Intrepid Grrrl Reporter: A Dispatch from the NeuroGenderings II Conference

Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the NeuroCultures - NeuroGenderings II Conference at the University of Vienna.
The conference brought together an international group of scholars to discuss brain
research on sex and gender from a feminist perspective. The conference was a
treat for me, as I was able to meet a number of leading scholars in the field,
including some of the people I have mentioned in previous blogs. I presented a poster on the course, "Feminism, Sexuality, and Neuroethics," which Cyd Cipolla and I co-taught last spring, and also presented a paper reviewing contemporary neuroscience research on transsexuality.

Although it is difficult to summarize two days' worth of
keynote speeches, panels, and poster presentations, I would say that two main
themes emerged within the conference: the first was a critique of neurosexism
both within scientific research on sex, gender, and brain and in how this
research is communicated to the public through the media. The second was an
attempt to explore whether it would be possible to conduct feminist neuroscience research on sex and gender and, if so, what
such research would look like.

Critiques of Neurosexism

My Poster Presentation

A number of the presenters at the conference carefully
analyzed how sexist assumptions inform a great deal of contemporary neuroscience
research on sex and gender. For example, in her keynote talk, Cordelia Fine analyzed
a representative sample of recent neuroimaging studies on language
lateralization. According to Fine, the studies reflected sexist assumptions in
three ways: 1) by exaggerating the extent of male-female differences; 2) by exaggerating
the functional importance of M-F differences (many of the researchers made
post-hoc speculations about the significance of M-F differences, i.e. greater
activation in X area in males compared to females may explain why men like
football more than women); and, 3) exaggerating the fixedness of these
differences by not investigating how differences might vary over time (plasticity)
or based on context.

Other scholars examined how neuroscientific research on sex
and gender is conveyed to the public by popular science writers. For example,
in her presentation, Odile Fillod analyzed the ways in which the theory that
oxytocin promotes maternal bonding in humans has been popularized in France.
According to Fillod, the theory has been used in some cases to support a
conservative agenda, specifically the idea that women are natural care-givers
whereas men are not.

Imagining a Feminist Neuroscience

Daphna Joel

A number of the presenters grappled with the question of whether
it would be possible to conduct feminist neuroscience research on sex and
gender and, if so, what such research would look like. Presenters came at this
question in very different ways. Keynote speaker Daphna Joel,
a practicing researcher in psychology and neuroscience, described how her
thinking was revolutionized after she found that 15 minutes of stress could
change a particular structure in a rat’s brain from the “male form” to the “female
form” (and vice versa). I highly recommend reading her article, “Male or female? Brains are intersex” in Frontiers
in Integrative Neuroscience in which she argues that there is no such thing as a “male brain” or a “female
brain.” At the conference, Joel suggested that a feminist neuroscience research
program would be attentive to the fact that the brain is a complex structure
with the ability to change over time, while investigating the ways in which sex
interacts with a variety of other factors to influence different brain
structures in complicated ways.

Isabelle Dussauge

Coming at the question from a very different perspective, Isabelle Dussauge led the audience through a thought experiment. Assuming the role of a historian
from the year 2090, she described what had happened in the 2020s and 2030s
after queer feminists created their own organization to fund queer/feminist neuroscience
research. She described an influential experiment funded by the organization, which
compared the neural mechanisms of desire between those from sexual or gender
minority groups and those from sexual or gender majority groups in order to
understand the effects of power differentials on neural mechanisms of desire.
Notable aspects of the experiment included the following: participants brought
in objects that they found arousing and non-arousing and were scanned while
interacting with those objects; in addition to scanning, extensive qualitative
interviews were conducted with participants; and, scanning and qualitative
interviews were repeated regularly over the span of two years. At the end of her talk, Dussauge expressed both doubt and hope that such an experiment would ever be conducted.

At the end of the conference, I don’t think we had resolved
the question of whether a feminist neuroscience research program on sex and
gender is possible or, if it is possible, what it would look like, but the
conference certainly got me thinking in all sorts of new ways. What do you
think? Is there such a thing as a feminist neuroscience research program on sex and
gender?





Want to cite this post?

Gupta, K. (2012). Intrepid Grrrl Reporter: A Dispatch from the NeuroGenderings II Conference. The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/10/intrepid-grrrl-reporter-dispatch-from.html

Neurosexism and Single-Sex Education (or support your local ACLU)

"N" is for Neurosexism

Twenty or thirty years ago, single-sex education for girls was a feminist clause célèbre. However, beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, people began to worry that boys were “underperforming” in school and in life (an idea nicknamed “the boys’ crisis” by the popular press). The media framing of the boys’ crisis has been critiqued on a number of fronts – specifically, critics have pointed out that both girls and boys are performing better in school than in the past and that the difference in educational achievement between white and middle-class students and low-income and minority students is far more pronounced than the difference between female and male students (see a 2008 report from the American Association of University Women).

However, despite these critiques, cultural commentators began to advocate for single-sex education in public schools as a solution to the boys’ crisis. Commentators like Michael Gurian (author of Boys and Girls Learn Differently!) and Leonard Sax (founder of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education and author of Why Gender Matters) argued that boys’ and girls’ brains develop differently, so boys and girls should be separated in school and should receive education targeted to their specific neuro-developmental patterns and mental strengths.

