Transcript
This question here was the first time where we got fairly lively last night. Probably won't surprise you that it's to do with gender and the hemispheres.
Okay, great.
As you said earlier, one should be free to speak freely, but it's how something is said rather than what is said. And I do feel that gender is something that should be discussed as indeed should identity. There's three questions here. What is the relationship between identity and gender? You don't want to go there. I
Don't go there.
Fair enough. The other one is how does gender relate to the hemispheres?
Okay.
And the third question is how does identity relate to the hemispheres?
Too big a question, doesn't it? I mean, it's too vague a question. I don't know what you even mean.
Well, how does identity with respect to masculine and feminine relate to the hemispheres? Which I would say is different to how does gender relate to the hemispheres, which would be more to do with XY chromosome.
It's one of those things that's always brought up. And I always have to sort of ... My heart rather sinks.
We don't have to go into the final, final point if your heart's rather syncing.
No, no, it's okay. I mean, probably what I would preface it by saying is that we don't know enough for anything I'm saying now to be taken as solid truth of any kind. But I just want to dispel some illusions. So one of the common ones is, would you not say that the left hemisphere is male and the right hemisphere is female? And I think I know what people are getting at there because they're thinking the right hemisphere is this nurturing empathic has this style and the left hemisphere has a more technical style. And for reasons, as I think I understand, people see technical ways of thinking are more espoused by men. I think that's probably true. And empathy seems more manifested by women. I say manifested because the research suggests that men are not less empathic than women, but they just don't use the language of empathy in the same way. (02:21): So I think I get that, but there are quite a lot of problems with trying to make any easy equation between the right hemisphere and the female and the left hemisphere and the male. And they start from ... There aren't many things that we can say with some degree of certainty about differences between men and women psychologically, neuropsychologically. But one that is pretty robust is that visuos facial manipulation is much better in men and that verbal fluency is much better in women. And this gives rice the stereotype of the silent male and the inarticulate male teenager and they're constantly talking or communicating female teenager. So I see that as a bit of a problem because verbal fluency and women are more verbally fluent as a whole is clearly linked to the left hemisphere and visuospatial manipulation is clearly linked to the right hemisphere. So there's a problem for a start, more sensitive to testosterone than the left. (03:42): And then you get the fact that where there are sex differences and there are, and they need to be investigated more carefully in doing, for example, scanning studies, people are only beginning to realize this that when they set up a scanning study, for example, they don't separate the males from the females, but they really must do this because quite a lot of important findings have been lost because the distinction has not been made. Now, if it turns out, as it does in certain cases, that in males, the active areas in the right hemisphere and in females, the active areas in the left hemisphere, you have 50% of each and you aggregate the data. You find there is nothing there, but actually there's something very important there. So we need to learn to separate data, but an interesting observation, I know of perhaps in the half a dozen cases in which we do know that generally speaking, there is this difference that the same task draws on the right hemisphere in males and the left in females. (04:53): And I put it that way around, because in every single case, that is the way around it is. So that you might think the females would be more right hemisphere dependent, but actually the males are. In those cases where we know there are differences, I have to be careful that that is the point I'm making.
Because we haven't had the data on other cases.
