Gender on the Brain: Cordelia Fine Exposes "Neurosexism"

I was given Cordelia Fine's new book, Delusions of Gender, as a Christmas present, and I just finished reading it a couple days ago*.

It's very easy and fun to read, despite going into a lot of technical detail about the design of various studies (although she manages to write about those details in wonderfully clear, simple prose --- I *try* to do that on this blog, but I think her book is better-written, and easier to understand, than many of my researchy posts) and trying to tease out the separate strands of a very complicated knot of biology, psychology, culture that lies underneath the surface of what we understand gender to be.

She spends a lot of time discussing a topic that's also been on my mind a lot recently: fetal testosterone. She takes a much broader view of this literature than I do, because I am focusing exclusively on those studies that I consider relevant to the "extreme male brain" theory of autism, while she's addressing the whole idea that a "male brain" and a "female brain" even exist, much less that they differ as radically as most people writing popular (and academic) books on brain sex seem to think.

She peppers her book with quotations from such works as Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain (if you have time, read Mark Liberman's series of posts on Language Log debunking this book; they're hilarious and eye-opening), Leonard Sax's Why Gender Matters, John Gray's however-many-there-are-now Mars and Venus books, Allan and Barbara Pease's** Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps, and various books authored or co-authored by Michael Gurian of the Gurian Institute: Leadership and the Sexes, It's a Baby Girl!, and What Could He Be Thinking?

As an additional bit of context, she also quotes liberally from sources a hundred years old or more, laying out their nearly-identical visions of the masculine and feminine mind; the only difference is in what kind of pseudoscientific technobabble is used to justify the idea of separate spheres for men and women: in the old books, it is woman's physical frailty, nervous sensitivity and smaller brain that fit her for a purely domestic life, while in the new books, it is her relatively larger corpus callosum, her greater verbal fluency and emotional sensitivity, that fit her for the caring professions or for full-time wife-and-motherhood.

The book is divided into three parts, the first and last of which (called "'Half-Changed World', Half-Changed Minds" and "Recycling Gender") deal with psychological research on the effects of sexism and gender stereotyping on women's choices, behavior and performance on various tests, and with how children learn to sort themselves into gender categories, starting at very young ages.

Those parts of the book fill in the background for the middle part, "Neurosexism," which discusses research into hormonally-driven "hard-wiring" of gendered interests, behaviors and aptitudes. (It's in this part of the book that she tackles the prenatal-testosterone literature). While she does offer some critique on methodological grounds, her biggest beef is with popularizers who extrapolate universal truths from ambiguous results derived from very small, restricted samples of people.

An example:

[W]hen I decided to follow up [Louann] Brizendine's claim that the female brain is wired to empathize, it nonetheless proved to be an exercise that turned up surprise after surprise. I tracked down every neuroscience study cited by Brizendine as evidence for feminine superiority in mind reading. (No, really, no need to thank me. I do this sort of thing for pleasure). There were many such references, over just a few pages of text, creating the impression that it is no mere opinion, but scientifically established fact, that the female brain is wired for empathy in a way that the male brain is not. Yet fact-checking revealed the deployment of some rather misleading practices. For example, let's work our way through the middle of page 162 to the top of page 164 in her book. We kick off with a study of psychotherapists, which found that therapists develop a good rapport with their clients by mirroring their actions. Casually, Brizendine notes, "All of the therapists who showed these responses happened to be women." For some reason, she fails to mention that this is because only female therapists, selected from phone directories, happened to be recruited for the study.
...
A little later, readers are told that "brain-imaging studies show that the mere act of observing or imagining another person in a particular emotional state can automatically activate similar brain patterns in the observer --- and females are especially good at this sort of mirroring." Cited as support for this feminine superiority in emotional mirroring is a 2004 neuroimaging study by cognitive neuroscientist Tania Singer and colleagues, who compared brain activation when someone was either receiving a painful electric shock to the hand or was aware that a loved one was receiving the same painful electric shock to the hand. Singer and colleagues found that some brain regions were activated both by being shocked and watching someone else be shocked. If you think I'm going to be nitpicky about what any sex differences in activation in this study mean, you're wrong. Actually, the problem of interpretation is rather more basic. Only women were scanned.

Even when there aren't gross factual errors in the reporting of the research, Fine's inclusion of social- and developmental-psychology perspectives on gender --- how children learn it, how children and adults learn to change their behaviors, and their understanding of themselves, to fit into it --- makes it clear that whatever gendered differences do turn up on brain scans, they are as likely to be the effects of gender socialization as they are to be the underlying physiological cause of gender.

So, if we're not "hard-wired" by means of prenatal and pubertal hormone surges into immutable, characteristic and complementary "male" and "female" selves, what are we? Are we just blank slates, onto which society can write whatever it likes? Is there no such thing as human nature at all?

That's the alternative vision most commonly invoked in these debates: if you don't accept the idea that gender is hard-wired, you must be an environmental determinist who doesn't believe people are born with anything at all in their heads.

Luckily for us, this isn't a binary, and we don't have to choose between nature and nurture.

Here's Fine again, this time from the Epilogue of her book:

The fluidity of the self and the mind is impressive and is in continual cahoots with the environment. When social psychologists discover, for example, that mere words (like competition), everyday objects (like briefcases and boardroom tables), people, or even scenery can trigger particular motives in us, or that similar role models can seep into our most private ambitions, it makes sense to start questioning the direction of causality between gender difference and gender inequality. We are justified in wondering whether, as gender scholar Michael Kimmel suggests, "gender difference is a product of gender inequality, and not the other way around."

Nor is gender inequality just a part of our minds --- it is also an inextricable part of our biology. We tend to think of the chain of command passing from genes, to hormones, to brains, to environment. (As biologist Robert Sapolsky describes this common misconception, "DNA is the commander, the epicenter from which biology emanates. Nobody tells a gene what to do; it's always the other way around.") Yet most developmental scientists will tell you that one-way arrows of causality are just so last century. The circuits of the brain are quite literally a product of your physical, social, and cultural environment, as well as your behavior and thoughts. What we experience and do creates neural activity that can alter the brain, either directly or through changes in gene expression. This neuroplasticity means that, as [neuropsychologist Anelis] Kaiser puts it, the social phenomenon of gender "comes into the brain" and "becomes part of our cerebral biology."

As for hormones that act on the brain, if you cuddle a baby, get a promotion, see billboard after billboard of near-naked women, or hear a gender stereotype that places one sex at a higher status than the other, don't expect your hormonal state to remain impervious. It won't. "Even how we behave or what we think about can affect the levels of our sex hormones," point out Gene Worship authors Gisela Kaplan and Lesley Rogers. This continuous interplay between the biological and the social means that, as Anne Fausto-Sterling has put it, "components of our political, social, and moral struggles become, quite literally, embodied, incorporated into our very physiological being."

