Gender and sexuality differences in the brain: should we study them?

Hi all,

Sorry for missing class last week. I was there in spirit. Just from reading the articles and the online discussion, I believe I have gleaned the topics of discussion that were covered in class. I'm going to circumvent the binary-spectrum debate for a moment, and re-visit a question that Alex posed, specifically if assigning these intrinisc qualities to "man" and "woman" will reinforce social stereotypes. I would argue that this already happens, for example, just look to the gender dichotomy between a random sampling of english vs. engineering or computer science departments at a university level. I think, and I could be wrong, that english departments would be significantly more mixed gender, while engineering and computer science would be weighted heavily towards men. In cases like these, is it underlying social stereotyping pressures that lead to self-selection, or is it due to intrinisc differences that cause difference in performance?

Also, Andrea brings an excellent point that in terms of neuropathology. If men and women have fundamental differences, how do we know that treatment is equally effective for both? If women and men experience a disorder differently, should there treatment be different. In the case of panic disorder with agorophobia, a recent (2006) study shows that there were little in the way of gender differences in PDA.

http://lib.bioinfo.pl/auth:Latas,M

I do think it is worthwhile to study gender and sexuality differences in cognition (and other differences observed between different genders and sexualities). If looking at the example that males are better at spatial tasks, and we were able to find out why this was, this could lead to an ability for scientists to maybe understand people who suffer from a deficiency in spatial abilities (not females, but people who regardless of sex have problems that affect their daily lives). Being able to point to why some people do better at certain things will aid us in identifying what may be malfunctioning in people with a decreased ability. Additionally, by learning what differs in brains of people who are good at spatial tasks and those who are poor at them, researchers may be able to develop more balanced ways of testing aptitude.

In terms of social stereotypes, research really suggests that the knowledge of these stereotypes affects a person’s ability on different aptitude tasks. In terms of SAT math, there is the stereotype that Asians are good at math but women are bad at math. A study was done (I can’t remember if I read this for this class or not) where Asian women were made (I forget how) to focus on their identity as an Asian or their identity as a woman. Those that focused on their identity as Asian did significantly better than those who focused on their identity as a woman, seeming to cement the idea of stereotypes influencing a person’s ability. While the stereotypes must stem from somewhere, they reinforce the cycle since people follow the stereotypes. Research has also found that when African-American high school students are given a test and are either told that it measures aptitude or that its just a test (not measuring talent), the students who were told it was measuring talent did significantly worse than those who did not have to confront the stereotype that African-Americans aren’t as talented on achievement tests (they were both reminded that African-Americans don’t do as well on aptitude tests). Once again, stereotypes seem to be changing how people perform.

Finally, looking at the difference of the number of men and women in the math and science fields, I am always forced to wonder if the interest in such fields is biological (or socially based). I won all of the math awards in high school and can immediately see how to solve math problems, but I found it boring; because of that I haven’t taken any math (besides statistics) in college. My boyfriend majored in math and saw it more as solving puzzles---I was never able to see it that way. While I think my inherent aptitude for math is still high, I have no desire to ever do another math problem. Since I feel that this disinterest is biologically inherent to me, I wonder if the interest in such fields is biological (and therefore the basis for difference of the number of men and women in these fields). While I see obvious reasons for it to be socially based, my personal experience makes me think that the interest may be at a more biological level.

 There were so many interesting points brought up from last weeks class and I’d like to touch on just a few—again mostly as they relate to the binary v. spectrum debate. I think I’m somewhat oddly in the middle of the debate in terms of what I believe—I think that the spectrum model is actually much more accurate. Im not sure what I believe about the physiological basis for gender, but I think that the point about multiple factors contributing to percieved gender is incredibly important and that in this way there is indeed a spectrum for gender. For some reason I find this spectrum analogy much easier to justify in terms of sexual preference, which I think is probably true for most people—we accept that sexual preference is not necessarily just homo or heterosexual, and Im interested as to why this is the case. (sort of off topic I admit, but why are we much more willing to accept this spectrum? Perhaps because of all the media coverage it has gotten within our lifetimes? You never see much press on the “gender spectrum”). Anyway, to reiterate, I feel that the spectrum model is definitely more accurate. Where my views start to diverge however is how this affects research and how we can apply this. Honestly, maybe I’m being pessimistic here, but I think it is impossible to consider all the variables that would need to go in to creating such a spectrum in order for people to be able to “accurately” identify themselves as male or female. And the whole idea of self report isn’t failsafe either, because self report is inherently affected BY all those criteria so it probably wouldn’t provide more useful information. Therefore, I think to do research at all you need to take some “shortcuts” (though I hesitate to call them that) in terms of category definition. No, we’re not all the same. No, we didn’t all have the same experiences growing up… or the same genes… and even if we did have a ton of clones of one person that we could study the results wouldn’t be interesting because they wouldn’t be applicable to the wider population. So I think in order to make research generalizable—and therefore applicable on a wider scale—it becomes necessary to make categories and to put similar subjects into groups so that they can be compared to subjects who are less similar. That’s just how research works, and I can’t think of any good productive way to account for all the differences found in a subject population—and even if I could, im not sure I would want to. 

