Biases and Blind Spots: The Role of Science in Gender Policing
Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash
The concept of gender policing is something that I wasn’t truly able to understand until adulthood. Discovering its influence on me was a bit like discovering that I have lived my whole life completely unaware that I had a “kick me” sign taped to my back. I think that I believed to a certain extent that I was above such influences. My parents encouraged and expected me to express myself in whatever fashion I felt fit. While there was not an overt expression of what it meant to be a girl or punishment for not “being a lady”, I was given a near-constant flurry of quiet reminders. It was found in the way teachers suggested ambitious science projects for boys and suggested I do a project about removing stains. It was there in the separation of physical education classes when the girls were taught dance and the boys were taught to play flag football. I heard it every Fourth of July picnic when well-intentioned adults would quiz me on whether I had a boyfriend or had gotten “boy crazy” yet. I could most certainly feel it in the apologetic way my grandmother brought dinner to the table a little later than expected or in the way my mother and my aunts (I had no uncles) blamed themselves for the failures in their relationships with their husbands and daughters.
I was an expressive, theatrical kid who became quiet and withdrawn in middle school as I quickly became aware of the competition to become popular and maintain the status quo. It felt like everything I did was being assessed and judged: what I wore, where I shopped, what I read or watched, what I ate, who I talked to, what I laughed at, and how I chose to approach academics. Kristin Myers and Lara Raymond in their piece on “The Girl Project” reference this as a period known as “the fall”, a time for young girls characterized by a shift from defining themselves from the perspectives of themselves or their parents to defining themselves through the perspective of boys. The thoughts expressed in this piece remind me very much of a book I read several years ago on the same subject, Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher. This is the book that made me aware of that aforementioned sign on my back. In it, Pipher states, “Adolescent girls experience a conflict between their autonomous selves and their need to be feminine, between their status as human beings and their vocation as females.” As an adolescent girl, it can feel like you simply are not good enough to meet the standards set out for you, which leads to depression, anxiety, and a constant feeling of needing to reinvent or edit yourself to avoid being ridiculed or ostracized. You should be pretty, but not too pretty because it should seem effortless. You should be smart, but not a know-it-all. You should not speak out of turn because it is impolite and could lead people to think you are full of yourself. You should not enjoy kissing or ask questions about sex because that will mean you are a slut. Question everything about yourself before anyone else gets a chance to. In other words, for me, it meant I was the one most actively policing myself.
In terms of heteronormativity, I was also raised with an openness that expressed both heterosexuality and homosexuality as reasonable and valid lifestyles. I was told that it was perfectly acceptable to “love who you love” because I was raised by a heterosexual mother and a homosexual father, both of whom maintained decades-long relationships with their partners. Yet despite that fluid home environment, society told me that I should be cautious about sharing those feelings. In her publication, “Normalizing Heterosexuality: Mothers’ Assumptions, Talk, and Strategies with Young Children,” Karin A. Martin—a professor of Sociology who focuses on gender and childhood— talks about boys calling each other “fag” as a means of policing each other’s masculinity. As a young girl with a gay father, I became hyper-aware of these incidents of name-calling. It was clear to me through the behaviors exhibited by my peers, and even occasionally my teachers that I should keep my father’s sexual identity secret, not only because it opened me up to ridicule, but also because it could call into question my own gender normativity, and there was no greater violation of the rules of femininity than that in my developing mind.
In the book Gender and the Science of Difference, Jill A. Fisher demonstrates how the field of science has been influenced by society and how society, in turn, has been influenced by science. Western society, for example, is guided by several perceived differences between sexes. Essentialism will argue that those differences are biological and that the type of person we are is determined by our biological sex. Conversely, constructivism argues that while sex may be biological, our gender and the expression of it are social constructs. Regardless of what you believe, both perspectives set a baseline for approaching the question of researching gender differences.
While researching gender differences continues to intrigue and compel us, we must not forget that science is a field shaped by individuals and that those individuals influence what decisions are made, which tools may be used, and what approaches and theories are applied. The facts as we know them have been interpreted through a filter of history, social structures, and personal or institutional observations. Science has long been a field dominated by patriarchal ideas which have determined the direction that research takes when seeking to define a scientific difference between the sexes. Those ideas have also served to normalize presumptions about human sexual differences. In other words, science has historically been biased against women and even with the careful application of the scientific method, those biases can still perpetuate gender stereotypes.
By example, Fisher tells us that Aristotle was once quite influential in the study of gender differences at a time when the prevailing theory of gender was that of a “one-sex” model. Aristotle theorized that a woman’s genitalia was inferior because it was simply an underdeveloped version of the male genitalia. He posited that this was due to a lack of sufficient heat during fetus development. As a well-respected thinker of his time, Aristotle’s theory was largely unchallenged for centuries and was even expanded to explain that women were also less intelligent and more emotional because of this same heat deficiency. Fisher notes, however, that these concepts were not expected to be proven or studied because the idea that females were the inferior sex was simply the understood and accepted belief of the time.
Just as the thinkers of Aristotle’s time couldn’t have conceived of a world where men and women could be equal in intelligence, emotional capacity, or physical strength, modern science is vulnerable to bias. We, the consumers of data, as well as scientists and institutions, must accept that the thick lens of societal norms is unavoidable. I feel that Fisher’s theories seek to question sexism in science (or the sexist interpretation of data and findings), but also to recognize the potential for the gendered institutions of science and medicine to influence society and our cultural values and practices. This notion highlights the importance of awareness, conversation, and a continued practice of checking and rechecking our biases and blind spots.