And so, when researchers look for sex differences in the brain or the mind, they are hunting a moving target. Both are in continuous interaction with the social context. Some researchers have even started to investigate how the brain, or hormones, respond differently while doing stereotyped tasks, depending on whether gender stereotypes are made salient. And gender differences in the mind can shift from moment to moment: for example, as stereotype threat is created or dispersed, or self-identity changes. But also, our actions and attitudes change the very cultural patterns that interact with the minds of others to coproduce their actions and attitudes that, in turn, become part of the cultural milieu: in short, "culture and psyche make each other up." When a woman persists with a high-level math course or runs as a presidential candidate, or a father leaves work early to pick up the children from school, they are altering, little by little, the implicit patterns of the minds around them. As society slowly changes, so too do the differences between male and female selves, abilities, emotions, values, interests, hormones, and brains --- because each is inextricably intimate with the social context in which it develops and functions.
...
Our minds, society, and neurosexism create difference. Together, they wire gender. But the wiring is soft, not hard. It is flexible, malleable, and changeable. And, if we only believe this, it will continue to unravel.

This closing statement encapsulates what I like so much about this book; it brings feminism, sociology, and a more accurate, more nuanced understanding of human biology together to give us a broader view of what gender is --- or at least how many different things, over a person's whole lifetime, go into creating gender.

For some other reviews of this book, see Neuroskeptic*** and Echidne of the Snakes (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

*I was also given Rebecca M. Jordan-Young's Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, which covers similar ground --- both books poke and prod at the conventional wisdom that sex hormones shape "male" and "female" brains before birth, and that masculine and feminine behaviors, interests and life paths are the inevitable outcomes of these two different types of brain. I haven't finished reading Brain Storm yet, but I will probably also review it here when I do.

**Another of their books, not cited in Fine's book, refers in its title to a particularly stubborn gender stereotype that drives many feminists --- particularly sex-positive feminists --- absolutely batty: Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love. As if no woman has ever been horny, or no man ever wanted to be loved!

***Who is cited as a source twice, and quoted once, in this book!

These Are Not the Eternal Verities of Biology - Part II

I wrote this post almost a year ago, but it's always been my plan to add to it. And now Echidne (who is, among other things, a tireless debunker of gender-essentialist pop evolutionary psychology) has inspired me to come back to this topic.

She describes a recent study in Evolution and Human Behavior (full text here) by Jaime C. Confer, Carin Perilloux and David Buss that tried to characterize how men and women choose short-term or long-term sexual partners.

Briefly, what the study did was sit 192 straight male and 183 straight female (the six --- only six?! --- would-be participants who said they were gay were screened out) college students down and show them a (clothed) picture of a member of the opposite sex, whom they were supposed to evaluate as a potential sex partner. (Half of them were told to consider the person as a short-term partner; the other half were told to think long-term). The picture was initially covered up, with one box covering the face* and another covering the body; study participants were given a choice which box to remove.

When evaluating the pictured person as a potential long-term sexual partner, the sexes behaved almost identically: sixty-eight of the men (75%) and sixty of the women (73%) chose to look at the person's face. The sexes also showed a similar change in strategy between long- and short-term conditions: both looked at the face more when they were asked to evaluate a potential long-term partner, and both looked at the body more when asked to evaluate a potential short-term partner. For the men, though, the change in strategy was much more dramatic: they went from three-quarters of them choosing the face in one set of circumstances to half and half in the other (roughly speaking); for the women, it was a much smaller decline, from (a little less than) three-quarters to two-thirds. The men's change, but not the women's, was considered statistically significant.

That's not the narrative Confer, Perilloux and Buss use to describe their findings, though: rather predictably, they see a marked sexual dimorphism in mate-choosing strategies, reflecting deeply ingrained male preferences for fertile mates (i.e., younger women with neotenous, "hyperfeminine" facial features as long-term partners, but also obviously sexually mature, fertile women with low waist-to-hip ratios as short-term partners) and an equally ingrained lack of female preferences for youth or bodily beauty in her partners.

The study, its findings, and the way its authors chose to present those findings are not what I really want to look at in this entry, though. (Echidne has already covered those angles really well). No, what I want to look at is the imaginary scenario the study's authors set up for its participants: what they were asked to do, essentially, is evaluate a third (absent) person's suitability as a sexual partner based on one quick look.

It came up in the comments at Echidne's blog, and I agreed wholeheartedly, that this scenario resembles today's anonymous, superficial meat-market dating scene a lot more than it does the likely pattern of courting and mating behaviors that early humans would've shown. Early humans, like other primates and modern-day humans still living a hunting-and-gathering lifestyle, lived in small, close-knit bands, where you would probably have known the people you ended up having sex with for quite a long time before you had sex with them. Accordingly, things like waist-hip ratio, facial symmetry and whatnot would've been less important than, say, each partner's social and family ties (i.e., does she have sisters, aunts or a mother who would help out with childcare? Do these aforementioned relatives *like* the prospective mate? What about his relatives? How does he get along with the other men in the tribe? Is he a social asset or liability?) or lack thereof.

This is another of the weird things I've noticed about much of evolutionary psychology --- it seems to be less a historical science (like paleontology or archaeology) and more an extended thought-experiment in What Human Nature Would Be Like If It Weren't for All This Pesky Civilization Crap. The ev-psych model for heterosexual relationships seems to assume that the man and the woman are both relatively isolated: the woman depends solely on the man for support, for herself and her children; the man, while he is not correspondingly dependent on the woman, and is thought to be impregnating --- or trying to impregnate --- other women whenever the opportunity arises, his relations to other men resemble the Hobbesian state of "war of all against all." (Similarly, other women are invisible unless and until the man in the thought-experiment has sex with them).

This highly individualized, atomistic way of thinking about people is actually very new in the history of ideas, and notably it does not compute to modern-day people who actually live in extended-family communities.

*This experimental setup apparently poses a temptation for commentators to make "butterface" jokes. I am trying to resist this.