Just a quick note on the other thing that has been brought up: the whole idea of women as learning and excelling at different things. Like Kara brought up earlier, I think it is interesting that this concept has come up with the discussion of “disease states” such as autism among other things. I think it is entirely possible that women are hardwired differently and therefore may excel at different things. HOWEVER, I think the minute we make generalizations about these characteristics we get into trouble—as we’ve said so many times in the past, we as a society need to be much more accepting of neurodiversity and allow people to excel as they are capable. It does rub me the wrong way that we can say that men are “better at complex engineering” or something, because I think this then leads to the thought that no woman can be better than a man. (Which I don’t believe is true at all—I think predisposition only has so much to do with it, so any broad statements like that really worry me). 

Thanks again for the discussion

In discussing gender and sex, I am most struck by cases where males were castrated at a young age and raised as females, yet most of them grew up feeling as though that something was wrong, that they were somehow male in a woman’s body and social role. Even without a large amount of androgens circulating, these people still felt like they were in some manner male. In keeping with Paul’s reminder that there exists no single and absolute standard for differentiating between sex, I think it would be worthwhile for many studies to be conducted or re-conducted to examine what biological factors influence one’s perceived gender. While there is certainly a social component to gender, the previously mentioned cases seem to suggest that there are fundamental biological components that influence how one perceives one’s gender. I would be interested to see how various biological components influence the degree to which one perceives oneself as male or female, especially in the face of social conventions.  While several people have commented on the difficulty in ascribing to oneself a value of gender, a process which is rapt with subjective variance, I still believe such an approach could prove valuable for better understanding gender.

Thanks for such a great topic and discussion!

I wanted to expand upon the idea Rebecca brought up about science and research (often) soley looking at male subjects. I was recently reading a book entitled Eve's Rib about the ways in which disease is different for females as compared to males, and how detrimental it is to only study males and then try to extrapolate that information back to women. Futhermore, doctors tended to take female complaints and reply condecendingly, saying something like "I've never heard of that" instead of validating their concern. However, occasionally over time these complaints are actually studied and it turns out that this "imaginary complaint" in fact is a result of a way by which a woman's body processes a medication differently than a man.

There has also been research done suggesting that the symptoms of a stroke or heart attack are different in men and women. The "typical" heart attack signs (chest pain radiating down the left arm) often do not occur in women. Instead they frequently have "only" generalized weakness and shortness of breath that many doctors discredit. Why is it that people (researchers, doctors, the media) insist on trying to generalize illness in one way? Everyone is different (think back to our beetle in the box discussion), with different genes and cultural backgrounds, and so it seems rediculous to me that these variations are frequently not studied in a research setting, or if they are and differences are found, they are explained as "normal progression" (of middle class white males) and "abnormal progression" (everyone else).

Another issue I have thought about before, particularly on the subject of a range of sexualities and genders, is something I have seen happen at Bryn Mawr. If a person who identifies as a female dates another person who also identifies as a female, most people would say that they are homosexual. But what if that second woman actually identifies as male and is (or may not even be) planning on transitioning genders. What does that mean for his partner? Is she still a lesbian since she is "technically" in a relationship with a female? These are not questions that can be answered because gender and sexuality are not as straightforward as the questions suggest. Particularly when thinking of terms of gender as coming from a self-identification as opposed to a concrete genetic/physical category, the lines get blurred and the situations messy. I think that even identifying on arange wouldn't clarify this example, because there are so many factors (each person, their relationship to each other, society, etc) that come into play.

Well it seems like our class discussion on binary vs spectrum has carried on to this forum!  From reading all the comments posted above, I feel like we might need some clarifications from Prof Grobstein about his argument; I seem to have a slightly different understanding of the argument from some of the other students... I didn't think the argument was that people don't or shouldn't identify themselves as one sex or the other.  Of course they do, and as Rebecca mentioned, there are some benefits of gender categorization such as the power to unite people of the same gender.  What I understood Prof Grobstein saying was that there is an issue in conducting research with the sole purpose of trying to find a distinction between the two genders by putting each subject into the "male group" or the "female group", because there really are no set of criteria which would allow people to be 100% male, or 100% female, and even if there were, there would be no group of individuals who would fit all the criteria.  

In the posts above and during our discussion, several people mentioned the benefits of studying gender differences using the binary gender model, because the findings may allow us to provide more appropriate treatments.  However, as I briefly mentioned during class I personally think it is so much more important for us to focus on why it is that there is a difference in the way different individuals benefit differently from a certain treatments. For instance, ebilter raised an example that a different diet may be more effective for males with high blood pressure while females may benefit more from a different medicinal option. If this was the case, I think it is really important to examine what it is about the certain male subjects in the study that makes them so much more responsive to a change in diet.  I can't imagine that it is just the title "male", so it must be something about the biological, psychological or habitual characteristics of the certain male subjects in the study that allowed them to benefit from the diet change.  If we could pin point what it is, then we can predict that females with this characteristic may also benefit from a change in diet, rather than the medicinal option.

