Kathryn B. H. Clancy, PhD

Tuesday, January 11th 2011

Science Online 2011 Panel this Sunday: On the perils of blogging as a woman under a real name

Perils of blogging as a woman under a real name

Sheril Kirshenbaum, Anne Jefferson, Joanne Manaster, Maryn McKenna and Kathryn Clancy

This Sunday, 11:30am-12:30pm, Room B

Panel description: Being a woman scienceblogger has its own set of challenges, writing under your real name a few more. Readers may want you to be beautiful, to be their mommy, to be accessible to them in a way they don’t expect of other bloggers. They also may hold your decisions and lifestyle to a different standard. “There just aren’t any good women science bloggers out there.” “She was picked just because she was a woman.” “I would cure cancer just to capture your heart.” “You are a terrible mother if your baby is in daycare and you are in the lab.” These statements exemplify the sorts of unwelcome comments that women science bloggers can face, and reflect broader issues of cultural and institutional sexism. How do we navigate those issues, and ensure our own safety, while covering the science that we love? How do we get our writing noticed when people claim we don’t exist? Panel members and attendees will tackle these issues and others as a way to move towards a solution in the issue of gender representation in science blogging.

Sounds awesome, if I say so myself. I have some additional thoughts I’d like to share for our audience members, so you can think of your own contributions to the panel (and I plan on expanding on these, at least a little, in the panel itself).

• I blogged and participated in the academic blogosphere for many, many years pseudonymously before deciding to start writing under my real name. I think spending time as a pseudonymous member was really beneficial for me (and very different, and sometimes I really miss it). I learned the lingo and culture, I got to share my thinking honestly with fewer professional repercussions, and I got to make mistakes (lots of them). I think anyone who wants to write with their real name, should first write (or at least comment) pseudonymously, particularly if you’re a population susceptible to attacks (i.e., from an underrepresented group in science, person who studies something politically charged, etc).
• I’ve noticed disparities not only in who is selected to write at high-profile networks, but what kind of work gets covered by mainstream scienceblogs. For instance, even though I think the physiology of women’s reproduction is incredibly important for everyone to understand, given how politically charged issues are around reproductive choice, it doesn’t get covered that often (there are of course notable exceptions). The few times I see women discussed, it’s almost always a behavioral study.

If you cannot attend #scio11, or you can attend but want to help frame the conversation now: What questions do you have? What comments? What must be covered or considered to move this conversation forward productively?

Friday, January 7th 2011

Guest post: Sex-differential use of the same objects versus sex-differences in object preference

Last year, I had the good fortune to meet Stephanie Meredith at the American Association of Physical Anthropology meetings in Albuquerque. Stephanie is a PhD candidate at Arizona State University. I believe it was Julienne Rutherford, long time friend, placental enthusiast and AAPA Bandit blogger, who introduced us. I became quickly captivated by Stephanie’s good humor and intellect, and in particular her perspective on gender roles in non-human primates. As someone with a Women’s Studies background who doesn’t get to use it as often as I’d like, I absolutely loved talking with her, and thought her work was really interesting.

When I read Ed Yong’s post about Kahlenberg and Wrangham’s new article on gendered stick-carrying behaviors in chimpanzees, I wrote Stephanie and asked her what she thought. She wrote me a detailed, thoughtful response — with citations — after thoroughly reading the original manuscript. I liked it so much that I asked her if I could post it to my blog, and she graciously accepted.

* * * * *
After reading the article, I have the same questions and cautionary feelings about the data that I did when I heard Wrangham give this talk at the AAPAs in ABQ. According to the paper (Kahlenberg & Wrangham, 2010), we’re talking about sex differences based on 117 observations of the behavior over 14 years (which was more than I remembered, probably in error, from the talk, but it’s still not all that many). The median rates of stick-carrying for females, who carry more frequently, top out at 1.6 times per 1000 hours of observation for a set of 4 females in the 6-8 year age group. All in all, this seems to be a very rare behavior. In some cases, this behavior lasts for 4 hours, in some cases only for a minute. Of course, evolutionarily important behaviors certainly can be rare and of short duration (e.g., infanticide). But since we’re obviously not talking about a behavior that characterizes every day in the lives of male and female juvenile chimps, its evolutionary importance can’t be taken for granted, either, and I think we need to be careful and clear about exactly what conclusions we draw about its potential evolutionary significance.