A Popular Mis-Conception

This post of Urocyon's, about zoologists who can't seem to stop describing animal behavior in terms that reflect the values and norms of one particular human culture*, reminded me of the chapter in Natalie Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography about the ovum and how its role in reproduction is commonly (and wrongly) understood in terms of traditional Western conceptions of gender: Man acts, Woman is acted upon; Man creates, Woman nurtures, etc.
One of the more obvious, and literal, examples of applying this gendered binary to human reproductive biology is the understanding of conception shown in Book I of Aristotle's On the Generation of Animals:

That, then, the female does not contribute semen to generation, but does contribute something, and that this is the matter of the catamenia [menstrual blood?], or that which is analogous to it in bloodless animals, is clear from what has been said [earlier in the passage], and also from a general and abstract survey of the question. For there must needs be that which generates and that from which it generates; even if these be one, still they must be distinct in form and their essence must be different; and in those animals that have these powers separate in two sexes the body and nature of the active and the passive sex must also differ. If, then, the male stands for the effective and active, and the female, considered as female, for the passive, it follows that what the female would contribute to the semen of the male would not be semen but material for the semen to work upon. This is just what we find to be the case, for the catamenia have in their nature an affinity to the primitive matter.
...
[W]henever one thing is made from two of which one is active and the other passive, the active agent does not exist in that which is made; and, still more generally, the same applies when one thing moves and another is moved; the moving thing does not exist in that which is moved. But the female, as female, is passive, and the male, as male, is active, and the principle of the movement comes from him. Therefore, if we take the highest genera under which they each fall, the one being active and motive and the other passive and moved, that one thing which is produced comes from them only in the sense in which a bed comes into being from the carpenter and the wood, or in which a ball comes into being from the wax and the form.

This understanding dominated biology from the days of ancient Greece until the 18th century; some early biologists, like Nicolaas Hartsoeker, took this idea of sperm-as-seed/womb-as-flowerpot to its logical extreme of thinking there was a tiny person already fully-formed inside the sperm cell! (Hartsoeker is the one who drew the cute little sketch shown near the top of this post. There's even a little star inside its tiny head, which I'm guessing represents a soul).

Even once the actual mechanics of fertilization became known, and people realized that women's ova also contain genetic material**, there was still a tendency to describe the male and female gametes' roles in Aristotelian terms of passive, receptive egg and moving, active sperm. The sperm are said to compete against each other to reach the egg, thereby ensuring that the hardiest, best one goes on to develop into an embryo.

The truth is actually more complicated, and involves more of an interplay between egg and sperm.

I don't currently have Angier's book on hand --- my partner, a sometime anatomy teacher and amateur sex educator, is borrowing it --- but I do have my developmental-biology textbook from college, Scott F. Gilbert's Developmental Biology, Seventh Edition. It ought to include everything Angier mentioned, and probably more, too.

Anyway, four processes that occur in the egg stick out to me as giving the lie to the notion of the female gamete as an inert substrate, awaiting the action of the "winning" male gamete:

1) In order to find the egg at all, sperm depend on signaling molecules secreted by the egg, which allow the sperm to track where the signals are coming from and adjust their trajectories accordingly.

2) Sperm undergo a chemical transformation called capacitation once they've been in the uterus for a while, without which they're unable to pass through the cumulus, or layer of ovarian follicular cells associated with the egg. During capacitation, the sperm cell membrane changes composition: uterine proteins remove cholesterol, and some of the proteins and carbohydrates embedded in the sperm cell membrane are also stripped away. The membrane also hyperpolarizes (i.e., the difference in net electrical charge between opposite sides of the membrane becomes bigger), which somehow triggers a cascade of protein phosphorylations (which, as I've mentioned before, can either activate or inhibit a protein) which ultimately allows the sperm to recognize, bind to and fuse with the egg.

3) For the sperm to be able to release its genetic material into the egg, a protein in the egg's zona pellucida, or thick outer coating of glycoproteins, has to bind to the sperm and initiate a process called the acrosome reaction, which is a signaling cascade involving G proteins (I've written about them before, too) and a mass influx of calcium ions, set off by surface proteins on both sperm and zona pellucida weaving together, and which results in the release of the protein-digesting enzymes contained in the acrosomal vesicle. These enzymes bore a tunnel through the zona pellucida that allows the sperm to reach the egg cell membrane.

4) Once a given sperm cell has fused membranes with the egg, another chemical reaction takes place, modifying zona-pellucida proteins so that they can no longer bind to any additional sperm-cell surface proteins. This causes the swarm of sperm cells that has gathered around the zona pellucida to lose their grip on it and disperse before any more of them can deposit genetic material inside the egg.

So, the egg guides the sperm toward it, draws it in as it approaches, triggers the acrosomal reaction that allows the sperm to penetrate the dense zona pellucida, and, once that sperm has fused with the egg and deposited its genetic material inside it, it prevents any others from doing likewise.

"Material for the semen to work upon," indeed!

*Have a guess as to which one. No prize if you said "white Christian Anglo-American capitalist patriarchy," sorry!

**The egg actually contributes a bit more DNA to the eventual embryo than the sperm does, for two reasons: 1) sperm cells can have either an X or a (much smaller) Y chromosome, while the egg always has an X; and 2) sperm cells are super-streamlined, containing only a nucleus and a sac of cell-membrane-dissolving chemicals called an acrosomal vesicle within their cell bodies, while the egg has a normally-sized and -populated cytoplasm, which includes mitochondria, which have their own vestigial genomes. (Sperm have mitochondria, too, but they're associated with the flagellum and do not enter the egg during fertilization).

Psychology Today? More Like Psychology Fifty Years Ago!

(Image created by Anne Taintor)

Pop evolutionary psychology, for all its vaunted iconoclasm, starts sounding awfully familiar when applied to what appears to be its spokespeople's favorite subject, innate gender differences and their implications for how men and women ought to be living their lives.

Here's an example, from another post on Satoshi Kanazawa's Psychology Today blog, this one titled "How to Be Happy":

One of the things that evolution has done is to make men and women very different. In some ways (though not in others), males of one species are often more similar to males of other species than to females of their own species, and vice versa. In some ways, in many ways, men are more similar to male chimpanzees or gorillas than to women. One of the ways that men and women are different is in what makes them happy.

Forget what feminists, hippies and liberals have told you in the last half century. They are all lies based on political ideology and on conviction, not on science. Contrary to what they may have told you, it is very unlikely that money, promotions, the corner office, social status and political power will make women happy. Similarly, it is very unlikely that quitting their jobs, dropping out of the rat race, and becoming stay-at-home dads to spend all their time with their children will make men happy.

(I'm not even going to address the staggering wrongness of the claim that male humans are more like males of other species than they are like female humans. Just take it from me that it is wrong, so extraordinarily, mind-bogglingly bizarre that I can only muster up one word in coherent response to it: No.)

So, men want to go out, make money and rule the world, while women want to stay at home and have babies. Those two nonoverlapping spheres are where men and women respectively excel, and the only place they can truly feel fulfilled.

Where have we heard that before?

