Opengender

A recent uber-view of empirical research about women (largely carried out by men) seems to have concluded that the state of femininity is characterised by significant difference in biological brain function.

There seems to be a concomitant drift in governmental and non-governmental discourse that ICT professional environments need to become more 'women-friendly' by adapting themselves to accommodate biologically feminine traits. Of course, what is mostly meant by this (reading for subtext, as one seems to be encouraged to do) is that the inappropriate sexualisation and trivialisation of women has to stop. It's just not politic to put it quite that way.

Other suggestions include providing tailored training for schoolgirls and giving more value to 'anciallary' fields such as documentation and other 'soft' contributions to ICT. In case the lame-brained little darlings break a nail on the hard stuff.

Given that girls outperform boys marginally in 'hard' technical subjects up until puberty it would seem to make more sense to enquire why girls apparently lose interest in the 'hard stuff' at roughly the same time they get interested in what boys think of them? Add this to the relatively high proportion of women in ICT who identify as lesbians (relative to the population at large) and consider that lesbians are the group of women least likely to care what men think of them. Starts to look more like a case of an imposition of male expectations and desires in the socialisation of adolescent girls rather than of the biology of female brains?

If you visit a forum for (the pitiful percentage of) women professionals in ICT their main (and bitter) complaints are of bullying, exclusionary tactics, patronising attitudes, a glass ceiling, and incompatibility of the industry with childrearing responsibilities. Are we to conclude that bullying, discrimination, sexual vulgarity, and inability to wipe a baby's arse are genetic male traits? Fancy trying to read that off a brain scan or find the precise gene responsible for the trait of talking down to women? Feel a funding application coming on?

Women seem to be taking a bashing in the nature/nurture debate all round lately. Some days it seems the whole popultion of IRC is firmly convinced that women's brains are 'hard-wired' differently from men's – and science has 'proved it'. Well ya know, at various times science has proved that the universe is geocentric, that woman have larger frontal lobes, that women have smaller frontal lobes, and that the atom is the smallest particle of an element.

The current discussion seems to be based on three kinds of 'evidence': brain scans, genetic surveys, and stats based on behavioural observation/testing/surveys. Brain scans, in particular, seem to be a big flavour of the moment.

Behavioural stats merely measure what is and it seems likely that discursive effects are frequently being reinscribed as biological causes. There are endless arguments to be had about the extent to which the hypotheses influencing the design and interpretation of behavioural observations or surveys are culturall 'loaded'. And for a survey 'proving' that, for example, infants behave differently according to gender from birth, there will be another one showing that infants are treated differently from birth by their mothers. The scientific jury is still out on the behavioural question – and as I'm thus free to think for myself, I'll choose to continue to assume that behavioural differences in infants are produced as an effect of language and environment. Well, it's hard to imagine funders devoting resources to behavioural studies which 'prove' that because Italian and British people behave differently from early childhood it is clear that there are significant differences in brain structure.

Then there's genetics. OK, we (famously by now) share more than half our genes with a banana and more than 99% of our genes with chimpanzees. Just how much room for radically different 'programming' of brains is there within a single species? In terms of mutation and recombination, there is more difference between two gorillas in the same valley than between a Chinese and a European homo sapiens. The theory is that the human gene poool must've been reduced to a puddle at some point. In reality, genetic differences between human individuals are greater than averaged differences between social classifications such as gender or race.

This averaging is a misleading representation of human diversity. It's not like all women hover around a median and all men hover around a different median. It's that there are big differences between individuals whilst any difference between the genders as a whole is barely discernible statistically. The standard deviation is large. And whilst I don't think there's been a formal study, it looks as though deviation in ICT field is probaly much higher among both men and women. I once asked a random bunch of men in an ICT forum to go off and take an online test actually designed to meausre AS quotient but which also shows an average differential of 2 points between 'normal' male and female scores. All (not just some) came back with wildly extreme scores (at both ends of the scale). Most of these were at least 10 points +/- the 2-point average difference. Not one came anywhere near the middle.

What is also becoming clear is that differences such as complexion, shape of eye, or sexual orientation are controlled by many different genes in extremely complex and imbricated ways (much as race, gender and sexual orientation are inconsistent and complex in language and culture). Clearly, there are XX and XY individuals, but gendered identifications in discourse are rather more complex than that and this may have nothing whatsoever to do with brain structure anyway.

