Robyn McSweeney

Transcription

>> My name is Ingrid Cumming and I am here on behalf of the Custodians and Traditional Owners of Whadjuk Nyungar Country and the families that are Benil, Shore and Kallad. It's my utmost pleasure to come here and provide a Welcome to Country for you people today. The history behind Welcome to Country, traditionally when new people would come into country, we would greet them and pass on things like boorna wangkiny or message sticks and we would basically give information about how to travel through countries so they are safe and felt welcomed and I certainly hope that this welcome resonates those same feelings today. I'm going to sing to you in language. Don't fear. I understand not everyone is a Nyungar linguist in the room. That's more than fine. But basically what I'm singing about is bringing on good spirit into country to look over all you people as you walk through. Before I do start, most importantly, I would like to honour my elders past and present because without them, I wouldn't be able to stand here and carry on these thousand year old traditions. Feel free to clap along and get yourselves warmed up for the afternoon. [ Music and Singing in Foreign Language ] Thank you. [ Audience Applause ] The final part of the Welcome to Country is passing on the boorna wangkiny. However, reading the brief about musical Deliah Fine, I find that this particular gift is probably way more appropriate. What I have here is what we call a women's belt and it's made from reeds here from the Swan River. This belt has been used in many different women's ceremony including the burial ceremony of a very significant female elder. And it's true, when we think about anthropologists that first came here and studied about our people, the Nyungar people, they took on the stories of the men, their culture, their dances, but very seldom took on the information of the women. And in Nyungar culture, and in a lot of Indigenous Australian cultures here, we believe that it's not matriarchal or patriarchal, that we're equal. So, the women's place and women's law and women's culture is just as important. It needs to be recognised. So this is a very powerful piece of Nyungar history and, like I said, used for many ceremonies. It's very powerful and I'm very honoured to pass this on to you cordially if you would like to accept this on behalf of the Nyungar community. [ Audience Applause ] Thank you very much for inviting me here today. I look forward to hearing what Miss Fine has to say and as our people say here in Nyungar country, [Speaking Foreign Language], we will see you again soon. Thank you. [ Audience Applause] >> There are many distinguished people here today and I would particularly like to acknowledge the honourable Robyn McSweeney, MLC, Minister for Child Protection, Community Services, Seniors and Volunteering and Women's Interests, and Associate Professor Cordelia Fine, our wonderful guest speaker today. To Professor Robyn Quin, our Deputy Vice Chancellor, Education at Curtin University. To my colleague, Professor Majella Franzmann, Pro Vice-Chancellor of the Faculty of Humanities at Curtin University. To Doctor Linley Lord who was the 2010 Clare Burton guest speaker. To Ms. Jenni Perkins who is the Director General of the Department of Communities and to all our distinguished guests and especially to my colleagues. What a wonderful day to be together and to think about the sorts of issues about gender equity. So, have a wonderful luncheon. I particularly welcome also the 2010 Clare Burton Scholarship recipient, Melissa Marinelli who is from Curtin. So we acknowledge Melissa's win and are delighted to have you here with us. Thank you. [ Audience Applause ] I welcome you all then to the 13th annual event to celebrate and commemorate the life of Doctor Clare Burton. And it's wonderful to see so many repeat visitors here today, both from universities, from government and from the private sector and I know that there are many of you who have been here to a great many of those 13 lectures. The Clare Burton Annual Memorial Lecture was initiated by the ATN WexDev, which is the Women's Executive Development Program established by the five universities of the Australian Technology Network or the ATN. Those universities include Queensland University of Technology, University of Technology, Sydney, RMIT University in Victoria, University of South Australia and Curtin University. And the ATN WexDev program is a strategic career development program designed for senior women, both academic and general staff within the ATN universities. And the program is in response to the continued underrepresentation of women at senior levels in higher education and, of course, it's a situation that Australia shares with the international university community and, indeed, the broader community. At Curtin we've made great progress in recent years and women are well-represented in senior management of the university, but we've still got quite some distance to go to achieve equal representation at lower levels of management and its senior academic and professional staff classifications which we are hoping to progress through our advancing women's strategy. And I would just make the comment, you know, while you think you're doing okay, it only takes -- can take a month or a few months and, you know, you seem to be almost back where you started so it's a fragile project keeping gender equity balanced and it needs, sort of, to be ongoingly supported. Clare Burton passed away in August 1998 and was someone who made a difference during her lifetime. In Australia during the 1980s and 1990s, Clare was the intellectual force behind employment equity programs. It was her academic research on gender and race bias as well as her work as a public sector administrator which became the basis for policy, both in the public and private sectors. She was known as the guru of equity practitioners and some of you here today may have known Clare and her work, and indeed been involved in policy work yourself with her. These lectures support the awarding of the Clare Burton Scholarship