(00:00:00):
Everywhere I go, people want to attribute my kids' behavior to their gender.

(00:00:05):
Oh, look at how sweet your girl is.

(00:00:07):
Just wait till the hormones hit in adolescence.

(00:00:10):
Look at how rough and tumble your boy is.

(00:00:12):
Boys are just different, aren't they?

(00:00:14):
And yet these same people who talk constantly about gender,

(00:00:17):
who attribute everything to gender in front of their children who are listening,

(00:00:21):
seem to think their children aren't listening and that their own ideas about gender

(00:00:25):
have no effect on their behavior or their parenting.

(00:00:28):
They earnestly tell me that they parented in a gender neutral way and that their

(00:00:32):
children just naturally developed into complete gender stereotypes.

(00:00:36):
Uncoincidentally, the very gender stereotypes that they believe in.

(00:00:40):
It is exhausting and demoralizing to witness.

(00:00:44):
Hi, I'm Zanva Lines and this is the Liberating Motherhood podcast.

(00:00:49):
Today,

(00:00:49):
we are going to be talking about gender stereotypes,

(00:00:51):
how these gender stereotypes affect our parenting and how they affect our world.

(00:00:55):
I'm so excited to be interviewing the inimitable Cordelia Fine.

(00:01:00):
Cordelia Fine is an academic and writer.

(00:01:03):
Her work analyzes scientific and popular biological explanations of behavioral sex

(00:01:07):
differences and workplace gender inequalities,

(00:01:10):
explores the effects of gender-related attitudes and biases on judgments and

(00:01:14):
decision-making,

(00:01:16):
and contributes to debates about workplace gender equality.

(00:01:19):
She was recently named a living legend of research by The Australian.

(00:01:23):
She is the author of Patriarchy Inc.,

(00:01:25):
Testosterone Rex,

(00:01:27):
Delusions of Gender,

(00:01:28):
and a Mind of Its Own,

(00:01:30):
and has been published in more than a dozen languages.

(00:01:33):
Among other accolades,

(00:01:34):
Testosterone Rex won the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize.

(00:01:39):
Delusions of Gender was listed in 10 books about women that will change your life,

(00:01:43):
22 Books Women Think Men Should Read,

(00:01:45):
Top 10 Books on Women in the Past 30 Years,

(00:01:48):
and the New York Public Library's Essential Reads on Feminism 100 Years After the

(00:01:52):
19th Amendment,

(00:01:53):
among others.

(00:01:55):
In recognition of her work on the understanding of gender stereotypes,

(00:01:59):
challenging gender perceptions,

(00:02:00):
and contributions to public discourse to close the gender gap,

(00:02:04):
She was awarded the 2018 Edinburgh Medal by the City of Edinburgh Council to honor

(00:02:08):
men and women of science who have made a significant contribution to the

(00:02:12):
understanding and well-being of humanity.

(00:02:15):
Cordelia Fine has degrees from Oxford University,

(00:02:18):
Cambridge University and UCL and is now a professor in the History and Philosophy

(00:02:22):
of Science program in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the

(00:02:26):
University of Melbourne.

(00:02:28):
So I'm thrilled to have Cordelia here,

(00:02:29):
but before we get started,

(00:02:31):
I'm going to do a few quick administrative reminders.

(00:02:34):
First,

(00:02:34):
you can find Cordelia's books and all of the books I mentioned on the show,

(00:02:38):
as well as a ton of reading lists and recommendations on the Liberating Motherhood

(00:02:42):
bookshop page.

(00:02:43):
You'll also find that the Liberating Motherhood website has a cornucopia of

(00:02:47):
information about my work,

(00:02:49):
this podcast,

(00:02:49):
the people I've interviewed,

(00:02:51):
including details on how to appear on the podcast,

(00:02:53):
how to submit a story for the podcast,

(00:02:55):
how to submit an advice question,

(00:02:56):
how to contact me,

(00:02:57):
anything you could possibly imagine.

(00:02:59):
Check it out at liberatingmotherhood.org.

(00:03:02):
And finally, just a reminder that this podcast is free, but it is not free to make.

(00:03:08):
My work exists solely because of the commitment and generosity of paid subscribers.

(00:03:12):
People who pay to support this work get a bonus podcast every month,

(00:03:15):
at least eight extra essays each month,

(00:03:17):
and access to the private Liberating Motherhood support group.

(00:03:21):
Subscribe at zon.substack.com.

(00:03:24):
If you'd like to help support the podcast in other ways,

(00:03:26):
then liking,

(00:03:27):
commenting,

(00:03:28):
sharing,

(00:03:28):
or leaving a positive review is more helpful than you might realize.

(00:03:31):
Social media algorithms are actively punishing feminist writing,

(00:03:35):
but engaging with feminist writing and scholarship you love can help counter this

(00:03:39):
trend,

(00:03:40):
ensuring that there's always a market and an outlet for quality feminist

(00:03:43):
scholarship.

(00:03:44):
Sharing my podcast with others helps me to continue to get great guests like Professor Fine.

(00:03:49):
Cordelia, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

(00:03:53):
Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here.

(00:03:55):
Thank you for having me.

(00:03:56):
I am a longtime fan of your scholarship, and it's had such an impact on me and

(00:04:01):
On everybody I meet, really, because I won't stop talking about it.

(00:04:06):
Countering the dominant narrative about gender is so important and you've just done

(00:04:10):
it so eloquently.

(00:04:11):
So thank you.

(00:04:13):
Thank you.

(00:04:14):
It's an endless task.

(00:04:15):
I feel like I just took the baton from a feminist who came before me, to be honest.

(00:04:21):
It really is because I recently did a podcast where we talked about women are from

(00:04:29):
Mars,

(00:04:29):
men are from Venus.

(00:04:31):
And it just feels like this has been going on forever.

(00:04:35):
And of course, there's a reason for that.

(00:04:38):
So before we kind of get into why this exists,

(00:04:41):
how it exists,

(00:04:42):
and how we counter it,

(00:04:44):
tell me a little bit about how you got into this line of research.

(00:04:49):
Yeah,

(00:04:50):
no,

(00:04:50):
I'm glad you asked that,

(00:04:51):
because I think sometimes,

(00:04:53):
particularly my critics,

(00:04:55):
assume that I keep Judith Butler by my bedside as a

(00:05:00):
as a sort of Bible,

(00:05:01):
and I set out to,

(00:05:04):
you know,

(00:05:04):
prove my pre-existing beliefs about,

(00:05:06):
you know,

(00:05:08):
gender being socially constructed.

(00:05:10):
But that's really not how I kind of tumbled into this area of research.

(00:05:16):
So many,

(00:05:18):
many years ago when my children were preschoolers,

(00:05:21):
so much younger,

(00:05:22):
they're in their early 20s now,

(00:05:24):
I was working part-time as a research associate at Monash University,

(00:05:29):
which is an Australian university in Melbourne.

(00:05:32):
And I was on someone else's project, which was to do with neuroethics.

(00:05:39):
So this was interested in how this rise of the new neuroimaging technologies was

(00:05:45):
changing our conceptions of ourselves.

(00:05:47):
So this is a philosophical project, right?

(00:05:49):
So we had these new brain scanners.