It was quite familiar to Naomi Weisstein, who wrote these words (from her essay "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female") in 1968:

It is an implicit assumption that the area of psychology which concerns itself with personality has the onerous but necessary task of describing the limits of human possibility. Thus when we are about to consider the liberation of women, we naturally look to psychology to tell us what that liberation would mean: what would give women the freedom to fulfill their own intrinsic natures. Psychologists have set about describing the true natures of women with a certainty and a sense of their own infallibility rarely found in the secular world. Bruno Bettelheim, of the University of Chicago, tells us (1965) that "we must start with the realization that, as much as women want to be good scientists or engineers, they want first and foremost to be womanly companions of men and to be mothers." Erik Erikson of Harvard University (1964), upon noting that young women often ask whether they can "have an identity before they know whom they will marry, and for whom they will make a home," explains somewhat elegiacally that "much of a young woman's identity is already defined in her kind of attractiveness and in the selectivity of her search for the man (or men) by whom she wishes to be sought ..." Mature womanly fulfillment, for Erikson, rests on the fact that a woman's "somatic design harbors an 'inner space' destined to bear the offspring of chosen men, and with it, a biological, psychological and ethical commitment to take care of human infancy." Some psychiatrists even see the acceptance of woman's role by women as a solution to societal problems. "Woman is nurturance ..." writes Joseph Rheingold (1964), a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, "anatomy decrees the life of a woman. ... [W]hen women grow up without dread of their biological functions and without subversion by feminist doctrine, and therefore enter upon motherhood with a sense of fulfillment and altruistic sentiment, we shall attain the goal of a good life and a secure world in which to live it." (p. 714)

These views from men who are assumed to be experts reflect, in a surprisingly transparent way, the cultural consensus. They not only assert that a woman is defined by her ability to attract men, and thus, a home; for this will allow her to set about her life's task of "joyful altruism and nurturance."

Though the reasoning behind it has shifted with the times, this notion of opposite sexes --- the active, aggressive male and the passive, nurturing female --- has remained more or less constant* in Western culture throughout history.

Equally constant, for as long as there has been a vocal feminist contingent protesting this consignment of women perpetually to kitchen and nursery, has been the experts' response to the feminists. For whatever reason --- whether it was physiological, as in the Victorian belief that brain and uterus competed with one another for a limited blood supply, and thus a woman could not make heavy use of one without causing the other to atrophy; or psychosexual, as in the Freudian belief that a healthy, mature woman's sexuality necessarily revolves around intercourse, and that childbirth represents her ultimate achievement and the only way to resolve lingering issues of "penis envy"; or romantic, as in the more recent backlash idea that a woman must marry young, prioritizing finding a husband and having children above education and work, or else she'll run out her biological clock and find herself unable to marry or have children later on --- deviation from woman's ordained role could only lead to disappointment, bitterness and literal and/or metaphorical sterility.

Indeed, an educated man from any of these eras --- Victorian, mid-twentieth century, 1980s backlash era --- would have been able to write an article very like Kanazawa's, urging women that neglecting their rightful, natural role in life would leave them lonely, bitter and unfulfilled.

If we go back far enough, everything new becomes old again, and we find evolutionary and physiological reasons being proposed for the inherent rightness of women's traditional role.

Psychologist Stephanie Shields describes some of these in a 1975 article in American Psychologist, titled "Functionalism, Darwinism and the Psychology of Women: A Study in Social Myth":

The first systematic treatment of individual differences in intelligence appeared in 1575. Juan Huarte [link] attributed sex differences in intelligence to the different humoral qualities that characterized each sex, a notion that had been popular in Western thought since ancient Greece. ...The humoral theory of sex differences was widely accepted through the 17th century, but with the advent of more sophisticated notions of anatomy and physiology, it was replaced by other, more specific, theories of female mental defect: the lesser size and hypothesized simpleness of the female brain, affectability as a source of inferiority, and complementarity of abilities in male and female. It was the developing evolutionary theory that provided an overall explanation for why these sex differences existed and why they were necessary for the survival of the race.

...

Because variation from the norm was already accepted [in the 1870s] as the mechanism of evolutionary progress (survival and transmission of adaptive variations) and because it seemed that the male was the more variable sex, it was soon universally concluded that the male is the progressive element in the species. Variation for its own sake took on a positive value because greatness, whether of an individual or a society, could not be achieved without variation. Once deviation from the norm became legitimized in evolutionary theory, the hypothesis of greater male variability became a convenient explanation for a number of observed sex differences; among them the greater frequency with which men achieved "eminence." By the 1890s it was popularly believed that greater male variability was a principle that held true, not only for physical traits but for mental abilities as well:

That men should have greater cerebral variability and therefore more originality, while women have greater stability and therefore more "common sense," are facts both consistent with the general theory of sex and verifiable in common experience. (Geddes & Thomson, 1890, p. 271)

...

In the United States the variability hypothesis naturally found expression in the new testing movement, its proponents borrowing heavily from the theory of [Havelock] Ellis and the statistical technique of [Karl] Pearson. The favor that was typically afforded the hypothesis did not stem from intellectual commitment to the scientific validity of the proposal as much as it did from personal commitment to the social desirability of its acceptance. The variability hypothesis was most often thought of in terms of its several corollaries: (a) genius (seldom, and then poorly, defined) is a particularly male trait; (b) men of genius naturally gravitate to positions of power and prestige (i.e., achieve eminence) by virtue of their talent; (c) an equally high ability level should not be expected of females: and (d) the education of women should, therefore, be consonant with their special talents and special place in society as wives and mothers.

Shields has also written more recently (2007) about how nineteenth-century psychologists differentiated the sexes within the realm of emotion:

Female reproductive physiology was at the heart of most explanations of the development of women's distinctive cognitive and emotional character (Vertinsky, 1988). ... The account generally followed this line: The human female's nervous system was limited (or prevented from its full development) either because of earlier achievement of full maturity [than the male] and/or because of the biological demands of development and maturation of the female reproductive system. At maturity, women's brain and nervous system were limited in their capacity to support the higher mental processes, specifically objective rationality and true creativity. The lower mental processes (emotion and certain perceptual skills) thus appeared to be or were comparatively stronger. Then, at menarche, the female's mental future was sealed: Blood that might have promoted further brain development was diverted to the uterus and sustaining fertility. The result of this abbreviated course of development and the demands of female reproductive physiology were limited intellectual capacity in comparison to men and a triad of interlocking traits: sensitivity, perceptual acumen, and, more important, emotionality.

...

In its feminine form, emotion was portrayed as a somewhat unstable sensitivity of feelings toward oneself and others. Masculine emotion, in constrast, was described as a passionate force evident in the drive to achieve, to create, and to dominate. Male/masculine reason was believed to be powered by a distinctively masculine emotion. Although passion could overwhelm reasoned behavior, well-controlled masculine passion is energy focused on "the battle of life." Passion was not simply equated with sexual drive, but as all strong feeling that powered creative thinking, social action, and physical prowess. Manly emotion was distinguished by its capacity to be put in the service of reason (Shields, 2002) and with a broader political definition of heterosexual manhood that emphasized Christian values of autonomy and self-regulation (Alderson, 1998). ... Women's emotion, feminine emotion, was portrayed as lacking the power and energy ascribed to masculine emotion, identified with an inferior and ineffectual emotionality. Women's emotion was more likely to be described as sentimentality, which was itself rendered as a degraded, pale version of normal emotional impulse that, in any event, women were not well equipped to regulate.