which was established by Clare's family and the five ATN universities to honour and continue the work of Doctor Clare Burton into gender equity. The $10,000 scholarship is open to post graduate students within the ATN universities for a research based gender equity project, and to date, the proceeds from the Perth event have contributed more than $16,000 towards those scholarships. And the scholarship will be again available for 2012. The applications close very shortly on the 18th of November and there are details on your tables so I encourage you to look to the opportunities for identifying post-graduate research study students. We're honoured to have with us today the Minister for Women's Interest, the Honourable Robyn McSweeney, who will a little later, introduce our guest speaker. Robyn is a wife and a mother of four adult children and is best known for her role in leading and setting long term goals as both Minister and Shadow Minister in the social portfolios of child protection, seniors and volunteering, local government, women interests and emergency services. She was elected as a Member of the Legislative Council for the South West Region in 2001. Robyn's current role as Minister for Child Protection, Community Service, Seniors and Volunteering, Women's Interests and Youth, is the result of many years of representation at both the local and state level. Our guest speaker today, Doctor Cordelia Fine, is an academic psychologist and author and she's been described variously as, quote, that rare academic who is also an excellent writer, a cognitive neuroscientist with a sharp sense of humour and an intelligent sense of reality, and finally -- that was from the times -- and finally from the Times Higher Education Supplement, a brilliant feminist critique of the neurosciences. In her lecture today entitled How the New Neurosexism Helps Sustain the Status Quo. Doctor Fine will show how stereotypes created in the name of science have influenced attitudes and behaviour in the workplace in self-fulfilling ways and how they still interfere with our trajectory towards real equality. Today's lecture is certainly an intriguing topic and an examination of yet another subtle barrier to women's rightful equality. Cordelia commenced this lecture series in Melbourne on the 26th of October and today is her final and fifth lecture. So, quite an achievement. We would like to congratulate you, Cordelia, on what we believe has been an extraordinarily successful lecture series and we're looking forward to hearing your lecture. Finally, on behalf of the Australian Technology Network, WexDev, and Curtin University, I thank our sponsor, the Department of Communities, for their continued support and involvement in these lectures. So, we greatly appreciate the ongoing support. >> Good afternoon everyone, and a warm welcome to all of you. It is a pleasure to be here today to introduce and welcome our guest speaker. The state government, through my Department for Communities, is very proud to partner with Curtin University in this very important lecture series. I'm very pleased that we are able to contribute to the debate on gender equity and to drive it forward with new information and ideas. The proceeds of this event will contribute to the Clare Burton Memorial Scholarship Fund which does support post-graduate research into gender equity. Doctor Clare Burton was a leader in driving forward that gender equity debate. Her work in the 1980s and '90s put equal pay on the industrial relations agenda, and her book, Redefining Merit, became the equal opportunities practitioners bible. Given Clare's legacy as a leading researcher, academic consultant, author on gender equity. It is fitting that we are about to hear from another woman who is also a leader in her field. Today we welcome Doctor Cordelia Fine to the stage. Doctor Fine has also undertaken to understand how and why gender inequality exists and I'm sure I could tell her a few things myself. [Laughter] Doctor Fine is a psychologist and neuroscientist whose writing has drawn accolades from reviewers and her academic peers around the globe. She has traveled the world presenting her findings at research conferences and her popular books on neuroscience have been printed and reprinted across the world. What makes Doctor Fine's work distinctive is a level of clarity and humour she brings to a very complex subject. She is an expert translator and is able to make the mess of neuroscience studies and reports understandable for us all, even me. In her latest book, Delusions of Gender, Doctor Fine sets out to challenge and disprove many of the scientific arguments for gender as hardwired quality. We would not have a better guide for a subject that is long overdue for discussion. Please join me in welcoming Doctor Fine to the stage to deliver her lecture entitled, How the New Neurosexism Helps Sustain the Status Quo. Thank you. [Audience Applause] >> Thank you very much for these wonderful introductions, especially the beautiful one from Ingrid and for the wonderful gift which I will treasure. Thank you for that. And thank you all for coming this afternoon. It's a great honour to be here. I'd like to thank the hosts for this event and also express my thanks to Anna Rita [Assumed Spelling], who organised me extremely efficiently over the course of the two week lecture series. Everything that I've read and heard about Clare Burton makes it clear that she was a woman who cared deeply and passionately about both social justice and rigorous scholarship and whose intellectual legacy includes not just her own work, but that of everyone whose thinking and commitments her work continues to influence and inspire. In her eulogy for Clare Burton, Quentin Bryce described marvelling at, to quote, the thoroughness of the research, the analysis of her data, the power of her argument, the strength of her reasoning, the persuasion of her language, the breadth of her references, the detail of her bibliography, the courage of her conviction, compassion and her faith. So it is a very great honour to be giving the Clare Burton Memorial