My questions are really just that—questions about the nature of the data that will not be answered in published articles but can easily be answered over a beverage with the authors. I’d like to know how much variation there is among individuals in rates of these behaviors–do some individuals carry a lot and some not at all? Do some individuals typically carry for a long time and others typically carry for only a minute or two? Are most of the carrying bouts long, or are most short? Are most of them characterized by overt infant-care behavior, or does that characterize only a few of them? Do individuals continue to carry throughout their juvenility or is this an ephemeral phenomenon (it’s possible that one can infer this from the paper, but the way they binned individuals into age categories made it difficult for me to get a sense of the how much longitudinal data they have for each individual)? Do animals with younger siblings around do it more than ones without? Sometimes, this sort of information from the people who’ve watched the animals can nuance those dry and seemingly unimpressive numbers in such a way that you better understand how this particular small but significant difference really might be biologically important. For that reason, I’m generally curious about the details of the observations that allow for subjective, qualitative impressions about what’s going on with whom and in what conditions.

Unanswered questions aside, there is the obvious issue of how best to interpret the importance of an apparent sex-difference in a very rare behavior with no obvious function. The authors’ interpretation is that this stick-carrying is effectively “practicing for motherhood” by juvenile females. That seems perfectly reasonable. Given that interpretation, though, this behavior is just another manifestation of a sex-difference in infant-interest and it can simply be rolled into a larger set of behaviors we call “infant interest.” You could dissect primate infant interest behaviors if you wanted—grooming directed at infants, lip-smacking at infants, increased rates of grooming of mothers of newborns, infant carrying, etc.—but they’re all a part of the same phenomenon, which is getting close to and interacting with infants in order to practice mothering behaviors so that you will have a better chance of being a successful mother yourself. But that isn’t very catchy because it isn’t very different from every other primate that shows sex-differential infant interest. No one disputes that there is a plesiomorphic sex-difference in infant interest for chimps and humans (and many other primates). And no one disputes that this sex-difference and the practicing it facilitates are adaptive, since female primates that have no access to infants before they themselves have their first offspring tend to be crap-tastic mothers.

So, the authors go on to suggest that the real find here is that sex-differential object play that is not socialized by adults may be a plesiomorphic characteristic of chimps and humans. Well, ok. That would be true if sex-differential object play that is not socialized by adults characterizes both species. So far, it only characterizes one group of wild chimps. Admittedly, I’m a bit confused about whether that’s really the case, because the chimp people are a tight-knit little group of people, and before writing a sentence like “Given that regular stick-carrying has not been reported outside Kanyawara, a social learning component appears important,” the obvious thing to do would be to ask the other chimp people if they’ve seen this but not reported it. In fact, I’d be amazed if that very conversation didn’t come up sometime before or after Wrangham’s talk at the AAPAs. After doing a little asking around, you could then simply state that it hasn’t been seen in other communities or that it has and needs further quantification. If it hasn’t been seen in other communities, it isn’t species-typical and can’t be used to suggest a symplesiomorphic behavioral sex-difference of chimps and humans. If it has been seen in other populations but not reported or quantified, then their assertion that it is symplesiomorphic is actually stronger than they’ve stated. If you’re a chimp person, this should be easy to resolve. Regardless, though, of whether or not this characterizes chimps as a species, sex-differential object play that is not socialized by adults has already been demonstrated in captivity in rhesus macaques (Hassett et al., 2008) and vervet monkeys (Alexander & Hines, 2002). So plesiomorphic sex-differences in object preference (to the extent that one accepts that this characterizes humans) has already been demonstrated, and for far more distant cousins than chimps.

I think the interesting point here is that we’re talking about sex-differential use of the same objects in juveniles–when females play with sticks, they exhibit infant-care related behaviors, and when males play with sticks, they tend to exhibit weapon-related behaviors (although they also sometimes exhibit infant-care related behaviors). That’s something different than sex-differences in object preference. That hasn’t been demonstrated experimentally with monkeys. And it’s not about the object and its characteristics, but is something about differences in individuals’ responses to the same stimuli. But not much was made of that point. I wonder if they’re going to have a companion paper about weapon stick-use in males. I think it’d be a more compelling story presented all together. Of course, to suggest that this is a plesiomorphic characteristic of chimps and humans, it still has to be established for other populations of chimps. That might take a while, given how infrequent a behavior it is. But I do think that the sex-differential use of the same objects during play is pretty cool. Insofar as those uses are related to sex-differences that will later emerge in maternal care and fighting/displaying in adults, they are not altogether surprising, but it is still cool in that it is one more way in which humans aren’t actually unique, which means it’s one more line of evidence/inquiry that can be used to better understand human behaviors from an evolutionary point of view (and that is true regardless of whether this “shared trait” is symplesiomorphic or homoplastic in this population and humans).