Men's emotions are strong, vigorous drives, leading them to do things, while women's, for all their greater refinement, are merely felt. Men are active, restlessly spurred onward, ever onward, by these heroic passions, while women's more diffuse emotionality renders them acutely sensitive to others' needs and emotions without ever feeling anything strongly enough to have emotional needs, or desires, or ambitions, of their own. As Shields points out, this ideal complementarity meshes nicely with the ideal of the nuclear family that was being popularized at the time:

The definition of women's ideal emotion evolved contemporaneously with the identification of women as the center of the household. This domestic image of woman featured emotional temperance and equanimity as its defining themes. Emotionally, the successful household manager was portrayed as expressing calm mother-love and unruffled housewifeliness. ...

The identification of the domestic sphere as one in which woman is the emotion expert (by virtue of natural qualities of attention to detail and emotional influences on judgment) undergirds a domestic structure of benevolent paternalism. As putative "emotion experts," the burden was on women to define healthy emotional home life. Nevertheless, women's tendency for "mere emotionality" calls into question the soundness of their judgment. The legitimacy of women's authority on emotional matters in the home was undermined by beliefs regarding the inherent weakness of feminine emotional nature. The intervention of someone with greater skills in self-regulation would be needed in matters of any importance.

She goes on to describe, and quote, the philosopher, sociologist and early popularizer of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory Herbert Spencer's (whom we might consider an ancestral Evolutionary Psychologist) ideas about the nature and evolutionary origins of sex differences in human emotion and intelligence. Those ideas, not surprisingly, place male aggression, particularly competition among males, in the driver's seat of evolutionary progress, shaping women's behavior along with men's:

[Spencer, in the 1902 edition of his book The Study of Sociology:] In barbarous times a woman who could from a movement, tone of voice, or expression of face, instantly detect in her savage husband the passion that was rising, would be likely to escape dangers run into by a woman less skilled in interpreting the natural language of feeling. Hence, from the perpetual exercise of this power, and the survival of those having most of it, we may infer its establishment as a feminine faculty.

(This one-sidedness --- female behavior changing in response to male behavior or preferences --- is still entrenched in evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary explanations of female appearance, or, more precisely, female pursuit of feminine appearance, that invoke deep-seated genetic imperatives in the male to choose a young, healthy and fertile mate, abound, in defiance of the usual pattern of sexual selection in which females are the choosy partners).

Given how little was known during his lifetime about human evolutionary history (indeed, we're still very much in the dark about a lot of it), Spencer can be forgiven for making up tales of a Hobbesian state of nature in which the human psyche as he knew it was forged. Today, though, we have more actual evidence to work with than he did, but still the stories that are told about human nature are unchanged.

Sources:

Shields, S. A. (2007) "Passionate Men, Emotional Women: Psychology Constructs Gender Difference in the Late 19th Century." History of Psychology Vol. 10, No.2, pp. 92-110.

Shields, S. A. (1975) "Functionalism, Darwinism and the Psychology of Women: A Study in Social Myth." American Psychologist Vol. 30, Iss. 7, pp. 739-754.

Weisstein, Naomi (1968). "Kinder, Küche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female." Boston: New England Free Press.

*An interesting exception to this pattern is the cultural back-and-forth over which sex has the more powerful libido. Though it is now believed that men are the insatiable ones, and women the natural prudes, at some other points in history --- the Middle Ages being the first such era that comes to my mind --- this thinking has been reversed, with women being seen as the lustful, animalistic sex and men the higher, more cerebral and spiritual sex.

These Are Not the Eternal Verities of Biology - Part I

I don't read Psychology Today, as a rule --- it strikes me as very much psych-lite, and there are lots of much better neuroscience, psychology and social-science blogs around the Internet --- but Echidne does, and has lately been bemoaning the fact that so few people are criticizing their science reporting, especially on matters of gender differences, where the reigning theoretical framework seems to be a particularly rigid, virulently anti-feminist strain of evolutionary psychology.

The primary exponent of this doctrine on that site is Satoshi Kanazawa, a Reader in Management at the London School of Economics and Polical Science who holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Arizona.

This educational background, you might guess, does not lend Dr. Kanazawa much credibility as an authority on human evolutionary history, genetics, sexual selection, or early hominid reproductive strategies and social behavior.

I'll come back to that in a later post; what I'd like to focus on now is Kanazawa's treatment of a subject that does lend itself to sociological explanation: effects of culture on observed sex differences in wealth, prestige, happiness and mating behavior.

Oddly, when presented with a topic that so clearly invites a sociologist's patient untangling of all its component threads of cultural, historical and economic factors, Kanazawa seems to forget all about sociology.

Instead, in a post titled, incredibly, "Why Modern Feminism Is Illogical, Unnecessary and Evil," he clings stubbornly to "biologically meaningful measures of welfare" --- i.e., longevity and number of descendants --- to argue that, since women live longer than men, and more women than men have at least one child at some time in their lives, women are clearly thriving at men's expense!

The fact that men and women are fundamentally different and want different things makes it difficult to compare their welfare directly, to assess which sex is better off; for example, the fact that women make less money than men cannot by itself be evidence that women are worse off than men, any more than the fact that men own fewer pairs of shoes than women cannot be evidence that men are worse off than women. However, in the only two biologically meaningful measures of welfare -- longevity and reproductive success -- women are and have always been slightly better off than men. In every human society, women live longer than men, and more women attain some measure of reproductive success; many more men end their lives as total reproductive losers, having left no genetic offspring.

As Echidne points out, women's current near-universal advantage in life expectancy is a fairly recent development.

The 1999 Working Paper of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research has this to say about how sex differences in life expectancy have shifted around through the centuries:

Today, women have a mortality advantage at almost all ages in developed countries. But this has not always been the case. Paleo-demographers are now establishing evidence that there may have been no life expectancy difference between males and females prior to the development of agriculture. Following the development of agriculture, females may have then suffered higher mortality than males. It has not yet been established whether this female disadvantage was brought about by a heavy work burden, high fertility, the microbiological environment or other factors (Boldster and Paine, 1995). The oldest records on mortality are from England and Wales, and from Sweden. The data reconstructed for England and Wales show that from the early 17th to the 20th century male and female mortality differed only little. In general males had a slight advantage in the 17th and 18th centuries, but females enjoyed lower mortality during some periods.

The authors trace the emergence of a consistent gap between the average male and female life expectancies to the reduction or elimination of two major causes of early death in women: death in childbirth and death from illness or parasitic infestation during youth. While germs don't discriminate by sex, girls were likelier than boys to die of such illnesses as tuberculosis, scarlet fever, smallpox, measles, and the like because girls were more likely to be malnourished, and thus less able to fight off an infection.