Well, only that I'm not saying necessarily some global thing like men use their right hemisphere is more than women, although I think that's a possibility actually, but I'd rather say that men use their right hemisphere for different things from what the females use their right hemisis for, and the same goes for the left hemisphere. But one possible, here I'm going to stick my neck out and cause hysteria all over the internet, but one of the very well validated phenomena, and it's largely talked about for reasons of political quantness. It's talked about and researched about by women is there is something called greater male variability. I mean, this is a pretty robust finding, and it's no secret within the world of psychologists, but it's not common knowledge, but it is a very important point. What greater male variability means is what one psychologist has cronins calls dumbbells and nobels. (06:25): In other words, there are more dummies at the bottom of the range and there are more Nobel Prize winners at the top of the range. This is because of a quite simple thing, which is the shape of the curve. If you distribute talents of any kind for males and for females, you will find that females are more central. So the graph is a steeper graph that occupies the center of the field, whereas the bell curve for men is a more flattened curve where the ends are pushed further out in the distribution. And what that explains is something that I think we intuitively know that at the end of the spectrum, there are both the most dysfunctional, least intelligent people tend to be men. And at the other end of the scale, and I don't believe that this is simply a socially engineered, when you get out to the very end of the town, there are an enormous number of men. (07:24): Now, that doesn't mean to say there won't be women, and it doesn't mean to say that women should be discouraged from trying to do whatever they want. I don't have no political agenda here. I'm just talking about facts. And although it's a very small effect in the middle, it's an enormous effect when you get to the very extreme men, because when you're talking about the very tops of anything, you're talking not about 1%, you're not talking about 0.1%, you're talking about 0.001%. And there you would find that it's, I think, according to Helena Cronin, it's something like 280 to one. And I can't do anything about it. I didn't make it that way.
But when I hear that, that the bell curve is flatter for men and steeper for women so that there's more extreme differences at the tails.
Yeah.
I'm asking the question naturally, well, why is that? And the conclusion, sorry. Sorry, I'm instantly thinking, and I'll probably get my head bitten off too, but I'm instantly thinking that it has something to do with competition versus empathy, because if you're taking an approach to life whereby you want to feel connected to the society in which you live, then blind striving for competition so that you get to the top is not necessarily going to help you because you're alienated. Whereas if you take a position where you don't mind that, you're going to get to the top. And so for me, it seems to be taking a competitive rather than empathetic approach to existence.
Well, I think that's a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it, and I wouldn't for a moment say, dismiss it. Another way of putting it might be that from the point of view of nature, what matters is women, because if there are no women, there's no next generation. And I don't mean no women, of course, but what I mean is you can't afford to have too many flaky women because you want women to be able to bring up the next generation. So as you say, they need to be more socially focused and more socially responsive, which they are, and they need to have deeper bonds with their offspring, which they do. The children need to respond more to mothers and to fathers, which when they're very young, they definitely do. And if there is to be experimentation with the gene pool, and there must be if things are to evolve, then it's much better that the experiment should be carried out on men because men are dispensable. (10:01): Frankly, once men have fathered the child, this is an exaggeration, of course, but from an evolutionary biology point of view, they're much less important than the woman. And I'm absolutely not saying that men are not important as influences on children as they grow up. The evidence is that they are. And one thing that might be interesting is that in the first year and a half of life, the mother is very much more important than the father, but in the second year of life, the father becomes at least as important as the mother.
There are many who would say that to say that, to say that women need to connect more to the children than men do in the early stages is a social construct and that we need to get beyond that into-
Because they say it doesn't ... We can say what we like. It doesn't make it true.
No, I mean, I'm just interested because it's something that comes up very, very often.
I know it arouses feelings.
It really does. It rases deep feelings. Well,
It ramses deep feels largely because at some level, I believe a lot of people know that this is true and a lot of women say, of course that's true, but you are in a conflict if you're a woman nowadays. You have to both listen to your body, listen to what you find fulfilling, and you have to be conforming to the current thing, which I think is driven actually not in the interest of women at all, but driven by capitalism. Capitalism wants as many people as possible to be in the workplace. It doesn't care about the future of humanity. It only concerns workforce now, productivity now, and it's very good to have lots of women in the workplace. And listen, I'm not saying that women don't contribute in the workplace, or that there aren't women whose ambition it is to be in the workplace, and they certainly should be, but there need to be women who devote time to childcare, because men are not a substitute. (12:12): It's not as purely socially conditioned thing. Our bodies, our minds, our feelings are different as men and women, not because of some social conditioning. They've been like that forever, and they're there in animals. Animals are not socially conditioned, but in animals, you find all the same differences between the males and the females that you find in us. You find it in other primates. They haven't read books or watched television or been lectured on how they ought to behave. They do it totally naturally.