(00:05:52):
And neuroscientists were either,

(00:05:54):
you know,

(00:05:55):
looking at structural features of the brain using these technologies or looking at

(00:06:00):
patterns of blood flow and looking at brain activation patterns.

(00:06:04):
And yeah,

(00:06:05):
so this project was,

(00:06:06):
you know,

(00:06:07):
with this new technology that seems to promise to offer us a sort of insight into

(00:06:12):
our brains,

(00:06:12):
into our very souls,

(00:06:13):
how is that changing our sense of ourselves?

(00:06:16):
At the same time,

(00:06:17):
of course,

(00:06:17):
because my children are very young,

(00:06:18):
I was working part-time and because I'm an academic,

(00:06:21):
I was reading a lot of parenting books,

(00:06:23):
like I sort of wanted to research my way into being a better parent.

(00:06:27):
And one of the books that I read was actually recommended to be my one of the

(00:06:30):
mothers and my mother's group was called,

(00:06:34):
I think,

(00:06:35):
Why Gender Matters by Leonard Sachs.

(00:06:38):
And that was drawing on these same new neuroimaging studies.

(00:06:43):
to say,

(00:06:44):
look,

(00:06:45):
this new technology is telling us what we always knew all along,

(00:06:48):
which is that men and women's brains are fundamentally different.

(00:06:51):
And this particular book was arguing that this was the reason that we needed to

(00:06:56):
parent boys and girls differently and we also needed to educate them differently.

(00:07:01):
And the particular author was a real advocate for single-sex schooling.

(00:07:06):
So I was kind of interested

(00:07:10):
about this because my PhD was in,

(00:07:13):
I did it at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of London.

(00:07:18):
And although I didn't use neuroimaging technologies,

(00:07:20):
I was,

(00:07:21):
you know,

(00:07:22):
looking at the effects of damage to particular parts of the brain on cognitive and

(00:07:26):
social processing.

(00:07:27):
And people hadn't been talking about sex differences in the brain.

(00:07:30):
So I thought, oh, that's, that's kind of interesting.

(00:07:33):
And so I looked up the study that was being cited as evidence for

(00:07:38):
I can't quite remember now, but why we should teach maths differently to boys versus girls.

(00:07:43):
And I was like,

(00:07:45):
there was basically no connection between what the study showed and the claim that

(00:07:51):
was the educational implications that were being drawn from it.

(00:07:55):
So I got kind of curious about this.

(00:07:57):
And so I started to go into bookshops and I started to look at these self-help books.

(00:08:03):
And I started to see that, whether it was to do with

(00:08:08):
relationships or making more money in your business or parenting these books were

(00:08:15):
again drawing on this new neuroimaging technology to say you know boy male and

(00:08:21):
female brains are fundamentally different and you know whether it was you need to

(00:08:25):
educate them boys differently to girls or whether it was like you need to leverage

(00:08:29):
female capital uh to make you know unprecedented profits it was the same the same

(00:08:34):
kind of message

(00:08:36):
And because I was part of this neuroethics project,

(00:08:38):
I was thinking,

(00:08:38):
well,

(00:08:38):
this is really interesting.

(00:08:39):
This is a way that this new neuroimaging technology is being used to sort of tell

(00:08:43):
us,

(00:08:44):
oh,

(00:08:44):
look,

(00:08:45):
you know,

(00:08:46):
science is,

(00:08:47):
you know,

(00:08:47):
this new scientific technology is sort of reinforcing what,

(00:08:52):
you know,

(00:08:52):
those stupid feminists always told us were just gender stereotypes.

(00:08:57):
So I was, you know, as an academic, I was able to, as I said, look up the actual studies

(00:09:05):
that these being based on and I wrote a sort of early article about it which I'm

(00:09:11):
sure literally a handful of people have read but it was when I saw that original

(00:09:16):
book being promoted in my son's kindergarten that I thought you know I feel like

(00:09:21):
there needs to be an accessible deconstruction of what's actually going on here

(00:09:27):
that this

(00:09:28):
these scientific findings are being misrepresented.

(00:09:31):
They're being actually fabricated in some cases.

(00:09:34):
They're being totally, totally over-interpreted.

(00:09:38):
And, you know, I, my, my goal, I'd written a mind of its own.

(00:09:42):
So I knew I could write a book was I thought I'd like to write a book explaining,

(00:09:45):
you know,

(00:09:46):
what the science does and doesn't show.

(00:09:49):
So I did, I did get the contract to write what the book that became delusions of gender was.

(00:09:53):
But that book actually changed as well during the course of writing it,

(00:09:57):
because originally my target was just these popularizers,

(00:10:01):
you know,

(00:10:02):
that they were going over the top,

(00:10:04):
they were exaggerating,

(00:10:05):
they were treating gender stereotypes as if they were true of all boys and all

(00:10:08):
girls,

(00:10:09):
you know,

(00:10:09):
all just the usual stuff.

(00:10:11):
But when I went to look at the scientific research more closely to...

(00:10:16):
you know to see what does the science actually say it was then I realized that this

(00:10:19):
was actually a much more complicated book that the science itself was infused with

(00:10:24):
kind of gender biases that it was being distorted by gender stereotypes um and so I

(00:10:31):
sort of had to go back to the publisher and say this is going to take a bit longer

(00:10:34):
to write uh and it's going to be a more controversial book um and I was I was I

(00:10:41):
felt it was it was it was um

(00:10:45):
At that time, I was quite sort of intellectually isolated.

(00:10:50):
I had a mother of young children.

(00:10:53):
I didn't have secure employment.

(00:10:55):
I didn't have a kind of intellectual community around me.

(00:10:58):
And there I was sort of critiquing work coming out of labs at Cambridge,

(00:11:02):
Oxford University,

(00:11:03):
et cetera.

(00:11:04):
As you said, this kind of mainstream view.

(00:11:08):
And it was only towards the end of finishing the book that I actually met another

(00:11:11):
you know a fellow a fellow traveler in this terrain rebecca jordan young whose book

(00:11:17):
um brainstorm came out just about the same time and it was that was a sort of

(00:11:21):
relief you say okay i'm not mad you know she she hers was you know based on decades

(00:11:28):
of um uh studying research looking at hormones and masculine masculinity and

(00:11:34):
femininity um but you know we we both had a very skeptical take on on this work so

(00:11:41):
So that's how, that's a very long story about how I fell into it.

(00:11:46):
And then I just, you know, I became fascinated by the topic.

(00:11:51):
So delusions of gender was,

(00:11:53):
you know,

(00:11:54):
it was about this idea of prenatal hormones,

(00:11:56):
wiring male brains and female brains and about neuroimaging technologies and the

(00:12:02):
sort of over-interpretation and false positive biases and the way that we project

(00:12:06):
our gender stereotypes onto these very ambiguous data.

(00:12:10):
And it was mostly around this idea of,

(00:12:12):
you know,

(00:12:12):
this very old idea of men as thinkers and women as feelers.

(00:12:16):
And then I moved to work at a business school.

(00:12:22):
And there was a lot of talk there about,

(00:12:25):
you know,

(00:12:25):
risk taking and competition and this version of the business case for diversity

(00:12:31):
that was really flavoured with this idea of,

(00:12:34):
you know,

(00:12:34):
women having skills and competencies that men lack.