Lecture 2011. Not least because the virtues she exemplified are those that are inspirational to everyone whose work touches on the question of sex equality and on this I can offer myself as a personal example. The topic of the role of sexist science in perpetuating sex and equality is one that I stumbled into quite accidentally only a few years ago. Originally, my one and only target in my book, Delusions of Gender, were the popularisers who exaggerate, misrepresent and sometimes even fabricate facts about sex differences in the brain and what they supposedly mean for how and why males and females think, feel and behave differently. But the pleasant veil of ignorance soon fell and I came to realise that neurological explanations and justifications for the status quo are as old as brain science itself and are continuously renewed. No sooner has one hypothesis, long past its "best by" date, finally been hurled onto the scrap heap of sexist science, then another one is there to take its place. As the sociologist Hillary Rose points out, for feminists, this means that every generation has to take up a fight that is both new and old. And it is, I discovered, rather alarming to find yourself taking up such a fight when you have only just realised that you are standing in the middle of a battleground. And it is impossible for me to overstate the contribution of the work of feminist scholars, the heroes in my own field, such as Anne Fausto-Sterling, Ruth Bleier and Australia's own Lesley Rogers and enabling a fresh battalion of researchers to tackle this latest fight in the longest war. The intellectual power and rigour of their arguments, mercilessly exposing the holes in claims that, ironically, female brains are better suited to sympathy than science, were so prescient that they remain relevant decades later. But even more than this, these researchers have shown incredible dedication to the tedious and frustrating task of cleaning up the sludge of sloppy sexist neurobiology. These qualities of rigour and dedication are of extraordinary value to anyone unfortunate enough to be dissatisfied with the status quo, to be sometimes angry, sometimes despairing, but above all, willing to take up the feminist chisel that is passed on through the generations and do their bit to chip away at the complex interacting and multi-level factors that stand in the way of a better and fairer society. The task is enormous, but progress comes. And it is people like Clare Burton to whom we owe the greatest gratitude. Her work, to quote Bryce again, has meant that doors have been opened wide and paths made smoother for all of us. We find in her life's work a source of courage, support and inspiration. I didn't know Clare Burton, but I certainly know what precious gifts, both personal and intellectual, these are for feminists and that is why I am truly honoured to be part of this tradition to celebrate her work and to be delivering this year's Clare Burton Memorial Lecture. [ Pause ] Just -- before I get on to the new neurosexism, a brief spiel about the old neurosexism. In 1915, in the opinion pages of the New York Times, the noted neurologist, Doctor Charles Dana offered his professional insights into the controversial topic of votes for women. Doctor Dana expressed the following concern. If women achieve the feministic ideal and live as men do, they would incur the risk of 25% more insanity than they have now. [Audience Laughter] So where exactly in the female nervous system did the problem lie? Well, Doctor Dana pointed out that the upper half of the spinal cord that controls the pelvis and limbs is larger in women, the implications for women's suffrage. To Doctor Dana, and I think the key to understanding his chain of reasoning here may lie in the word pelvis, this suggests that, to quote, women's efficiency lies in a special field and not that of political initiative. It seems laughable now, but a contemporary influential and widely disseminated scientific hypothesis tells much the same story in different words, that males are designed to advance civilisation, females to nurture it. According to this account, sex differences and prenatal hormone levels, in particular testosterone, have permanent effects on the brain that hardwire or predispose male brains on average to understand the world and female brains to understand people. In this lecture, I'm going to track the journey of the new neurosexism as it makes its way from scanner to sound bite to society. And society is where the journey not just ends, but begins, a society in which men and women still tend to be segregated, not just horizontally in terms of pink and blue, occupations and roles, but also vertically with decreasing numbers of women the higher up any ladder you go. Why is this still the case in our apparently egalitarian 21st century society? Is it a status quo in which politics, wealth, business, art, science and technology lie predominantly in the hands of men to be blamed entirely on sexism and socialisation? Or is sex inequality, to some extent, natural, inevitable and immutable, set in the womb and fixed in our brains? Your implicit assumptions about the answer to this question or the answer you choose to assume until it's proven wrong has political implications. And if you are a neuroscientist working in the area of sex differences, these assumptions and political values creep into research. Now realise that to particular sections of the academic community, when I make this kind of statement, they tend to politely look at their watches and stifle yawns, but to me, coming from a background in comparative neuroscience, this was a horrible shock to realise that science wasn't quite as objective as I had assumed and frankly I'm still recovering from this awful insight. Neurosciences have three important obstacles to deal with when it comes to sex differences in the brain. The first is a problem of spurious or chance results. The second is the problem of understanding what, if anything, a sex difference in the brain actually means for thinking, feeling or behaviour. And the third is the changeable nature