideas. This fixation on the female body to determine women’s place in the world is a common thread between Connor, Schiebinger, and Dean-Jones. They all argue that in some way male scientists were able to render women incapable of performing in the public sphere and inherently inferior through sexualizing and fixating on aspects of their bodies.
An important conversation in gender studies is the discussion of binaries and where the male and female binary originated. Cordelia Fine and Diane Bolger construct arguments that dismantle the male and female binary and trace the origin all the way back to hunter gatherer societies. In her piece, Delusions of Gender, Fine addresses cultural assumptions of women as girly-girls, empathetic, soothing, nurturing, and the primary homemaker. She challenges the idea that men work harder and longer by saying that women have more responsibility and arguably work harder in their “Second Shift” looking after their children (Fine, 2001, p. 92). This is just one stigma attached to the female side of a binary which people assume is explained by science. “Hardwiring” is an old idea that at eight weeks old male brains shift away from female brains along with a surge of testosterone, which determines a man’s character (Fine, 2001, p. 177). Hardwiring is not scientifically proven, and, in fact, Fine argues that the brain is easily modeled by a person’s environment. Neuroplasticity is the term used to describe a brain’s ability to shape over time due to environmental factors. Fine compares math scores of males and females from the United States and Asia to dismantle the idea that women are not as good as math. Her findings uncover that Asian-American girls perform better than white girls, confirming the idea that environment and social surroundings affect a girl’s brain, not the biological difference between them and boys.
Diana Bolger in Gender in Early Agricultural Societies of the Near East also deconstructs the gender binary by looking at early hunter gatherer societies. Similarly to Fine, Bolger addresses binaries, but she looks at them from a historical standpoint. She suggests that early hunter gather societies did not have the same gender binaries that exist in the modern world, and that we can not assume these binaries existed then. She challenges the idea of “man the hunter” by claiming that women and men did both hunting and gathering and that there is no evidence to explain which job contributed more to society (Bolger, 2001, p. 506). Females in hunter gather societies chose their mate, insinuating that women had social power in this early society (Bolger, 2001, p. 507). There is some evidence of worn female toes suggesting that they were often grinding grains inside the house, but the evidence is not consistent, meaning different societies evolved independently of each other (Bolger, 2001, p. 510). She summarizes by arguing “we need to abandon once and for all the stereotypical, polarized conceptions of male and female behavior that have been so firmly embedded” both in society and the anthropology discipline (Bolger, 2001, p. 526). Both Bolger and Fine are able to dismantle the gender binary that defines and constructs so much of the society that we live in today.
The common theme across each reading is the connection and intersection between science and history in the discussion of gender. Embodiment, fixation on female anatomy, male dominated societies, gender binaries, and many other factors have all contributed to the separation of the sexes. Throughout history men and women have been put on very different paths, and it is almost impossible to establish a definite beginning to sexist gender roles. Science has been influenced so greatly by social concepts of how men and women should act; and similarly, society has tried to use science to confirm these social conventions. The question then becomes how do we separate the two? In an age where the gender spectrum continues to become increasingly complicated, uncovering the true biological differences and deconstructing society's predisposed paths and expectations for men and women seems more important than ever.
Reference List
Bolger, D. (Winter, 2010). The Dynamics of Gender in Early Agricultural Societies of the Near East. The University of Chicago Press.
Conner, C. D. (2005). A People’s History of Science. New York, NY: Nation Books.
Dean-Jones, L. (2003). The Cultural Construct of the Female Body in Classical Greek Science. Edinburgh Scholarship Online.
Fine, Cordelia. (2010). Delusions of Gender. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Roberts, D. (2011). Fatal Inventions. New York, NY: The New Press.
Schiebinger, L. (2010). Nature’s Body. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Conner, C. D. (2005). A People’s History of Science. New York, NY: Nation Books.
Dean-Jones, L. (2003). The Cultural Construct of the Female Body in Classical Greek Science. Edinburgh Scholarship Online.
Fine, Cordelia. (2010). Delusions of Gender. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Roberts, D. (2011). Fatal Inventions. New York, NY: The New Press.
Schiebinger, L. (2010). Nature’s Body. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.