(00:12:38):
And of course, economists were very interested in risk-taking and competition.

(00:12:42):
These are sort of really core concepts in economics.

(00:12:47):
And so then I began to get interested in ideas about circulating testosterone at

(00:12:54):
sexual maturity,

(00:12:56):
risk-taking,

(00:12:56):
competition,

(00:12:57):
status-seeking,

(00:12:58):
and this whole sort of evolutionary story that our ideas about gender are framed

(00:13:05):
within.

(00:13:05):
And that became testosterone wrecks.

(00:13:09):
And Patriarchy Inc, I think that it's definitely the final chapter.

(00:13:15):
I was actually talking to someone who works in the area as well.

(00:13:19):
And she said, what's next?

(00:13:20):
And I said, I'm done with gender.

(00:13:25):
She's like, oh, that's amazing.

(00:13:26):
You've said everything that you want to say about it.

(00:13:28):
I'm done with gender.

(00:13:32):
Anyway, so you can see, you can frame it as a positive way or a negative way.

(00:13:34):
But I feel like with Patriarchy Inc, like I am done.

(00:13:40):
Well,

(00:13:40):
I have to say,

(00:13:41):
I'm a little worried that you might not be able to be done because so I worked very

(00:13:48):
briefly with primates,

(00:13:49):
you know,

(00:13:49):
enough to know like three facts and be completely useless.

(00:13:53):
But one of the things that was constantly circulating when I was working with

(00:13:58):
primates is the study of rhesus monkeys,

(00:14:01):
where they use a sample size,

(00:14:03):
I don't know,

(00:14:03):
like five or seven.

(00:14:05):
And they gave these juvenile monkeys toys, human toys.

(00:14:11):
And the boy monkeys, as the researchers called them, were attracted to cars.

(00:14:16):
And the girl monkeys were attracted to dolls.

(00:14:21):
And I remember hearing about this in the popular press and then actually reading the study.

(00:14:26):
And the study was just ludicrous.

(00:14:29):
It's like, by what evolutionary mechanism would monkeys learn to be attracted

(00:14:35):
cars like this is this is just silly um but i i raise that because it just seems

(00:14:41):
like there's always a new study trying to prop this up whether it's with monkeys or

(00:14:46):
apes or brains or brain scans it just feels so endless yes that's right and i think

(00:14:54):
i think you know as the i mean this is the one of the points that i made in

(00:14:59):
delusions of gender and of course many have made it before me and since is that you

(00:15:03):
know as the tech

(00:15:04):
Every new technology is a kind of new way of re-inscribing those old ideas.

(00:15:12):
So,

(00:15:12):
you know,

(00:15:13):
once it was filling up the skulls with millet grain and,

(00:15:17):
oh,

(00:15:17):
look,

(00:15:17):
you know,

(00:15:17):
you can fit more millet grain into a male brain than a female brain and,

(00:15:21):
of course,

(00:15:21):
a white brain than a black brain.

(00:15:23):
So that's,

(00:15:24):
you know,

(00:15:24):
that's why white men are the,

(00:15:27):
you know,

(00:15:28):
at the absolute top of the intellectual ladder.

(00:15:31):
Yeah.

(00:15:33):
you know,

(00:15:33):
right through to now we have,

(00:15:37):
you know,

(00:15:37):
using machine learning to see if they can classify brains as male and female with a

(00:15:42):
high degree of accuracy.

(00:15:46):
But,

(00:15:46):
you know,

(00:15:46):
when you go into research with sort of pre-existing assumptions,

(00:15:53):
you know,

(00:15:53):
there's always this risk of confirmation bias within research.

(00:15:56):
So, you know, the computational using machine learning

(00:16:00):
is to classify male and female brains is a good example.

(00:16:04):
So other researchers have shown,

(00:16:06):
well,

(00:16:06):
if you give the algorithm brains to say,

(00:16:11):
you know,

(00:16:11):
these are male brains and these are female brains,

(00:16:13):
now classify as these ones,

(00:16:15):
you're actually already telling the algorithm that there are two kinds of brains,

(00:16:20):
male and female brains.

(00:16:21):
But if this is worked by Dafna Dwell, if you actually say, look, just here's a bunch of brains,

(00:16:29):
cluster them into groups based on similarity,

(00:16:33):
maybe two groups,

(00:16:34):
maybe three groups,

(00:16:34):
maybe four groups,

(00:16:35):
maybe five groups,

(00:16:36):
right?

(00:16:36):
They don't pick out male and female brains.

(00:16:38):
So it's a good example of the way in which the kind of question that you,

(00:16:42):
the assumptions that you make starting in can get built into the research itself

(00:16:49):
and then confirm what you thought all along.

(00:16:52):
Yeah.

(00:16:53):
So in the early days of our parenting, my husband and I worked

(00:16:58):
very committed to not doing the like gender socialization and the idea that we came

(00:17:03):
up with is we weren't going to go so far as to like not gender our child but we

(00:17:07):
weren't going to talk about gender you know we weren't going to say oh there's a

(00:17:09):
boy there's a girl we weren't going to say like you're a smart girl because we felt

(00:17:13):
like you know as soon as we gave her these categories she would start using them so

(00:17:17):
we wanted to minimize the use of categories and i do feel it it made a big

(00:17:21):
difference with her um

(00:17:23):
But the thing that I noticed when I was pregnant with her that was just I was so

(00:17:27):
taken aback by,

(00:17:28):
I was not prepared for,

(00:17:30):
is how aggressively people were projecting gender stereotypes onto her from the

(00:17:36):
time she was a literal fetus.

(00:17:38):
I mean,

(00:17:38):
I remember ultrasound technicians making up entire stories about her based on her

(00:17:44):
being a girl.

(00:17:46):
And also assumptions about like how I would feel about her, how my husband would feel about her.

(00:17:51):
You know,

(00:17:51):
people would talk about how he might be disappointed to not have a boy or talk

(00:17:55):
about how excited I must be to be giving birth to my future best friend and how I

(00:17:59):
play Barbies and makeup together.

(00:18:01):
It was just stunning.

(00:18:04):
And then like when she was born,

(00:18:06):
and I know the research supports that how they do it,

(00:18:08):
but it was just so bizarre to see it unfolding.

(00:18:11):
Yeah.

(00:18:11):
You know,

(00:18:12):
she'd be crying in the hospital and the nurses would be like,

(00:18:15):
oh,

(00:18:15):
she's she's scared and she's an intense girl with those strong emotions.

(00:18:19):
Whereas, of course, if she was a boy, it would have been look how tough and angry he was.

(00:18:22):
It was just it was shocking.

(00:18:26):
So I wonder if you could speak a little bit to that early gender socialization issue.

(00:18:34):
how it affects things, how it affects families.

(00:18:37):
And,

(00:18:37):
you know,

(00:18:38):
I think generally just kind of the data that you think people need to know about

(00:18:41):
this.

(00:18:44):
Yeah.

(00:18:46):
So I think, I mean, you're right.

(00:18:50):
You can't sort of, you can't create a gender-free childhood, obviously, as you know.