There isn't nearly enough information about what connections there may be between human behaviours and gene cocktails to achieve anything more than highly speculative hypotheses. At most, geneticists might suggest predispositions. Spookily (as Edna would say) genes seem to be very well-read in Foucauldian models of productive multiplicity! Or is it just that I prefer to read the conclusions of scientists who are?

So that leaves brain scans. A real current favourite with those who have a predisposition to believe that women are inferior – or as it's usually put these days: "equal but different" (hands up if you remember where you heard that one before).(1) This field is, again, a hotbed of conjecture and conflicting studies. Current favourite is the corpus callosum – an area of the brain about which (handily) not-too-much detail is known – differences in which are frequently alleged to indicate that women are more sensitive and intuitive and crap at maths and logic. Of course, over the past couple of centuries this has been variously 'proven' by conflicting stuff about frontal lobes, overall brain size, differences in grey and white matter, cranial capacity, etc etc etc.

Much like genetics, so little is really known about the precise functions of the different areas of the brain – or the extent to which their functions are interconnected – that similar reservations about the field of genetic surveys apply. Differences between individuals are greater than categorical differences. Diverse results of studies fail to corroborate each other and hypotheses are heavily culturally lloaded'. And, of course, that's before you start on a critique of biological determinism.

Well, there's always gay sheep. Gays, of course, are also getting naturalised by the more conservative strands of genetic theory. Identical twin studies (remember, most of the science in genetics is statistics resulting from surveys, not repeatable experiment) indicate at most a possible 50% correlation between genes and sexual orientation. Which means that 50% of identical twins do not have the same sexual orientation. The higher correlation in identical twins might either indicate a predisposition which will only be realised half the time or might even merely record a tendency for people to treat identical twins the same as they grow up.

It's also important to remember that genetic survey has also been used to 'prove' anything from higher levels of neurosis in Asians to lower IQs in Africans (everything relative to Europeans of course). Gives the "equal but different" thing a rather more obviously sinister ring, eh? I think most of us will remember where we heard that stuff before. OK, there's often the fig-leaf that this is gonna help diagnose and fight diseases somehow. Or the stats just sort of spun off research into treating something like schitzophrenia all by themselves. Or it's supposed to help combat discrimination by changing the social environment to fit alleged biological differences.

Of all these branches of scientific endeavour, I'm inclined to ask the same question: why are institutions and funders so ready to support the project of underpinning patterns of social discimination biologically? Why can't some people just accept that human individuals are, at once, pretty much the same and yet interestingly different from one another? It seems fair to say that this is more of an ideological project than a medical one most of the time. So what if gays turn out to be enjoying a choice or are compelled to same-sex orientation by genes? What? If it's a choice, do we get punished for being awkward on purpose? If it's 'nature', are we supposed to get married and mimic a dominant construct of heterosexual, monogamous and monocultural 'nature' as closely as possible so they can settle smugly back into hegemonic assumptions? God forbid we'd grow up, respect other people's choices and histories and do the work to adjust to each other?

I pointed out in a FOSS forum the other day that although individuals are different (no prizes for guessing that) we should not actually make assumptions on basis of gender (or other discursive categories such as race). We should not be changing the world to accommodate fanciful notions of female biology but changing the discourses which inscribe hierarchical gender difference on the world. I was told that it shouldn't be "made that complicated". Hmmm – gender construction is an algorithm lacking in elegance perhaps? Is simplistic biological determinism less taxing on the superior male brain?

Frankly, the ICT environment would be a whole lot more comfortable for me if blokes would only stop treating me differently (like a squidgy-brained specimen from another planet). Not all of them, I hasten to add. ICT blokes are often less prone to mark gender in the way they communicate than is the male population at large and more inclined to respect ability in whatever morphological package they find it. Most men, in the FOSS community at least, express what I believe is a genuine wish for more women to be involved in ICT. (Before we canonise them, this often seems to proceed from a wish to find a girlfriend who sympathises with an obsessional will to code.) Sex should be ignored in the workplace. The problem is not that women are erroneously treated the same but that women are erroneously treated differently.