I absolutely agree with Stephanie. The one thing that I kept thinking to myself over and over again during the discussion portion of class (which was focused on the issue of gender as a spectrum), is that I just can't imagine anyone marking on a 10 inch VAS scale that their gender is 6 inches to the left of male and 4 inches to the right of female. Unless of course that individual is a person who feels that they have the mind of a female and are trapped in a male's body. Thus the only real reason that I think gender would reflect a spectrum when self-reported along a scale would reflect sexuality or a mis-match of mind & body gender. But even in that situation it's important to realize that the trans-gender individual still identifies as having a "female" brain and a "male" body. It's one or the other (in my opinion). Just because a girl would be classifies as a tomboy for liking sports doesn't mean that she's any less of a female than the girl that likes to wear pink, frilly dresses. And she shouldn't report herself as such. If the physiology is so different within a gender as Paul suggested it may be, it still doesn't change the fact that in society we are raised as one or the other, and the environment has a huge (not 100%, but really really big) effect on our self classification of gender. Even those castrated-at-birth males considered themselves boys, just boys that "felt like" girls. And considering that our environmental learnings of gender largely reflect a gendered physiology, the gender "dichotomy" still works for me.

Additionally, despite all of the evidence that Paul mentioned (are there any studies as to the actual percentage of males walking around with uteri? I just can't imagine that it's more than a handful and really does represent a rare minority like Stephanie mentioned...) I still find any sort of practical application difficult to imagine. As Rebecca pointed out, it's hard enough sometimes to study two genders separately to ensure that conclusions drawn from the studies will be applicable to all individuals to whom they will be applied. Because females experience medications, pathologies, mental disorders, and the world in general differently than males, it's important to consider both a male and a female subject pool in any study where the two may be effected differently. And it's important to consider these differences when offering potential treatments for pathologies or mental disorders. For example changing diet may be more effective for males with high blood pressure while females may be more responsive to the medicinal options. Or CBT may be more useful for females suffering from OCD while medication may be more effective for males. To think of all genders on a spectrum would render all previous psychology and biology experiments that consider males and females separately useless, which I don't think they are. And the even bigger problem for me is that we would have to consider absolutely everything along the spectrum and consider every variable in relation to a point on that spectrum which I still believe is highly unreflective of commonplace biological differences (as opposed to social differences). So in the example I gave before, the person with OCD who's 6in from male and 4 from female, but has the general physiology of a male, would get what? The medication or the CBT first? All practical applications of the gender classification in research are lost on the individuals who rank themselves somewhere in the middle. OCD probably won't kill someone who tries the ineffective method first, but other conditions can. And for the physiological males that consider themselves to have a female mind (a hypothetical self rank of 8in from male and 2 from female) but don't have the cycling hormones and other female physiology, taking the "female" medicinal approach has the potential to be really dangerous.

I don't think it's unreasonable to start a few gender spectrum pilot studies to see what various ranks on a gender spectrum really reflect (I would predict that they would reflect the sexuality spectrum in the individuals not ranking according to their external physiology/environmental raising)... But because of all of the biological implications, I just can't bring myself to stray away from the 2-gender view for (what I believe to be) the uncommon exceptions.

This past week's discussion was very interesting and controversial.  I enjoyed the information concerning sex differences in the brain, in cognitive abilities, brain differences in sexuality, and sex differences in mental disorders that the group presented.  I think the information is valuable and applicable to many realms, including education, psychology, biology, and medicine.

Our primary topic of discussion: binary vs. spectrum way of viewing gender & sexuality- was very thought-provoking.  Personally, I can understand and believe that sexuality is best characterized on a spectrum rather than by two categories (homosexual vs. heterosexual).  However, I believe that gender is better thought of in a binary fashion.  Despite our lengthy discussion and arguments about why gender should be viewed on a spectrum, I personally believe there are two genders: male and female.  I think most people would identify themselves as one of those two genders and only a small amount of people would identify as neither or as somewhere in between these two genders (if there was a spectrum).  Although female bodies vary greatly in nature and male bodies vary in nature, I believe there is a general layout/ outline that the bodies of each gender follow.  Most of our bodies will fit into the male or female category.  Yes, there are a few exceptions that arise, such as individuals born w/ both male and female body parts, but these are exceptions- and this is not the case for most people.  So, I believe the binary categories of gender (male & female) work for most individuals, and I think even if you gave a spectrum of gender (with male at one end and female at the other end), that most individuals would identify themselves at the ends of the spectrum (either male or female extremes), and not in the middle of the spectrum.  When I talked w/ some friends outside of class about this, they definitely could only really envision gender in two categories- and we talked about how both girly-girls and tomboys both identify themselves as female, even though some may share more similar interests w/ males.  

I know that some people may disagree w/ my binary view of gender- however, I cannot justify a spectrum of gender to myself and I personally believe in using two genders: male and female b/c most people fit into these categories and would identify themselves as one of these categories.  Yes, there are some exceptions, and I acknowledge that- but these are exceptions that are rare in nature, and that I believe do not fit into the binary gender category.  But, for research purposes and medical purposes, I believe using 2 gender categories of male and female can be useful- as described by Alex in her presentation of different ways mental disorders manifest in different psychological disorders and how different treatment for each sex may be beneficial.