Via Maria Farrell I see that yet another psychologist is laughing all the way to the bank with a book and multiple choice quiz about essential differences in the brains of men and women. A significant commonality in the brains of men and women is an endless appetite for tests of this sort that comfortingly reinforce what you already know. Men, clever boys that they are, typically have a high “systemising quotient” because their brains are “hard-wired” for understanding and building systems. Women, the soppy girls, are hard wired for empathy and sensitivity and caring. While men are driven to “extract underlying rules that govern the behaviour of a system; and the drive to construct systems” women are out in the hall yakking on the phone.

All kinds of things about this kind of pop gender research bug the living shite out of me. Before rushing to infer hard-wired differences between brains, is there any effort to control for role structure and culturally-driven expectations about appropriate gender behavior? And do you think these are leading questions:

If I were buying a car, I would want to obtain specific information about its engine capacity.

I am fascinated by how machines work.

If I were buying a stereo, I would want to know about its precise technical features.

When I read the newspaper, I am drawn to tables of information, such as football league scores or stock market indices.

That last one is my favorite. Compare and contrast them to the following questions I just made up:

If I were buying bedsheets, I would want to obtain specific information about the threadcount.

When I go grocery shopping, I bring a detailed list with me and tend to keep track of how food prices change from week to week.

When I watch football games on television, I often get very excited or emotional about them.

I keep my house clean, tidy and well-organized.

The following are left as exercises for the reader: (1) Suggest how swapping in a few of the new questions would change the balance of results on the test, and thus our inferences about hard-wired-for-eternity differences between the sexes. (2) The great thing about gender-role typing is its immense abliity to rationalize awkward cases as deviant or account for them in a way that preserves the core idea about fundamental differences. Show how each of the new questions can be interpreted within a stereotypical framework of gender roles provided we’re not too concerned about consistency with the other questions, thus making us feel better again.

(Incidentally, I don’t want any comments to the effect that the above complaints make me some kind of cardboard-cutout PoMo blank-slater. That wouldn’t be very analytical of you.)