Both countries [i.e., France and Denmark] exhibit a female disadvantage [in mortality rates] in early life between the ages of 5 and 15. This disadvantage, which was found in most European populations, was present from 1800 until it disappeared in the 1920s and 1930s. Data on causes of death show that infectious and parasitic diseases account for very high female mortality at these ages, tuberculosis being the main killer. The frailty of young girls from 5 to 15 with regard to tuberculosis has been attributed to hereditary factors, as well as living, working and housing conditions. This excess mortality for girls was the result of the sexual discrimination that characterised Western societies in the 19th century. Various factors played a role here, such as nutrition, housing and hygiene, access to education and medical assistance, and working conditions (Tabutin and Willems 1996).

This article goes into a lot of detail about the tuberculosis epidemic in late-nineteenth-century Ireland, which the article's authors think displayed typically sex-skewed patterns of mortality:

Tuberculosis was a serious problem in Ireland during the surveyed period. The tuberculosis epidemic was rising in the 1880's and 1890's and culminated in 1904. ... The high mortality rates were falling very slowly in the following decades and in the 1940's they were still higher than in many European countries. The reduction of overall mortality rates to European levels coincides with the reduction of tuberculosis mortality.

Mostly youth and young adults were infected by tuberculosis (Jones, 2001). During puberty mostly females died of TB, in older age groups the death rates of TB were more equal between genders. It was more probable for poor people to have TB and urbanisation brought a higher TB rate, men being more affected.
...
The true reasons for the high mortality from tuberculosis and the particular susceptibility of women may have been the same as for excess female mortality [in general]: poverty, urbanisation and malnutrition. In 1871 50% of the female workers in the linen factories of Belfast were aged between 15 and 25 years and hard work and unhealthy environment led to higher mortality rates. Many of them worked at home; the bad housing conditions in urban areas made it easy for the bacillus to spread to women and their daughters who were staying with their mothers while men and their sons worked in the fields. The women who were weakened from the bad living conditions and malnutrition contracted tuberculosis that their body otherwise may have resisted.

Though most, if not all, poor people living in Ireland at that time suffered malnutrition, women and girls got the worst of it, as they continue to do in poorer parts of the world today:

Traditionally, women in Ireland had almost no rights. Girls and women had to have their meals after men and sons had eaten ... . School education was denied to more girls than boys, as women were regarded as not capable [of making] use of the acquired knowledge.

Why am I bringing all this stuff up?

I'm trying to show that, contrary to what Dr. Kanazawa seems to think, sexism really does hurt women in tangible, "biologically meaningful" ways. It kills them, in infancy (girl babies, especially in societies where women have few or no employment prospects and a woman's family is expected to supply a dowry when she marries, are at a greater risk than boy babies are of being murdered by their parents), in childhood (again, when there's not enough food to go around, it's the women and girls who do without, which makes the girls frailer and less able to recover from ordinary childhood illnesses) and during reproductive years (when women don't have the option to terminate a risky pregnancy, or to choose when or if they bear children, they are likelier to die, or be seriously injured, during childbirth).

Furthermore, there's evidence that some of the kinds of cultural changes feminists generally favor --- particularly, changes that would reduce women's economic dependence on men, like making education and employment more accessible to women --- actually enhance infant girls' survival prospects.

Here's an explanation of how that works, taken from V. B. Tulasidhar's 1993 article in Health Transition Review, on "Maternal education, female labour force participation and child mortality: evidence from the Indian census":

Mother's education affects child survival in two main ways: through better child-care practices and higher standards of hygiene at home, and more rational and greater use of preventive and curative medical services (Mosley and Chen 1984; Cleland and van Ginneken 1988). ... It is also argued that education gives greater independence to the mother which will help her [m]ake child-health-promoting decisions without any hindrance (Caldwell 1986). ... Educated mothers are also found to have superior knowledge of diseases and they seek timely treatment more often (see Cleland and van Ginneken 1988). However, some studies deny superior health-care knowledge on the part of educated mothers, particularly among those with lower levels of education (Caldwell, Reddy and Caldwell 1983; Lindenbaum, Chakraborty and Elias 1985). To sum up, the available evidence indicates a strong and independent association between mother's education and child health, but the exact mechanisms through which it operates are not yet clear.

...

The relationship between female labour force participation and child mortality is even more complex. On the one hand, labour force participation can have an adverse impact on child health as the child will not get full attention from its mother and may even forgo the benefits of breastfeeding. This will probably happen in those families where because of poverty the mother must participate in the labour market soon after delivery. On the other hand, the mother's work force participation will enhance the family income which will in turn have a positive impact on child nutrition and health. Thus, the eventual outcome of female labour force participation on child mortality depends on the relative influence of these two routes of causation.

...

Besides female education, three important factors are identified to explain excess female mortality (Bardhan 1988; Basu 1989; Das Gupta 1990). They are, first, cultural preference for male children; secondly, low social status of women; and thirdly, low female labour requirements in areas where rice is not grown. Among these three, the last hypothesis, propounded by Bardhan (1988), is intuitively the most appealing. The underlying factor in the hypothesis is the low economic value of women and hence female children in areas where the labour force participation rates of women are low. It appears that the other two factors (low social status and cultural preference) stem partly from the low economic value of women.

A much more recent (2007) paper by World Bank development economist Shwetlena Sabarwal, written while she was a graduate student in economics at the University of Minnesota, sheds some more light on the relationship between mothers' education levels and daughters' chances of surviving childhood.

Sabarwal tries to account separately for the two things she sees education doing for women, which is informing them and empowering them, and measure the effect of each on child mortality and excess female mortality.

In this analysis, it is proposed that mother's education can affect child health outcomes in three ways: a) autonomy effects of education, b) information effects of education and c) other direct effects of education. Once the autonomy and information effects are isolated from the other direct education effects, some interesting results emerge. First, we see that mother's education influences child health primarily through direct education and information effects and mother's autonomy does not have much predictive power in this relationship. In the excessive female child mortality regression however, women's autonomy has a negative and significant influence. The fact that the female autonomy variable is not significant in the child mortality regression in India runs counter to theoretical literature that emphasizes the education-autonomy link as a major pathway through which maternal schooling influences child mortality. Instead, it is the information effects that stand out as being highly significant, indicating that effective information dissemination is a crucial channel for reducing child mortality.

These results also show that mother's education affects child mortality on the one hand and excessive female child mortality on the other hand in very different ways. Women's autonomy is an important pathway through which mother's education can improve relative survival probabilities of girls. This has important policy implications in that instead of simply relying on female education[,] attempts should be made to enhance female autonomy in a broader sense.