(00:18:57):
And in fact, there's interesting research showing that,

(00:19:01):
even in sort of in the first months of birth, babies are starting to develop.

(00:19:11):
I'm so sorry, my cat is feeling very vocal today.

(00:19:15):
So that even from, you know, from quite an early age, babies are

(00:19:21):
kind of noticing differences between male and female faces and sort of starting to

(00:19:26):
create these categories.

(00:19:27):
But of course,

(00:19:28):
we emphasize it in so many different ways through,

(00:19:32):
you know,

(00:19:32):
through the use of pronouns and different names and different hairstyles and

(00:19:36):
different clothing.

(00:19:39):
And that's even before you get to all the kind of content that you're talking

(00:19:42):
about,

(00:19:43):
these gender stereotypes.

(00:19:46):
So, you know, the developmental research shows that from, you know, children are starting to

(00:19:52):
pick up that you know they're little sponges they're starting to learn those

(00:19:55):
associations really from a very early age but it's around about the age of two when

(00:20:03):
the child develops that sense of their own gender identity that it gains a kind of

(00:20:09):
personal meaning to them and it's really I was I was just struck when you were

(00:20:14):
talking about how things were being projected onto your child your daughter even

(00:20:19):
before she was born it's like

(00:20:22):
she doesn't have any other characteristics to, to create a story about.

(00:20:27):
And it's true that when you're a,

(00:20:29):
when you're a child,

(00:20:31):
you know,

(00:20:31):
you don't have a,

(00:20:32):
you don't have a profession when you're very young,

(00:20:34):
you don't,

(00:20:34):
you know,

(00:20:34):
you're not a netball player or something like that.

(00:20:36):
Right.

(00:20:36):
So,

(00:20:37):
um,

(00:20:38):
these social,

(00:20:39):
these social categories,

(00:20:40):
including gender are very prominent and they're,

(00:20:43):
they're sort of one of the few things that you have to make sense of,

(00:20:47):
um,

(00:20:48):
who a person is.

(00:20:49):
So I think gender can loom very large,

(00:20:51):
both in terms of how an individual is seen by other people and how they perceive

(00:20:57):
themselves.

(00:21:00):
So I think, you know, there's obviously a lot of diversity in families.

(00:21:09):
You know, some families see it as maybe even their role still to

(00:21:17):
you know,

(00:21:19):
enforce appropriate,

(00:21:21):
what they see as appropriate masculine and feminine behaviour,

(00:21:24):
or perhaps it's just,

(00:21:26):
you know,

(00:21:27):
you want to make sure that your child will get on okay in the world and not be

(00:21:31):
bullied,

(00:21:32):
for example,

(00:21:33):
which is,

(00:21:33):
you know,

(00:21:33):
a really real concern.

(00:21:36):
Or you're sort of somewhat unthinking about it and you think that these things are

(00:21:40):
sort of naturally unfurl regardless of whether or not you mention them or not.

(00:21:46):
So I think,

(00:21:47):
you know,

(00:21:47):
obviously we can't just make generalisations about all families because families

(00:21:51):
are so different in their gender related beliefs and goals and how they parent and

(00:21:57):
so on.

(00:21:58):
But I think what's one of the things that really struck me when I was writing

(00:22:04):
Patriarchy Inc was,

(00:22:06):
you know,

(00:22:07):
the way that thinking about the human mind as

(00:22:12):
you know,

(00:22:12):
what's unique and distinct about it and different from racist monkeys and

(00:22:16):
chimpanzees is it's,

(00:22:20):
is it the fact that it's evolved to be enculturated and even things like the kind

(00:22:25):
of emotions that we feel and when we feel them are being,

(00:22:30):
you know,

(00:22:30):
conditioned from an early kind of age.

(00:22:32):
So we think about those,

(00:22:33):
even those early caregiver interactions,

(00:22:37):
what kinds of things are you drawing your child's attention to

(00:22:41):
how are you responding when they express different kinds of emotions?

(00:22:45):
Just even these very sort of unthinking,

(00:22:47):
reflective behaviors are already in some sort of way shaping your child's

(00:22:57):
development.

(00:22:58):
And they're not sort of things that we are worrying about.

(00:23:03):
I mean, if you have a, I have two sons, how would I even know

(00:23:08):
whether I would respond to a daughter differently.

(00:23:11):
I mean, I guess maybe if you had a boy and a girl twins, it might be a little bit more obvious.

(00:23:16):
But yeah, these things start early.

(00:23:19):
They can be automatic.

(00:23:20):
They don't necessarily have to be conscious.

(00:23:23):
And then I have to say,

(00:23:24):
yeah,

(00:23:25):
once the child reaches sort of the age of two or thereabouts and they know which

(00:23:29):
side of this incredibly important gender divide that they belong,

(00:23:33):
then this process of self-socializing begins.

(00:23:37):
And

(00:23:37):
parents become, I would say, less, you know, parents are never unimportant.

(00:23:43):
But this is the point where,

(00:23:46):
you know,

(00:23:46):
the parents can be frustrated because they don't want their daughter to,

(00:23:49):
you know,

(00:23:50):
go around in that pink frilly dress that means that they can't climb on the monkey

(00:23:53):
bars or whatever it might be.

(00:23:55):
But the child knows, the daughter knows, like, this is what girls wear.

(00:23:58):
And they become very aware of those norms.

(00:24:01):
I remember when my youngest was in,

(00:24:07):
uh kindergarten and they they had a kind of dress up day and all of the girls

(00:24:14):
except one dressed up as a princess uh I think the other girl she dressed as a

(00:24:19):
pirate or something like that and um and then the next dress up day she was dressed

(00:24:23):
up as a princess too and you know she she saw she saw what the norm was

(00:24:30):
And she quite understandably wanted to conform.

(00:24:33):
And that's,

(00:24:34):
you know,

(00:24:34):
one of the points I want to make in Patriarchy Inc is,

(00:24:37):
you know,

(00:24:37):
that's how we cooperate.

(00:24:38):
That's how we're able to achieve this extraordinary cooperation,

(00:24:42):
which is how we solve the problems of survival and reproduction by internalizing,

(00:24:47):
detecting and enforcing norms,

(00:24:49):
by developing these social identities,

(00:24:52):
by sort of developing the sense of what it means to be someone like me and what the

(00:24:56):
responsibilities and roles and expectations are.

(00:24:59):
And gender is just a core one that's ubiquitous and universal.

(00:25:05):
But just with any other social identity, we have to be enculturated into it.

(00:25:12):
Well, and I think also it becomes this form of bonding and small talk.

(00:25:18):
I especially see it.

(00:25:19):
So I have two fairly young children who are both kind of newly in school.

(00:25:24):
And so...

(00:25:26):
we're at the point where we're trying to make friends with other parents and that

(00:25:29):
sort of thing.

(00:25:30):
And one of the small talk subjects is like, oh, aren't girls different?

(00:25:35):
Or, well, you don't know what it's like for me because I have boys and you have girls.

(00:25:39):
And it's very difficult to,

(00:25:42):
you know,

(00:25:42):
climb up on the soapbox I carry in my purse and be like,

(00:25:47):
well,

(00:25:47):
actually,

(00:25:48):
you're wrong because I don't want to be the most hated mother in the school.

