Professor: Gender differences not as big as studies claim
By LINDSAY FRANK
News Writer
Scientific research is too often used to classify people in terms of gender, race and sexuality for political reasons, said Anne Fausto-Sterling, a professor of biology and women's studies at Brown University.
"Biological accounts of body differences are always political," she said.
According to Fausto-Sterling, dividing people into groups for things like census reports in order to map group differences is pointless.
"For almost any trait there are more variations within a group than between groups," she said.
Fausto-Sterling cited examples of scientific studies in the1900s whose data was manipulated to provide reasons for differences between the sexes and races. One such study involved research on the corpus callosum, a portion of the brain that is difficult to study unless it is completely removed from the rest of the brain.
Despite the fact that its removal alters its composition, these scientists subdivided it and took measurements of the posterior part and used these measurements as answers to racial and gender differences.
"Once freed from the body and domesticated in the lab the corpus callosum serves various masters. Then they thought it held the key to racial differences and now it is applied to gender," she said.
Other research at this time claimed that so-called internal secretions took on both female and masculine characteristics and was used to suggest that women's desire to vote came from masculine substances in the body. Women who did not want to become homemakers were seen as refusing to live in accord with their bodies.
Fausto-Sterling also discussed how our culture contradicts itself by challenging categories on the one hand and reinforcing them on the other.
"We are still trying to locate gender in the body and in our evolution so the wish to do that is still the same [as in the 1900s], but now gender is moving unstoppably out of its two boxes. Using gender as a research tool represents a thinking which is lacking subtly which is uninteresting to study," she said.
She then went on to say that too often we define people as being either part of one group or the other such as male or female.
"The problem is using dualism to divide the world," she said.
Instead she suggested that we adopt a way of thinking called the Developmental Systems Theories which says that one cannot study something without also studying the system that it is embedded into.
"We can never look for a single cause but must always examine the social-biological system. My model for studying what promotes physical group differences is based on the idea that external experiences become internalized. We don't know much about that interface but we know it's there," she said.
She talked about how the high incidence of hypertension in African Americans should be looked at from an environmental standpoint first and then from a genetic one.
"My hypothesis is that racism is a major contributor to hypertension. We should study life experiences and look at how racism is defined in terms of geographical regions, and the roles working conditions and daily stress play. The last thing to consider is genetic differences that affect the body's reaction to racism," she said.
The lecture, "Beyond Nature vs. Nurture: Gender, Race, Sexuality," was part of a series honoring distinguished women sponsored by the Provost's Office.
All News Stories for Wednesday, February 16, 2000