Stephanie Meredith’s bio

I am interested in understanding how developmental systems produce primate behavioral sex differentiation, with an eye toward elucidating the evolutionary histories of different system components (e.g., particular components of socialization, particular aspects of individual physiology, etc.), as these data are useful for testing hypotheses about the evolutionary history of human gender. My current research focuses on social and endocrine factors that shape the development of behavioral sex differences in ring-tailed lemurs, which are gregarious, female-dominant strepsirrhine primates. You can find my website here.

References

Alexander, G., & Hines, M. (2002). Sex differences in response to children’s toys in nonhuman primates (Cercopithecus aethiops sabaeus) Evolution and Human Behavior, 23 (6), 467-479 DOI: 10.1016/S1090-5138(02)00107-1

Hassett, J., Siebert, E., & Wallen, K. (2008). Sex differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences parallel those of children Hormones and Behavior, 54 (3), 359-364 DOI: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2008.03.008

Kahlenberg SM, & Wrangham RW (2010). Sex differences in chimpanzees’ use of sticks as play objects resemble those of children. Current biology : CB, 20 (24) PMID: 21172622

Tuesday, January 4th 2011

Around the web: cognitive sex differences

The “Around the Web” series highlights informative websites, and also targeted blog posts and news articles, relevant to the courses I teach. Last semester I taught Anth 143: Biology of Human Behavior, an introductory-level course that covers the basics of evolution, behavioral biology, and the interaction of biology and culture. My hope is that these posts are useful not only for my current students, but other people hoping to gain background or insight into these topics.

Ah, cognitive sex differences. Here we often find a mix of explanations for why we don’t need to try to achieve equity in the sciences, or for why women are simply less interested in the sciences. There are plenty of examples trotted out of men’s superiority in spatial ability, and the few where women are sometimes found to be superior put women on a pedestal without gaining her any real power or advantage in society (look at lovely woman, so able to verbally communicate that it makes her a good mommy and wife!).

This year has been a good year to critically evaluate cognitive sex differences, thanks to Cordelia Fine’s book Delusions of Gender and the many spaces online that have reviewed her book. I have yet to read it and it didn’t turn up under the Christmas tree, so I’ll be buying it for myself. The reviews have me very excited.

So, I’ll start there, then work my way through the other cool stuff that’s been covered this year.

Delusions of Gender

Slate reviews the book and interviews Fine. Here is one of my favorite quotes from her:

We look around in our society, and we want to explain whatever state of sex inequality we have. It’s more comfortable to attribute it to some internal difference between men and women than the idea that there must be something very unjust about our society. As long as there has been brain science there have been misguided explanations and justification for sex and inequality — that women’s skulls are the wrong shape, that their brain is too small, that their head is too unspecialized. It was once very cutting-edge to put a brain on a scale, and now we have cutting-edge research that is genuinely sophisticated and exciting, but we’re still very much at the beginning of our journey of understanding of how our brain creates the mind.

New Scientist also has a review in CultureLab. This article also reviews Jordan-Young’s Brainstorm, which looks like a similarly excellent book on the topic of sex differences. It is published with Harvard University Press rather than a press that tends to attract a wider audience, so maybe that’s why Fine’s book has received more attention.

Katherine Bouton reviews the article in the New York Times. The last line was my favorite: “It’s really not just a few steps from looking longer at moving objects to aptitude in math, from gazing at faces to mind reading.”

This Language Log post refers to the Bouton one and makes some interesting parallels between the Connellan et al (2001) article Fine dismantles and the Hauser misconduct case. I love teaching the Connellan et al (2001) article, and have been for many years — it’s such a great example of reductionist wording, flawed methodology, and incorrect conclusions off the authors’ own evidence. I have used it in particular in introductory writing courses, as a way to show students they can be critical thinkers, since they quickly pick up on most of the paper’s errors.

The Language Log post already dismantled the flawed methodology. I just want to briefly mention the flawed conclusions off the results they get. Remember, Connellan et al are using Connellan’s face, and a mobile comprised of a broken up photo of her face, as the two objects the infants are gazing at. Staring at Connellan implies a preference for faces and eventual social superiority, where preference for the mobile implies a preference for physical-mechanical objects.

Below, I’ve reproduced Tables 1 and 2.