(00:25:54):
and so you you end up just kind of like smiling and nodding and it you know it

(00:25:59):
becomes this like pro-social way for people to bond even though its long-term

(00:26:03):
effects are really not very pro-social well you can imagine i i very much identify

(00:26:10):
with that and sympathize because i was writing delusions of gender when um

(00:26:16):
Yeah, when my children were little.

(00:26:18):
And so, yes, I would have very much the same kinds of conversations at the playground.

(00:26:24):
And you have this dilemma,

(00:26:25):
like,

(00:26:25):
are you the jerk who disrupts that smooth,

(00:26:30):
smooth social conversation?

(00:26:32):
So how did you what did you do?

(00:26:36):
Which path did you choose?

(00:26:37):
Did you choose the path of having friends or not having friends?

(00:26:41):
Well, I like to think that I managed both, but maybe some would disagree.

(00:26:46):
But,

(00:26:46):
yeah,

(00:26:47):
so,

(00:26:47):
yeah,

(00:26:47):
you said actually,

(00:26:48):
you know,

(00:26:49):
you could say actually,

(00:26:50):
and I'd say interestingly.

(00:26:52):
And then I would come up with some,

(00:26:54):
you know,

(00:26:54):
study about showing that the average difference was there was a huge amount of

(00:27:00):
overlap or,

(00:27:01):
you know,

(00:27:01):
whatever it was.

(00:27:02):
Or even, yeah, I remember once talking about

(00:27:06):
having a conversation with another parent and she she also had two sons and i was

(00:27:11):
just mentioning that i was reading pippi longstocking to you know one of my

(00:27:17):
children and they were really really enjoying it and and she just says oh it sort

(00:27:23):
of never never occurred to me that my my boys might enjoy that and you know it was

(00:27:28):
just because it had a it was about a female character pippi longstocking and she so

(00:27:32):
i don't know i mean i i think i just said

(00:27:35):
well, it's a great book.

(00:27:36):
I'm like, you know, my children are really, really enjoying it.

(00:27:39):
And I don't know if she decided that,

(00:27:42):
you know,

(00:27:42):
maybe her boys could hear stories about girls too.

(00:27:45):
But,

(00:27:47):
yeah,

(00:27:50):
you probably have to ask one of the mums to see how well I managed to navigate that

(00:27:56):
particular territory.

(00:27:58):
I mean, I try to do a counter example.

(00:28:00):
Like sometimes I'll say, oh, like I haven't noticed that with mine or,

(00:28:04):
something like that.

(00:28:05):
But people can be really, really persistent with it.

(00:28:09):
I especially see it with parents of boys,

(00:28:12):
actually,

(00:28:12):
I guess,

(00:28:13):
because they're,

(00:28:14):
you know,

(00:28:14):
they see their experiences different from mine.

(00:28:16):
So they're trying to share kind of what their experience is.

(00:28:19):
And, you know, boys are so aggressive.

(00:28:21):
And I'm like, well, mine are going home from school every day and beaten on each other too.

(00:28:26):
They're pretty aggressive sometimes.

(00:28:29):
Yes, it's difficult to

(00:28:32):
It is difficult to navigate these conversations.

(00:28:35):
I remember spending in a school event,

(00:28:38):
I think I felt like hours,

(00:28:40):
it probably was only 20 minutes,

(00:28:41):
but having an argument about whether there could ever be a sort of women's league

(00:28:48):
of this hugely popular game here.

(00:28:51):
It's a bit like rugby.

(00:28:51):
It's called Australian Football League or Aussie rules.

(00:28:55):
And, you know, this person was arguing with me

(00:29:00):
what seemed like hours that you know women wouldn't want to play it was too rough

(00:29:05):
people wouldn't want to watch it blah blah blah well what do you know several years

(00:29:08):
later actually the the league has you know after much much fighting has finally uh

(00:29:15):
finally came into fruition and they actually kind of

(00:29:18):
When I bumped into him, he remembered the conversation and he said, you were right.

(00:29:22):
I thought that was very gracious.

(00:29:24):
That must have felt really good.

(00:29:26):
There's nothing like being told you're right after you've argued with someone.

(00:29:29):
I love that for him and for you.

(00:29:32):
So I think a lot of folks think they have this kind of fallacious reasoning that if

(00:29:39):
something is biological,

(00:29:40):
like if we can see it in the brain or we can see it in the hormones or we can see

(00:29:44):
it in the body,

(00:29:45):
then it's hardwired, it's natural, it was always there.

(00:29:49):
But one of the things that I really appreciate about your work is you talk about

(00:29:53):
how culture and environment influence biology and how even if there is this

(00:29:57):
demonstrable difference between the brains,

(00:30:00):
it doesn't mean that they were born or conceived that way.

(00:30:03):
Can you talk a little bit about that?

(00:30:04):
Yeah, absolutely.

(00:30:07):
I mean, you're absolutely right.

(00:30:09):
I think there is this sense of

(00:30:12):
If it's biological, it's innate and it's fixed.

(00:30:15):
And,

(00:30:15):
you know,

(00:30:16):
even people who take a quite different line to me on sex differences,

(00:30:20):
you know,

(00:30:20):
would say,

(00:30:21):
well,

(00:30:21):
that's,

(00:30:21):
you know,

(00:30:22):
that's simply,

(00:30:22):
that's simply not the case.

(00:30:24):
You know,

(00:30:24):
so one thing that really struck me when I was doing a lot of research into these

(00:30:27):
studies of differences between males and females in functional imaging studies,

(00:30:33):
for example,

(00:30:34):
was this kind of tacit assumption that if you see a difference in brain activation,

(00:30:42):
between your women and your men in your study,

(00:30:45):
then,

(00:30:46):
you know,

(00:30:47):
somehow that must be,

(00:30:48):
it must be innate.

(00:30:51):
And that's certainly an assumption that was made quite explicitly by the popularizers.

(00:30:56):
So they would certainly assume that if you saw in the brain, it was innate.

(00:30:58):
But of course,

(00:30:59):
you know,

(00:31:00):
you're not unwrapping your participants from their boxes unused and putting them in

(00:31:04):
the scanner.

(00:31:05):
They've had a,

(00:31:06):
you know, 20, 30, 40 years of living in a gendered world.

(00:31:10):
And particularly when we're thinking about brain activation studies,

(00:31:14):
you know,

(00:31:15):
where else would we see the effects of socialization,

(00:31:18):
but in the brain or the way that we sort of process information.

(00:31:21):
But having said that,

(00:31:22):
I have to say that I think one of the big issues with all of those kinds of studies

(00:31:27):
is that there were just a lot of spurious results.

(00:31:31):
So

(00:31:32):
You know, this is a general issue.

(00:31:33):
There's been a replication crisis in psychology, other behavioral sciences.

(00:31:40):
And the issue is that you,

(00:31:42):
you know,

(00:31:42):
you run a study,

(00:31:43):
you need to find something interesting,

(00:31:45):
they're expensive,

(00:31:46):
you need to publish,

(00:31:47):
you need a high impact in a publication.

(00:31:49):
One really easy thing to do is to divide your group by gender, compare them.