This is a really long, dense post, that in its specifics seems to leap randomly all over time, space, and culture, but throughout it I've been trying to demonstrate, both clearly and thoroughly, that feminism really does help women. My thesis here has been the opposite of Kanazawa's: rather than leave women unhappy, stressed-out and childless, feminism has improved women's health and well-being, and their children's --- especially daughters' --- chances for survival.

But What About the (Aspie) Men??!

There's a phenomenon I've been noticing off and on for a long time in online discussions of rape culture (most recently, here), and the snap decisions women have to make all the time about how much to trust each random man* they encounter: when women start talking about what sorts of cues and impressions tell them to avoid a particular man, other people pipe up to tell them they're being unfair.

Most often, the appeal takes this form: What if he's just got Asperger's? Those Asperger people, they can't tell what kind of signals they're sending, or that they might be creeping you out! Give creepy-looking dudes a chance!

This derailing tactic also commonly appears in discussions of consent, where it usually plays out like this: Feminist blogger writes about the myriad social pressures on women to say yes (or at least not say no) to sex they don't want; feminist blogger suggests that our understanding of what rape and consent are should reflect this, and proposes a model of consent resembling this one, or this one, or this one; whatever model the feminist blogger espouses, it's going to put more responsibility on men to make sure their female partners really want to do X sexual activity; male commenters pop up complaining that women's body language is just too danged hard to read, and if the feminist blogger's plan were adopted, hardly anybody would ever have heterosexual sex ever again!

The man with Asperger's usually makes his entrance here, as an extreme example of Everyman's dilemma.

Of course, this is all perfectly true --- autistic people do often fail to understand nonverbal cues, social context, or how other people are likely to interpret their actions, which does mean that straight autistic men will probably creep out a lot of strange women as they try to teach themselves to flirt (or not; I don't know how to flirt and have no desire ever to learn) --- and sometimes this fact can be brought up and discussed in a non-derailing manner**.

Far more often, though, it's brought up not to add anything to the discussion at all, but to end it. Straight men's oft-proclaimed incapacity to decipher the subtle ambiguities of straight women's facial expressions and body language places all the onus for creating a safer, more egalitarian heterosexuality back onto women's shoulders.

An example, from this comment thread at Hugo Schwyzer's blog, is this response to this earlier comment:

You [referring to previous commenter] have already said that some of the men in your experience can't read the non-verbal clues. That wasn't me. That was you.
So that's the way it is.
In other words, that's the world now.
It makes no difference if men are hardwired or if men are clueless. Your experience has told us that some aren't picking up your nonverbal clues. So what are you going to do about it in the immediate future?

Wishing won't make it change.

That's the way it is, and wishing won't make it change. So either do something about it (all by yourself, naturally, since we men are clearly unwilling or unable to help you) or shut up and quit bothering us!

"saying many men currently DO NOT correctly interpret nonverbal signals (or notice them at all) is not the same thing as saying that men CAN'T. do you seriously not get the difference between those two statements?"

I think this is unfortunately both true to some extent: a) men (on average) don't learn to be as good as they can be in interpreting non-verbal communication. This is something that can be dealt with if there was a real recognition that they needed help in this area, that not everything is "naturally" given or not, and b) men (people with a male brain structure) will on average ceteris paribus never be as good as women (people with a female brain structure) are on average when it comes to interpreting non-verbal communication. There are researchers who suspect that "autism is an extreme version of the male condition." (Simon Baron-Cohen)

"Many of these sex differences [in empathizing and systematizing] are seen in adults, which might lead to the conclusion that all they reflect are differences in socialization and experience. But some differences are also seen extremely early in development, which may suggest that biology also plays a role. For example, girls tend to talk earlier than boys, and in the second year of life their vocabularies grow at a faster rate. One-year-old girls also make more eye contact than boys of their age.

In my work I have summarized these differences by saying that males on average have a stronger drive to systemize, and females to empathize. Systemizing involves identifying the laws that govern how a system works. Once you know the
laws, you can control the system or predict its behavior. Empathizing, on the other hand, involves recognizing what another person may be feeling or thinking, and responding to those emotions with an appropriate emotion of one's own.

...

We know that culture plays a role in the divergence of the sexes, but so does biology. For example, on the first day of life, male and female newborns pay attention to different things. On average, at 24 hours old, more male infants will look at a mechanical mobile suspended above them, while more female infants will look at a human face."
[link]

There are several rhetorical sleights of hand at work in the invoke-the-Aspie gambit. First, there's the handy conflation of autistic men (who, if we use the current thinking that about 1% of people are autistic, and that the ratio of autistic men to women is 4:1, should represent about 0.8% of people, or 1.6% of men --- a tiny minority, even if not as tiny as it used to be reckoned) with all men. In the first comment I quote, the argument is that because some men really can't read nonverbal signals, no man should be expected to***.

This line of argumentation also completely erases autistic women from the discussion, by making "autism" synonymous with "clueless, socially awkward man who can't understand his mysterious female partner." Autistic women might have that kind of problem (or we might not, since I think we might be likelier than autistic men to be partnered with other autistics****, with whom there isn't quite so much of a body-language barrier), or our difficulties with nonverbal cues, social context and other stuff falling under the umbrella of "intuition" or "common sense" might take a more sinister form. Earlier in this post, I mentioned the snap decisions most women make every day to try to minimize their chances of being raped by a stranger. Such snap decisions are often going to rest on evidence of the type that's completely invisible to many autistic women.

This tactic is also a way to use intersectionality against feminists: a feminist who confesses hirself unsympathetic to the hypothetical Aspie bachelor's plight opens hirself up to accusations of ableism. (Or, in the weaker version of this appeal, where the hypothetical man is not an actual autistic but just a well-meaning, socially awkward, geeky guy, the feminist becomes the stuck-up Mean Girl who won't give the sweet but wallflowerish Nice Guy the time of day. Since most women have been socialized to be nice, and polite, and not selfish or superficial, this high-schoolish taunt can have surprising power even over grown women).

*The Shapely Prose guest post I linked to uses a wonderful phrase to describe this: "Schrodinger's Rapist." Every man hovers in a sort of quantum superposition between Rapist and Not-Rapist in the eyes of the women who have to interact with him, and often women will err on the side of caution --- assume every man you meet is a rapist --- because the alternative --- trusting a man who later rapes you --- is horrible. More horrible than having to live as if half the people you run into on a daily basis are violent criminals who will hurt you if they're given the chance.

**I think the commenter at Shapely Prose who first brought up autism accomplished this. She might've been the first person I've ever seen raise that issue in good faith, though.

***I do hate that the discussion of consent always goes there, just because there are people who can't read those signals, and such people do sometimes have sex. Where I part ways with the "What about the Aspie men?!" crowd is that I insist that, if a man can't get a reasonably clear idea of whether his partner is enjoying herself just by looking at her, he should stop and ask her. Is that really so hard?

