The essential difference Book

I finished this book several weeks ago, but have been putting off the review. I went into reading it with trepidation, expecting to find some of my thinking and understand challenged. Instead, I found a book so sloppy it made me angry that it is so widely referenced as the evidence that gender behaviour is genetically determined. At points early on, the book actually pushed me more towards a nurture understanding, just out of sheer annoyance.

So now I've talked about my emotional response, what about the book?

The book is written as a argument. The structure is designed to make you agree with the author, evidence that supports the author's conclusions is trumpeted, and contrary evidence is skimmed over. Details of studies, such as the actual ratio of gender difference, which would cast doubt on conclusions are generally not mentioned. This is hardly a crime - lots of non-fiction has a argumentative structure, even fairly good stuff (Dawkins, I'm looking at you) but it does mean this book has no business pretending to be an overview.

For starters, the book begins by explaining - in the consistently patronising tones that Baron-Cohen keeps up for the whole work - that human brains fit into three categories - the "female brain" (high empathy and low systematising); the "male brain" (low empathy, high systematising) and the balanced brain (you work it out). The fact that there is any correlation between empathy and systematising ability is not questioned until the second to last chapter, when Baron-Cohen asks rhetorically if one having one influences having the other - this book, he proclaims, proves that they do! This book - which has until now treated this as fact!

Throughout this book he attempts to argue that our brains are structured around different roles for each gender, the caring, empathetic nuturing role for women, and the organisational, decision making role for men. I was perhaps ill-equipped from the beginning to have much leaning towards this, working as I do in a field based upon ludicrous levels of systemising (cataloguing) and entirely dominated by women.

Baron-Cohen makes pains throughout to suggest that women can have "male brains" too, that these are generalities not specifics, but his choice of language belies this disclaimer. I do not have a "male brain" for example, nor do any women I know, no matter how good at systemising they are. One wants, naturally, to be seen as the gender one is, not as a strange hybrid exception.

For the first few chapters - the period at which my fury was most intense - Baron-Cohen cites few studies, although he makes the most of those he does. He mixes anecdotes in a way that can kinda offensive (regarding the prominence of men in engineering and maths, for example, he simply comments that the professors he spoke to were nice people who would never discriminate based on gender, so the discrepency must be biological. No I am not exaggerating. Yes, really.) The book improves in this respect as it goes on, but the flaws remain big enough to render the research useless in this form.

For starters, Baron-Cohen cites studies of adults, teenagers and children mostly interchangeably, and most studies are of teens and adults, making it difficult to identify how gendered behaviour develops over time. His key early infancy study findings - the infamous babies and mobiles - has never been successfully replicated, despite several attempts. And when you realise the extent to which his argument rests on a study which found a relatively small difference in the amount of time newborns look at a face vs a mobile, it's a little silly.

Secondly, Baron-Cohen frankly plays extremely fast and loose with his own definitions of "systematising" and "empathising" to make different categories fit. For example, at one point he uses a study showing girls are more reluctant than boys to engage in a physically dangerous activity as evidence for their higher "empathy", and he regularly uses examples of girls choosing to forgo something in favour of others as evidence of empathy, despite clarifying in the final chapters that he is not talking about sympathetic empathy. (as a consequence, men & autistic people come across as selfish assholes). At one point, I went to check the internet for a clearer explanation of Baron-Cohen's definitions, and was surprised to find his Wikipedia page much clearer and more informative than this book. In fact, I would recommend it above this book to someone trying to understand his research, and I think it puts him in a much more positive light.

Thirdly, when I started going through the cited studies (more on how difficult that was below!) I discovered that many of the studies on children were conducted in the fifties and sixties, and others had margins of difference much, much smaller than implied in the text. This was particularly irksome given that Baron-Cohen's dismissal of gender bais in the studies relied on norms introduced to gender studies in the last three decades.

As a side note - finding studies to check was a nightmare. Some of this was hardly anyone's fault - the Kindle edition I was reading had not been chaptered correctly, making it impossible to jump to notes. Some of it, however. references were given as endnote numbers. The endnote numbers were allocated sparingly - one for every page or so. The number hence listed around half-a-dozen citations, all in short form. Once noting down the half-dozen citations, you have to go tot eh bibliography to connect them, find the studies (yay for working in a research library!) then try to remember the point Baron-Cohen was claiming they proved. Not transparent. Several points I couldn't find confirmation of, not surprising given the difficulty of the process.

The material on autism - and I know this is what people are interested in - was substantially better than the rest. Baron-Cohen has worked with autistic people, and displayed a great deal of empathy and familiarity. I strongly suspect that his theories for gender have been developed from his work with autistic adults, and then imposed later, as the social awareness/systematising dynamic seems to fit much better. Having said that, his thesis - these were extreme male brains - didn't shed a great deal of insight, and he completely ignores the sensory and other aspects of the disorder. (I could have lived, as well, without Baron-Cohen's deduction that a female equivalent to autism - where women can't do basic logic, but are wonderfully empathetic must exist, but we haven't noticed because such women must be so good at getting others to do everything for them!).

I think I'm running out of puff! The book isn't completely without value. Some of his material on neurology is less terrible (yes, I'm scratching here) and his discussion about intersex individuals similarly. Both of these are better recorded elsewhere though.

Finally then, what was simply most offensive is Baron-Cohen's complete obfuscation of the social situation and role of gender difference. Towards the end of the book, he lists the occupations each gendered brain is best suited for, citing, those with "female brains" "make the most wonderful counsellors, primary-school teachers, nurses, therapists, social workers, mediators, group facilitators or personnel staff". Those with "male brains" in contrast "make the most wonderful scientists, engineers, mechanics, technicians, musicians, architects, electricians, plumbers, taxonomists, catalogists, bankers, programmers or lawyers". Don't worry, ladies, he adds a caveat that female-brains could apply for the PR aspects of these jobs! Yet a page later, he adds, "Society at present is likely to be biased towards accepting the extreme female brain and stigmatises the extreme male brain". Because all those primary school teachers and nurses I know are so much more valued than engineers and lawyers.

This is a really important topic, and this book mostly stands as to why you need to take claims that we "now understand" gender behaviour as mostly rubbish. Books like this just show that this research is still driven by a need to explain away aspects of society that make us uncomfortable, not to explore real differences. That was my key take home, anyway.