(00:31:53):
If you find a difference, you make that the focus of your study.

(00:31:58):
And,

(00:31:58):
you know,

(00:31:59):
as I think I talk about it in delusions of gender and I've done academic work

(00:32:02):
since,

(00:32:03):
you know,

(00:32:04):
all too often those differences are just,

(00:32:08):
they're just one-off.

(00:32:08):
They're spurious false results from this very noisy data.

(00:32:12):
So, you know, even if...

(00:32:16):
You have to sort of be skeptical about some of these findings in the first place.

(00:32:20):
And then even then, that doesn't mean that those differences are innate.

(00:32:24):
And also, we just don't know what they mean.

(00:32:27):
And one of the things that I did an analysis of two years of functional

(00:32:33):
neuroimaging data,

(00:32:35):
and what I found was that,

(00:32:37):
speaking to your point about the implicit assumption that things are innate,

(00:32:41):
all of these studies were just sort of single snapshots

(00:32:44):
So they look for a sex difference.

(00:32:46):
And then that's it.

(00:32:46):
That's the end of the investigation.

(00:32:48):
They're not interested in seeing, well, do we see the same difference in a different population?

(00:32:54):
What happens if we, you know, change the context?

(00:32:59):
Do we still see the same difference?

(00:33:01):
Where does it come from?

(00:33:02):
If we change the gender norms that are prevailing,

(00:33:05):
do we still see the,

(00:33:07):
you know,

(00:33:07):
instead of seeing it as the starting point of the investigation to see,

(00:33:11):
you know,

(00:33:11):
where does this difference come from?

(00:33:12):
When?

(00:33:13):
Why?

(00:33:13):
And

(00:33:14):
How do we see it?

(00:33:15):
Instead, that's just the end.

(00:33:17):
And if that's how you're doing research,

(00:33:20):
you're guaranteed never to produce data that will challenge the idea that the sex

(00:33:26):
differences in the brain are immutable,

(00:33:29):
universal,

(00:33:30):
fixed,

(00:33:30):
et cetera.

(00:33:30):
So even though the neuroscientists themselves aren't saying,

(00:33:34):
oh,

(00:33:34):
it must be innate as the popularizers do,

(00:33:36):
they're also not generating any data that could challenge that assumption.

(00:33:41):
And the other thing I found in that analysis was the way that the scientists would

(00:33:49):
draw on gender stereotypes to kind of putty fill in that gap between our

(00:33:56):
understanding of this and highly complex organ,

(00:33:58):
the brain,

(00:33:59):
and what it actually means.

(00:34:00):
What does it mean for a part of the frontal lobes to be activated a bit more in men than women?

(00:34:07):
And there's a beautiful example of

(00:34:10):
The sort of way that gender stereotypes are functioning that comes from the

(00:34:15):
philosopher Robin Bloom,

(00:34:16):
who analyzed neuroimaging studies of gender differences in emotion processing.

(00:34:24):
You know,

(00:34:24):
of course,

(00:34:24):
there's this idea like you refer to these nurses talking about how emotional your

(00:34:30):
your daughter is like.

(00:34:31):
This is a very, you know, very strong gender stereotypes.

(00:34:34):
And she was interested in the role that it would play in these functional neuroimaging studies.

(00:34:39):
And so she was looking at studies that were interested in the role of a region of

(00:34:42):
the frontal lobe,

(00:34:43):
which is,

(00:34:44):
you know,

(00:34:44):
involved in cognitive control while participants were looking at emotion arousing

(00:34:50):
images.

(00:34:51):
And basically what she found was that some studies found that the front,

(00:34:56):
that part of the frontal lobe was more activated in men.

(00:34:59):
Some found that it was more activated in women.

(00:35:01):
Some found no differences,

(00:35:03):
but somehow all of the groups,

(00:35:05):
all of the scientific groups,

(00:35:06):
research teams managed to include that their findings demonstrated that women were

(00:35:11):
more emotional than men.

(00:35:13):
So regardless of what they found, that was the conclusion.

(00:35:17):
And you can make a story about all of it, right?

(00:35:19):
If men's are more activated, it's like, oh, they're controlling their emotions.

(00:35:23):
If it's more activated than women,

(00:35:26):
it's like,

(00:35:26):
oh,

(00:35:26):
women are having such strong emotions that they need more frontal lobe to

(00:35:31):
you know, to deal with it.

(00:35:32):
Right.

(00:35:32):
You can make up a plausible story.

(00:35:36):
And that story is infused with gender stereotypes so that we,

(00:35:39):
so that we still get the right,

(00:35:41):
still get the right conclusion.

(00:35:42):
Sorry.

(00:35:43):
I know we've strayed a little bit from original question,

(00:35:45):
which was about the,

(00:35:47):
the way that,

(00:35:48):
that biology itself is,

(00:35:49):
is,

(00:35:50):
is shaped by culture.

(00:35:52):
No, this is great.

(00:35:53):
This is very interesting is how we frame things.

(00:35:57):
So I,

(00:35:58):
I'll tell you,

(00:35:58):
because I just I spoke with the writer Stephanie O'Connell earlier this week,

(00:36:04):
and she has a book about,

(00:36:06):
you know,

(00:36:06):
women and ambition and kind of like the lies we tell about women at work.

(00:36:10):
And, you know, women don't negotiate and women don't seek power.

(00:36:13):
And that's why there's a wage gap and all this kind of thing.

(00:36:16):
And one of the things that she talks about is how we never say that we're not

(00:36:21):
promoting a woman because she's a woman.

(00:36:23):
it's always, well, she's too old.

(00:36:26):
So then you present a younger woman and it's, she's too young.

(00:36:29):
It's she's too pretty or too ugly.

(00:36:31):
She's too ambitious or not ambitious enough.

(00:36:33):
And it slowly builds this scaffold where there's just like no way for women to succeed.

(00:36:39):
And I think there's like a similar dynamic with this gender difference research of

(00:36:43):
like,

(00:36:43):
no matter what the conclusion is,

(00:36:46):
the story is women are emotional and men are leaders and all of this kind of

(00:36:49):
nonsense.

(00:36:51):
Yeah,

(00:36:51):
and look,

(00:36:52):
some of my colleagues and I,

(00:36:53):
we've tried to draw attention to this issue because we're aware that people are

(00:37:02):
sometimes maybe not starting out interested in sex differences,

(00:37:06):
but maybe they look for one because they don't find anything that's so interesting

(00:37:11):
or...

(00:37:13):
you know, they find one and they need to make sense of it.

(00:37:15):
And we just, you know, we try it.

(00:37:16):
We've tried to write studies that are just not saying don't study sex differences.

(00:37:20):
It's good to look at sex effects and not against that, of course.

(00:37:25):
Well,

(00:37:25):
not of course,

(00:37:25):
but we're certainly certainly not against investigating these kinds of differences

(00:37:32):
or effects,

(00:37:32):
but,

(00:37:33):
you know,

(00:37:33):
to do it well and to be aware of the ways in which gender stereotypes can

(00:37:38):
shape the questions that we ask,

(00:37:39):
the methods that we use,

(00:37:41):
the interpretations that we make and the conclusions that are drawn.

(00:37:47):
And it's been good to see some traction.