The Growth of Single-Sex Education

Apparently, Gurian and Sax were very convincing (and they were peddling what people wanted to hear). In 2006, the U.S. Department of Education relaxed restrictions against single-sex education in public schools. According to estimates, in 2002, only about a dozen public schools were offering single-sex classes. Today, an estimated 500 public schools in the U.S. now offer at least some single-sex classes (public schools are required to allow parents to opt-out of single-sex classes) (AP).

An estimated 500 public schools

now offer single-sex classes

For a recent article, two AP reporters visited classrooms at Middleton Heights Elementary, a public school in Idaho that offers single-sex classes. According to the reporters, “In the single-sex classes, teachers use microphones that allow them to electronically adjust the tone of their voice to match the level that research suggests is best for boys. When preparing for a test, the boys may go for a run, or engage in some other activity, while the girls are more likely to do calming exercises, such as yoga…They learn the same curriculum, they still lunch and play at recess together, but the differences in their learning environments are apparent, from the blue chalkboards in the boy classrooms, to the red paper hearts that decorated the wall of one of the girl's classrooms.”

Neurosexism and Single-Sex Education

Despite the claims of Gurian and Sax, the neuroscience research simply doesn’t support the idea that boys have one type of brain and neuro-developmental pattern and girls have another type of brain and neuro-developmental pattern and that these two types are so different from each other that it makes sense to segregate boys and girls into different classes.

Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine

In her excellent book, Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine deconstructs the neuroscience claims made by Gurian, Sax and others in support of single-sex education (see especially Chapter 14). To give just one example from Fine: according to Fine, Sax claims that in boys and young children, emotion is processed in the amygdala with few connections to the cerebral cortex, while in older girls, the amygdala is richly connected to the cerebral cortex. As a result, Sax suggests two different strategies for English teachers: teachers are encouraged to ask older girls to reflect on the feelings and motivations of a story’s protagonist; while Sax writes approvingly of a “boy-friendly” class in which the boys were encouraged to read The Lord of the Flies not with an eye for plot or character development, but so as to be able to construct a map of the island. Yet, according to Fine, Sax’s claims about the lack of connections between the amygdala and the cerebral cortex in boys is based on one small neuro-imaging study in which children started passively at fearful faces (they weren’t asked to talk about what they were feeling and brain activity was not even measured in many of the brain areas involved in emotion and language processing) (Fine 2010 pages 163-164).

Linguistics professor Mark Liberman has also deconstructed a number of Sax’s claims in detail on his blog. Summarizing Sax’s arguments, Liberman writes: “Science is sometimes on his side, sometimes neutral or equivocal, and sometimes against him. He picks the results that fit his agenda, ignoring those that don't; and all too often, he misunderstands, exaggerates or misrepresents the results that he presents.”

Pushing Back: the American Council for CoEducational Schooling and the American Civil Liberties Union

Become a card-carrying member

of the ACLU

Photo by Vociferous

Recently, a number of academics have begun to push back against the campaign for single-sex education. A group (of mostly psychologists) founded an organization, the American Council for CoEducational Schooling, to advocate for coeducation. In 2011, a number of those involved in the group also published an extensive report on single-sex education in Science (“The Pseudoscienceof Single-Sex Schooling” by Halpern et al.) Recently, two of the co-authors, Rebecca Bigler and Lise Eliot, summarized some of the main points of the report for a blog on the Washington Post. They make five main points: 1) the neuroscience research doesn’t support the claim that boys and girls learn differently; 2) decades of national and international education research has found that single-sex education doesn’t improve educational outcomes; 3) gender segregation increases gender stereotyping and prejudice; 4) children in gender-segregated environments develop increasingly narrow skill sets and interests; and, 5) gender segregation reduces the opportunities for boys and girls to learn from each other. They conclude by stating, “Rather than segregating boys and girls during this important developmental time, schools should take better advantage of coeducation to model the truly egalitarian society that we hope for their future.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been pushing back against single-sex education for years. In May they launched a campaign called “Teach Kids, Not Stereotypes,” and sent demand letters to school districts in six states insisting that the districts takes steps to end single-sex programs that rely on and promote harmful sex stereotypes.

Call to Action: Neuroscientists and Ethical Responsibility

Co-educational cuteness: school children

at the Wilmington Fire Department, DE

Picture by Timothy Wildey

Some neuroscientists are involved with the American Council for CoEducational Schooling – Lise Eliot is a neuroscientist and author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps – and What We Can Do About It. But she is the only neuroscientist on the eight member board (the rest are psychologists). I also noticed that there are no neuroscientists on their list of members (again, most appear to be psychologists). No doubt this is because the organization was started by psychologists who naturally reached out to their friends and colleagues. However, I strongly encourage neuroscientists to think about becoming members and getting involved in the organization – on their website, they state, “for information on becoming a member of the American Council of CoEducational Schooling, please e-mail us at membership@coedschools.org.”

Because the push for single-sex education has relied so heavily on the use (and misuse) of neuroscience data, I think neuroscientists have a particular power (and perhaps ethical responsibility?) to influence this debate. In regards to research about the brains of boys and girls, policymakers, the media, and members of the general public are more likely to listen to neuroscientists than to women’s studies scholars (or even psychologists).

In general, I would encourage neuroscientists to consider responsibly engaging with the public and the media about this issue. Or, at least donate to the ACLU.

Want to cite this
post?

Gupta, K. (2012). Neurosexism and Single-Sex Education (or support your local ACLU). The Neuroethics Blog. Retrieved on
, from

http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/07/neurosexism-and-single-sex-education-or.html