Let’s pretend for a minute that there were not significant methodological concerns and just look at the data. What I notice are a few things. First, females primarily exhibit NO preference, not facial preference. If half my subjects exhibited no preference, I’d probably have to say the methods and stimuli were flawed. Males might have a slight mobile preference, but even if that were statistically significant, I’m not sure there is a lot of biological meaning to 19 vs 11 individuals’ preferences. Further, they mention that their statistical significance derives entirely from the greater male preference for the mobile (not a greater female preference for the face), yet their conclusions indicate female superiority in social cognition skills.

Table 2 is perhaps more damning. First, the difference in percent looking time is not really different between any of the four groups (male/face, male/mobile; female/face, female/mobile). This becomes more obvious when you consider the standard deviations. Again, it is important to place statistical significance in the context of biological usefulness. Do these few seconds’ difference in looking time tell us something, or not? My bet is on the latter.

Other delightful bits

Coverage of Fine’s book wasn’t the only time I got to read about cognitive sex differences, prejudice, and social conditioning. Most of the posts and articles I link to this section should provide very strong evidence for social conditioning playing a primary role in cognitive and behavioral sex differences. I am quite sure there are some genetic and/or biological differences between the sexes; however, I am unconvinced that they would amount to much of anything if we didn’t seize upon them and nurture them from birth. Further, meta-analyses of cognitive sex difference studies have found very small effect sizes, which means that overall, even when differences are found in empirical studies, those differences are tiny (Hyde 2005).

Check out Greg Laden’s great post: Why do women shop and men hunt? He does a nice job criticizing the idea of some sort of universal Pleistocene environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA), which already does a lot to undermine arguments that humans have evolved certain sex-specific behaviors over the last few million years due to foraging in the savannah. He also discusses the huge amount of variation in social structure among modern humans, which helps us understand why this idea that there is essential male and female behavior is flawed.

Here’s a neat Time Magazine article on pink toys. It discusses the Pink Stinks campaign, which I follow on Twitter.

This article discusses the damage that can be done to a woman’s cognitive ability when she is objectified. I know I have trouble thinking when I receive comments on my physical appearance in my student evaluations, and the few times this has been done to me professionally by colleagues.

Related to this, Communicate Science discusses a study that had male and female actors give scripted 10-minute physics lectures and then had real physics students give evaluations (the students thought they were lecturers). The males received higher evaluations overall — when broken down by student gender, the female students gave slightly higher evals to the female lecturers, but the male students gave MUCH higher evals to the male lecturers. This is the sort of study that keeps me up at night, thinking about going up for tenure as a female scientist.

More on physics teaching: Ed Yong writes about a writing exercise that helps reinforce students’ values and their sense of self, which then appears to close the gender gap in physics assessment. I had my students do this assignment on the last day of class as a way to help them with their finals (though we only did it for about 2 minutes — I encouraged them to do more at home). A really neat piece!

Pharyngula is a blog I read often, and was one of the first science blogs I ever read, but I don’t think PZ’s work has ever made it into one of my Around the Web posts. However, this post, “Attention, perversely assertive women! You are abnormal!” really resonated with me. He covers a recent news story about using dexamethasone to pre-treat normal girl fetuses (and those with the legitimate genetic disorder CAH) to prevent masculine preferences and behaviors.

Next, an article in the New York Times Business Section on why more women aren’t the boss. There are some interesting thoughts shared on mentorship and risk-taking behaviors.

The always-brilliant Jennifer Ouelette discusses the idea that “boyz will be boyz” in her post that dismantles the idea that female science teachers are feminizing science classes and increasing the dropout rate for boys.

Finally, I don’t know how to introduce this piece, “The Rise of Enlightened Sexism” by Susan Douglas up at On the Issues, except to say: read it. Read it now.

Random interesting tidbits

I had intended to finish this post in time for the end of 2010. I had wanted to send you in the direction of some pretty pictures as a way to close out the year, so let this be some eye candy to start you off well for 2011. Myrmecos (who I feel privileged to know in person through his fantabulous wife) offers up “The Best of Myrmecos 2010.” I will be honest here and say that, before this blog, I had close to zero appreciation for insects and mostly thought of ways to keep them out of my house and office, or kill them if they came in. I pay a lot more attention to them now, and wish I knew more.

And, Jerry Coyne put together some images from National Geographic that I liked from the 2010 contest.

Happy new year to all!

References

Connellan, J. (2000). Sex differences in human neonatal social perception Infant Behavior and Development, 23 (1), 113-118 DOI: 10.1016/S0163-6383(00)00032-1

Hyde, J. (2005). The Gender Similarities Hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60 (6), 581-592 DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.60.6.581