(00:37:50):
We're writing in mainstream scientific journals, but it's really an uphill battle.

(00:37:58):
And I think even in the time that I've been working in this area,

(00:38:03):
the narrative has kind of changed.

(00:38:04):
So it's changed from

(00:38:07):
oh,

(00:38:07):
let's find out why women are more emotional to let's find out why women are more

(00:38:12):
susceptible to mental health conditions.

(00:38:16):
And I find that really interesting and I don't quite know how to think about that.

(00:38:26):
But I think,

(00:38:26):
you know,

(00:38:27):
regardless of what the values are that are driving the research,

(00:38:31):
and of course we all want to have a better understanding of,

(00:38:35):
you know,

(00:38:36):
causes of anxiety and depression and how we might better treat them we still need

(00:38:40):
to be doing rigorous rigorous good quality research and not you know not assuming

(00:38:47):
that it's when we compare women and men all we're seeing are the effects of sex

(00:38:54):
related genes and hormones of course we're not all right so speaking of women being

(00:38:59):
too emotional i i have something i want to ask you about that

(00:39:04):
I've not really spoken to a researcher who I felt like can answer this for me.

(00:39:09):
And it's not something you've specifically written about.

(00:39:11):
So if you have no idea, you can just tell me that.

(00:39:13):
But I'll paint the picture for you.

(00:39:16):
So, you know, you've written a lot about how we blame hormones for things.

(00:39:20):
And we especially often will use hormones to dismiss women.

(00:39:24):
You know, she's PMSing and that's why she's upset.

(00:39:27):
And my own experience as a woman has been that at every stage of my development,

(00:39:32):
we do this thing with women where we dismiss their behavior because of their

(00:39:36):
hormones.

(00:39:36):
So if you're pregnant and you're struggling with the reality of being a pregnant

(00:39:41):
person,

(00:39:41):
of pregnancy discrimination,

(00:39:43):
of the financial challenges of pregnancy,

(00:39:46):
of the danger of pregnancy in the United States,

(00:39:48):
that's just your pregnancy hormones.

(00:39:50):
After you've had the baby,

(00:39:52):
you know,

(00:39:52):
if you're struggling to get support,

(00:39:54):
if breastfeeding is hard,

(00:39:55):
if you're sleep deprived,

(00:39:56):
all of that,

(00:39:57):
that's just postpartum depression.

(00:39:59):
We always locate the problem in the individual woman and her crazy woman hormones.

(00:40:04):
So now I'm seeing this new trend.

(00:40:06):
I'm 42 now.

(00:40:08):
And the new trend I see is suddenly we're blaming everything on perimenopause.

(00:40:13):
And the story is women are hitting perimenopause and they're going crazy and

(00:40:18):
they're leaving their husbands because of their crazy perimenopause disease.

(00:40:24):
And my perspective is that what's really happening is that

(00:40:28):
there's a huge awakening among a lot of women about the dynamics of marriage and

(00:40:33):
child rearing and all of that.

(00:40:34):
And that's why women are leaving their husbands or becoming feminist and all of that.

(00:40:38):
But I just, I'm starting to see this weaponization of perimenopause.

(00:40:43):
And the thing that really concerns me is that I'm often seeing it in feminist

(00:40:48):
circles where yes,

(00:40:50):
you know,

(00:40:51):
we don't research women's health enough and we don't know enough about

(00:40:53):
perimenopause and all that,

(00:40:55):
but

(00:40:55):
I'm just seeing this dynamic where even feminist women are saying,

(00:40:59):
well,

(00:40:59):
you know,

(00:40:59):
maybe I'm overreacting because I'm perimenopausal.

(00:41:03):
Can you speak to that a little bit?

(00:41:04):
Yeah, this is such a fascinating issue.

(00:41:08):
And actually,

(00:41:09):
you know,

(00:41:12):
I hadn't heard this sort of perimenopause leaving your husband thing,

(00:41:15):
but what I hear is,

(00:41:17):
and I'm,

(00:41:18):
you know,

(00:41:20):
older than you,

(00:41:21):
menopause and women are leaving the workplace.

(00:41:23):
So, you know, they're just about to,

(00:41:25):
you know, they're in the top positions and then they leave because of menopausal issues.

(00:41:31):
But yes, the word perimenopause does seem to be absolutely everywhere.

(00:41:37):
I am fascinated by this.

(00:41:40):
I mean,

(00:41:40):
you know,

(00:41:41):
my university has a,

(00:41:43):
I don't remember its exact name,

(00:41:44):
but it's sort of almost like a hormone support group.

(00:41:48):
And in a sense, it sort of stigmatizes people

(00:41:53):
females at like any, or, you know, it's like, is it your menstrual cycle?

(00:41:59):
It is pregnancy or it's perimenopause or menopause,

(00:42:02):
but it's basically sort of saying,

(00:42:03):
you know,

(00:42:04):
at any stage of your life,

(00:42:05):
you're going to need help,

(00:42:06):
you know,

(00:42:06):
support with about,

(00:42:08):
you know,

(00:42:08):
over and about your hormones.

(00:42:10):
And I know it's,

(00:42:11):
it's well intentioned and it might well be valuable,

(00:42:14):
but there's also this,

(00:42:16):
um,

(00:42:17):
this worry that,

(00:42:18):
you know,

(00:42:18):
you're basically saying,

(00:42:21):
um,

(00:42:23):
you know,

(00:42:23):
this is longstanding concern about the way that doubt is cast on women's competence

(00:42:30):
and capabilities because of their,

(00:42:32):
because of their hormones.

(00:42:34):
And I completely,

(00:42:35):
I'm completely with you on this tension,

(00:42:40):
because you're right,

(00:42:41):
like there hasn't been enough research into

(00:42:46):
genuine difficulties that women might face,

(00:42:50):
whether it's during pregnancy,

(00:42:51):
whether it's in lead up to menopause,

(00:42:53):
during menopause,

(00:42:54):
post-menopause,

(00:42:55):
et cetera.

(00:42:57):
You know, we do need to know more.

(00:43:00):
It sort of seems extraordinary until we actually do seem to know and how much

(00:43:08):
uncertainty there is around a lot of these medical issues.

(00:43:16):
But at the same time,

(00:43:17):
you know,

(00:43:17):
I've looked at some of the research that's,

(00:43:22):
you know,

(00:43:23):
trying to draw links between menopausal status and mental health issues,

(00:43:28):
for example,

(00:43:30):
and it's just not good quality.

(00:43:33):
And there is this worry that it's just a sort of,

(00:43:36):
it's a re-stigmatizing of women and it's a way of,

(00:43:41):
you know,

(00:43:42):
providing an explanation for

(00:43:44):
you know,

(00:43:45):
why it is that,

(00:43:47):
you know,

(00:43:47):
women are leaving the workplace when they're about to reach those senior roles or

(00:43:54):
whatever it might be.

(00:43:55):
And I think, yeah, this really, this is the same issue

(00:44:00):
that I have,

(00:44:01):
you know,

(00:44:02):
I think it needs,

(00:44:03):
there was this sort of second wave interrogation of these concepts like PMS,

(00:44:11):
premenstrual dysphoric disorder,

(00:44:13):
for example,

(00:44:14):
you know,

(00:44:15):
that was sort of work that was done in maybe the 1980s and the 1990s.