****If you're wondering how that can possibly be true, remember there are a lot more diagnosed male autistics than female ones.

Is There an Extreme Female Brain?

That question came up in the comments on this post I wrote in September on Simon Baron-Cohen's Extreme Male Brain theory of autism.

While Baron-Cohen did describe the Type E, or "female," brain in the lengthy paper I discussed in the earlier post, nowhere in that paper did he mention an extreme version of this type analogous to the "extreme male brain" he posits as an explanation of autism.

However, in his book-length treatment of the larger subject of brain sex in general, The Essential Difference (2003 --- brief summary and critique available here), he devotes a whole chapter to the extreme female brain.

Baron-Cohen claims that extreme empathizers have been harder for him to characterize because he hasn't seen any of them in his clinic. He hypothesizes that because it's easier for people who are highly skilled at dealing with people but who are helpless at solving problems and thinking logically to function in society, such people do not generally present their cases for psychologists' perusal.

All scientists know about the extreme female brain is that it is predicted to arise ... Scientists have never got up close to these individuals. It is a bit like positing the existence of a new animal on theoretical grounds, and then setting out to discover if it is really found in nature.
...
[W]hat would such people look like?

... Their empathizing ability would be average or significantly better than that of other people in the general population, but their systemizing would be impaired. So these would be people who have difficulty understanding math or physics or machines or chemistry, as systems. But they could be extremely accurate at tuning in to others' feelings and thoughts.

Would such a profile carry any necessary disability? Hyperempathizing could be a great asset, and poor systemizing may not be too crippling. It is possible that the extreme female brain is not seen in clinics because it is not maladaptive.

We saw that those with the extreme male brain do experience a disability, but only when the person is expected to be socially able. Remove this expectation, and the person can flourish. Unfortunately, in our society this social expectation is pervasive: at school, in the workplace and in the home. So it is hard to avoid.

But for those with the extreme female brain, the disability might only show up in circumstances where the person is expected to be systematic or technical. The person with the extreme female brain would be system-blind. Fortunately, in our society there is considerable tolerance for such individuals. For example, if you were a child who was systemblind, your teachers might simply allow you to drop mathematics and science at the earliest possible stage, and encourage you to pursue your stronger subjects. If you were a systemblind adult and your car didn't work, you could just call the mechanic (who is likely to be at least a Type S). If your computer needs putting together, and you can't work out which lead goes into which socket, there are phone numbers that you can ring for technical support. And in evolutionary terms, there were likely equivalent people that a systemblind person could turn to for help when that person's home was destroyed in strong winds, or when their spear broke.

Despite the silliness of the idea of Prehistoric Tech Support ("Step One: Does Your Spear Have a Pointy End?"), Baron-Cohen has a good point here: with the increasing complexity of society, technology and daily life, division of labor has proceeded to such an extent that many different categories of people exist whose job it is to make sure other people's gadgets are functioning as they should. The need to repair one's own stuff has gotten less and less --- and rich people have never had to fix their own broken appliances --- and, indeed, is no longer possible for many electronic gadgets. Since these extreme Type E's would be good at navigating complex social networks, they should have no trouble knowing whom to consult about what annoying technological hiccup.

That's about as far as I'm willing to grant that his prediction holds any water, though. I think he dramatically underestimates the degree to which systematic modes of thought are needed in modern life. In one example, he has his hypothetical extreme empathizer dealing with a car that won't start; were I in the room when he was writing that part, I would ask him what business he has supposing that this systemblind person could even drive a car? Driving requires memorization and application of a very specific and complicated set of rules, deriving other vehicles' likely trajectories from those rules, and performing fairly complex feats of spatial reasoning quickly and often. All of these things, you have probably realized, are examples of the "systemizing" cognitive style that these extreme Type E's are supposed to lack.

Later in the chapter, Baron-Cohen considers some of the possible matches for his extreme female brain among existing psychological disorders. He rejects what I had thought to be the obvious choice --- paranoia --- on the grounds that the over-attribution of hostile intentions to others (or, sometimes, to inanimate objects) cannot be hyperempathy, because the paranoid person does not perceive the hostility so much as he or she creates it.

[A]re individuals with these psychiatric conditions (for that is what paranoia and personality disorders are) revealing the extreme female brain?

This cannot be the case. If someone is over-attributing intentions, or has become preoccupied by their own emotions, then by definition they are not exhibiting hyperempathy. Hyperempathy is the ability to ascertain the mental states of others to an unusually accurate and sensitive degree, and it can only occur if one is appropriately tuned in to the other person's feelings. A paranoid person, or someone who is easily inflamed into aggression by suspecting that others are hostile, has a problem. But their problem is not hyperempathy.

So, if the "female" brain is characterized by special attention to, and a high degree of accuracy in parsing, subtle emotional cues in other people's faces, voices or behavior, a person whose wild imaginings led them to infer motivations that weren't there would be as far off from this mark as someone who simply failed to realize that there was any meaning to be read at all.

Ultimately, Baron-Cohen characterizes the extreme female cognitive type as regular people with a particular gift for connecting with people, but who are also technologically clueless:

A second, and to my mind more likely [than his earlier suggestion of a person who believes in telepathy without being delusional or generally harboring wacky ideas], contender for who might have an extreme female brain would be a wonderfully caring person who can rapidly make you feel perfectly understood. For example, an endlessly patient psychotherapist who is excellent at tuning in to your feelings and situation, who not only says she feels a great sadness at your sadness or great pleasure at your pleasure but also actually experiences these emotions as vividly as if your feelings were hers.

He adds that such a prodigy would have to be "technologically disabled" to a corresponding extent to fit his theory, but supposes that such a disability would not stop her from establishing a meaningful career in the caring professions. He says, to my mind unrealistically, that society values empathizers and provides them rewarding niches while compensating for (or ignoring) their weaknesses in systemizing.

I do not believe that society particularly values its caregivers, though. Most of them (in the US) are unpaid, and depend entirely for their survival on the income and health insurance of their working spouses. When caregiving is also a paid job, it is grossly underpaid and often physically and emotionally exhausting. Even within fields that are fairly prestigious, like medicine, those specialties which are dominated by women tend to be the lowest-paid and least-highly regarded. The specialties women choose are often the more nurturing, caring, do-gooder areas like pediatrics or family practice. Conversely, engineers are compensated quite well, and are unique among the professions for earning power immediately following completion of a bachelor's degree.

(I have one final, random thing to add: I know several hyperempathizers. Of the three I can think of, two are male and one is female. One of them sounds a lot like the idea Baron-Cohen rejected in favor of the wholly-assimilated caring professional: when he perceives other people's mental states, he claims to be seeing "auras." I take this to mean that his brain interprets the subtle signals he's perceiving in a visual way --- much like my own thoughts, experienced by a more superstitious person, might be termed "visions." Ironically enough, this man has an autistic son).