Yeah. For me, there seems to be a bit of a conflict between theory and practice. Because
That's what I'm
Saying. And I can completely identify with this because there's so much value placed, so much pressure placed on my sister, for instance, to become successful as a barrister, apparently barrister, at the same time as pressure on her to become a mother. And she feels that conflict.
I mean, if women ought to be emancipated, they shouldn't just enter a new dogma, which has been largely dreamt up in the last 15, 20 years. They should do what they want to do. And a lot of women feel actually bereft when they have to leave their child far too early and go back into the workplace. I have a daughter in America who has made me a grandfather for which I'm enormously happy and grateful. And because she lives in America, she was told four weeks after she'd given birth to my granddaughter that she should be back in the workplace. And if she wasn't back in the workplace, she needed a sixth certificate. So we get to the stage where we pathologize being a mother.
It's a really difficult one because it just stirs up so many feelings. I'm not even a woman, but I can still ... I can still ... Even a woman. Well, you say that, but we're not going to get into identity, but in America, in Canada now, if I were to say that I am a woman, then you would be obliged to call me.
But this is a perfect example of if I say it is true, it is true. It's the tyranny of a theory over what actually is the case.
It also removes ... If I say I'm a woman, then that removes the relationship that you have with the world, then it all becomes about the way that ...
But it does. It's not all in the head.
The thing that's difficult is that there does need, at the same time, as there needs to be a listening to one's body and to choose the path that one ought to live, there does also need to be a shift in the sense that ... My sister would say that she ... And I would agree with her that she gets a lot of value from becoming a family barrister.
Of course
She does. And pursuing that path. Of course
She doesn't. I'm not suggesting for a
Moment that she won't
Or shouldn't.
No, I'm not suggesting that you
Are. Nor am I trying to tell her what to do with her life. The right answer for her may be to devote herself entirely to the career and the law. If she's going to get to the top, she won't have time at home.
No, I know. This is the sacrifice. It's just-
You can't have everything in life. I'm awfully sorry. And it's true for men as well as for women. I mean, one of the things is we can't give birth anyway. I mean, so for a man, his identity is entirely based on the job that he does. If he doesn't have a job, he is effectively nobody. A woman has either the tyranny or the freedom, depending on how you look at it, to choose. (15:54): And we can social and engineer all we like, but it turns out that the distribution of men and women in different jobs is most conforming to what people would think of as the stereotypes in countries like Sweden where they have what people think of as the most progressive society. When people are actually allowed to do what they want, they don't do the same jobs. Why would they? They're not physically or psychologically identical. The whole problem comes between equality and sameness. Equality is not sameness. Equality means difference, but mutual respect. And one of the troubles with the situation at the moment is we no longer respect women who want to be mothers. If my daughter decides she just wants to be a mother, she will look down on herself, other women will look down on her.
What's interesting there about the ... People feel a sense of shame if they decide to be mothers and not pursue a career. I don't want to play the blame game here, but everything is often a response to something else. And if I just look at my own family structure and the structure of other families within my space, which is admittedly a very narrow framework to work with, but it seems to me that there is a sense amongst the fathers that what they were doing was more important than what was being done on the mothering side, and more value is being placed on jobs than on nurturing children, naturally in response. Women are going to go, "Well, you know what? I will show you that I can do what you're doing."
Absolutely. And it's entirely understandable, and I'm not sort of pretending to have an answer. And I'm just saying, just to say, "Oh, it's all a social construct." It's just not either common sense or good science. There are differences, and it's how we choose as a society to deal with them. That means there must be balances and there must be choices. Now, do you want to go or do you want to very quickly look around the house a bit?
Let's have a look around the house. Okay. That was nice. We've done really well. We have. We have. We've nice to get
Through that and still be on speaking to us a little bit.