(00:44:20):
And it feels like with this rise of what is something to be celebrated,

(00:44:28):
which is this insistence on

(00:44:30):
taking women's health issues seriously,

(00:44:33):
to not treat female bodies like sort of small versions of male bodies,

(00:44:38):
et cetera,

(00:44:39):
you know,

(00:44:39):
that nonetheless,

(00:44:41):
like we still need that critical attention on how that research is being done,

(00:44:48):
how it's being interpreted.

(00:44:51):
We need like a new wave of that kind of gender scholarship.

(00:44:56):
And, you know, to some extent it's being, it is being done,

(00:44:59):
So,

(00:44:59):
for example,

(00:45:02):
Sarah Richardson at Harvard University,

(00:45:03):
she has something called the Gender Science Lab,

(00:45:06):
which still does incredible work.

(00:45:08):
And some of the work that it does is,

(00:45:12):
you know,

(00:45:12):
interrogating these assumptions about needing sort of sex-specific medicine,

(00:45:18):
for example,

(00:45:19):
and just drawing attention to when you have differences in outcomes between men and

(00:45:24):
women,

(00:45:25):
let's not just jump to the conclusion that it's because of

(00:45:28):
you know, sex related genes or hormones.

(00:45:30):
Let's think about other things.

(00:45:31):
Let's think about gender norms that prevent men from seeking attention for their health issues.

(00:45:38):
Let's think about the kinds of economic circumstances that women and men are in.

(00:45:44):
Let's think about gender norms that make certain kinds of side effects more

(00:45:49):
problematic for women than for men or whatever it might be.

(00:45:51):
Right.

(00:45:52):
And once we start to take these into account and actually look more closely at the, um,

(00:45:59):
the outcome data, we find a much more complicated story.

(00:46:02):
So there is some of this work going on,

(00:46:06):
but yeah,

(00:46:06):
I really would love to see a really kind of intelligent,

(00:46:13):
critical probing of exactly that tension that you're talking about because it does,

(00:46:24):
yeah,

(00:46:25):
we need to recognize that certain things happen

(00:46:29):
in bodies and that's not always trouble-free.

(00:46:34):
But we also need to recognise that we have not eliminated gender biases from

(00:46:40):
scientific research and that these ideas can offer very powerful explanations that

(00:46:48):
attribute causes internally rather than externally in ways that are actually quite

(00:46:52):
misleading.

(00:46:53):
You know, I did find one study a couple of months ago.

(00:46:56):
I can't remember the author.

(00:46:57):
I'll have to go dig it up.

(00:46:59):
And it was a small sort of qualitative study.

(00:47:02):
But she found that women in domestically violent relationships who were going

(00:47:09):
through perimenopause or who believed they were going through perimenopause would

(00:47:13):
often blame their emotional reactions to the violence on perimenopause and

(00:47:19):
And then when they sought medical care,

(00:47:21):
their care providers would like adopt that narrative of this is perimenopause

(00:47:26):
causing you to be depressed or anxious rather than the abuse you're experiencing.

(00:47:32):
And that just, that's so, so alarming to me.

(00:47:35):
Yeah.

(00:47:37):
I mean,

(00:47:37):
there was,

(00:47:38):
there was work by Jane Usher that was sort of making these similar kinds of points.

(00:47:44):
Like this was to do with PMS, but, you know, interviewing women and, you know, just to sort of,

(00:47:49):
this is a simplified version of what she was finding.

(00:47:51):
But,

(00:47:51):
you know,

(00:47:51):
basically women would be quite reasonably angry at things that their partners or

(00:47:57):
children were doing the way they were being treated,

(00:47:59):
but it would be attributed to their,

(00:48:01):
their PMS.

(00:48:03):
Actually,

(00:48:03):
um,

(00:48:04):
I teach a course called bad science and,

(00:48:07):
um,

(00:48:08):
and I show an advert for a drug to treat premenstrual dysphoric disorder.

(00:48:15):
And it just has a, has a woman, um,

(00:48:19):
she's trying to get out of the house in the morning and she's looking for her keys

(00:48:24):
and she's like,

(00:48:26):
where are my keys?

(00:48:27):
Did you take my keys?

(00:48:29):
She's just a bit irritated because she's obviously late.

(00:48:32):
And then it's like, do you need this drug?

(00:48:34):
And I just laugh because that is me every morning.

(00:48:38):
Where are my keys?

(00:48:39):
It's all of us.

(00:48:41):
The key woman is all of us.

(00:48:43):
I'm reminded this is a much less funny story of

(00:48:47):
a breastfeeding group I'm in.

(00:48:51):
And a woman posted recently and she's,

(00:48:54):
you know,

(00:48:54):
about my age,

(00:48:55):
but also has a new baby that she's breastfeeding.

(00:48:58):
And she shared about how abusive her husband is and he yells at her and he doesn't

(00:49:03):
get up with the baby and he's sexually coercive and he's shaking her and she can't

(00:49:06):
trust him with the baby and just all this terrible stuff.

(00:49:10):
And so she's struggling.

(00:49:11):
She's anxious.

(00:49:12):
She's sad.

(00:49:12):
She's depressed.

(00:49:13):
She's all the things that you would expect her to be.

(00:49:15):
And so she tells this story and then she says,

(00:49:17):
and I just can't figure out what's going on with my hormones.

(00:49:20):
I don't know if it's breastfeeding hormones or postpartum hormones,

(00:49:25):
or if I'm going through perimenopause and,

(00:49:28):
you know,

(00:49:29):
my doctor tested my hormones,

(00:49:30):
which it's like,

(00:49:31):
well,

(00:49:31):
which hormones?

(00:49:33):
And they're all fine.

(00:49:35):
And I don't know how to be taken seriously.

(00:49:37):
And most of the comments were women suggesting that

(00:49:41):
further hormonal explanations well you know you should get your tsh tested and you

(00:49:46):
know have you have you had your prolactin tested and i just thought well have you

(00:49:50):
tested the idea of getting rid of the husband because that to me seems like the

(00:49:54):
best intervention wow yeah that's that's extraordinary but of course she did that

(00:50:00):
would be attributed to her hormone yeah

(00:50:06):
Just us crazy women and our crazy hormones.

(00:50:10):
So yeah, Cordelia, I'm so grateful to you for coming on the podcast.

(00:50:14):
I'm going to put all of Cordelia's books on the bookshop and in the show notes.

(00:50:19):
I highly, highly recommend her work.

(00:50:21):
It's so helpful to comb through these studies when you don't have a strong

(00:50:26):
scientific background.

(00:50:27):
And frankly,

(00:50:28):
even if you do,

(00:50:28):
because there's so much data,

(00:50:30):
it's impossible for a single person to

(00:50:32):
I guess, who's not Cordelia to synthesize it.

(00:50:35):
So thank you so much, Cordelia.

(00:50:37):
Oh, pleasure.

(00:50:39):
It's a pleasure.

(00:50:40):
It's been wonderful having you here.

(00:50:42):
And listeners, I will be back next week.

(00:50:44):
So thank you for listening.