of both brains and minds. And how neuroscientists tackle these three issues reveals a great deal about implicit beliefs and values around sex differences. So the first issue is spurious results. In behavioural science, researchers generally declare a difference between two groups as statistically significant if there is a 1 in 20 probability or less that it's just due to chance. Now while false positive or spurious results are a danger in any area of research, it has long been appreciated that this is an especially important problem for research into sex differences and this is because as neuroendocrinologist, Melissa Hines, neatly summarised it, sex is, to quote, easily assessed, routinely evaluated and not always reported. Because it is more interesting to find a difference than to find no difference, the 19 failures to observe a difference between men and women go unreported whereas the 1 in 20 finding of a difference is likely to be published. The possibility of spurious results in sex differences is certainly not something that functional neuroimages should ignore. Although the images produced by this technology look like objective pictures of neural activity, that are busy here or quiet there, these blots of colour actually represent patterns of statistical significance, the end point of extremely complex and not entirely agreed upon methods of data processing and statistical analysis. As cognitive neuroscientist, Geoffrey Aguirre, has put it, these pretty pictures hide the sausage factory. So there is plenty of scope for spurious results. Take, for example, the functional neuroimaging study published in the prestigious journal, Nature, in 1995 by a team from Yale University. The researchers scanned 19 men and 19 women while they performed three different language tasks. For two of the three tasks, there were no sex differences in brain activity, but for the third task, phonological processing of what words sound like, brain activity in the language areas tended to be greater on the left side than the right side in men, but distributed more equally in women. Now these findings spoke to a long-standing, but very controversial, claim that the male brain is more lateralised for language and other tasks than the female brain. That is that males tend to process information within one hemisphere to be more compartmentalised, whereas the female brain tends to recruit both sides of the brain to be more interconnected. But in what way does the study speak to this hypothesis, for or against? As you recall that in two out of the three tasks, the male-female activity was indistinguishable. And so as neuroscientist Anneliese Kaiser and colleagues pointed out, the choice of the authors to emphasise the single finding of difference over the two findings of similarity in their article title and the article itself, was neither scientifically inevitable nor politically neutral. I'm sorry, this doesn't make me cry, I'm just about to cough. [Audience Laughing] I cry about it in private. [Audience Laughing] Now this study has had massive impact and has been cited over 600 times in the scientific literature. But was this one finding of difference even real and reliable? In 2004 and then again in 2008, the neuropsychiatrist, Ara Summer, and her colleagues, performed what's called a metro analysis in which all the available neuroimaging studies with information about sex differences in language lateralisation's, this is whether it was reported or just information that researchers had that they hadn't published, were pulled together, fielding a sample size in the 2008 metro analysis of more than 2,000 participants. In their conclusion, in both 2004 and 2008, was that there were no sex differences in language lateralisation. [Coughing] Excuse me. A closely related claim is that the corpus callosum, which is a thick band of neurones that connect the two hemispheres of the brain, is larger in females. And supposedly, this oversized corpus callosum helps along the more interconnected collaborative style of the female brain. But again, a large metro analytic study published in 1997 found no support for this idea. [ Pause ] And yet this idea of a compartmentalised male brain and an interconnected female brain persists. In fact, I was recently speaking at a conference for marketing researchers and the gentleman speaking before me stood up and very confidently proclaimed that the corpus callosum was 300% larger in women and that's why they talked so much or something. Well, I sat there with my arms folded looking very, very, very cross, I'm sure. So in an article published earlier this year exposing this pseudoscience behind the promotion of single sex education, the neuroscientist, Lise Eliot, complained that popular writers, by failing to keep up with the empirical situation and cherry picking the positive findings like the Yale study, are perpetuating neuromyths. So here, for example, are these very claims in a 2005 opinion piece, again in the New York Times. The author wrote, in women, the connective tissue that allows communication between the two hemispheres of the brain tends to be thicker, perhaps facilitating interchange. This may explain why one study from Yale found that when performing language tasks, women are likely to activate both hemispheres, whereas males, on average, activate only the left hemisphere. Now this information about the supposedly different brains of men and women was offered in the context of an article defending the suggestion made by Lawrence Summers while President of Harvard University that women might be, on average, intrinsically less capable of very high level mathematical and scientific thinking. Though the author was not a popular writer but a distinguished professor of psychology at Cambridge University, and he's certainly not alone in perpetuating neuromyths. In 2009 and 2010, five to six years after Summer and colleagues' first metro analysis, the Yale study was cited more than 50 times. When I looked at how the Yale study was cited in each article, I found that only 19% of citing authors referred to one or other metro analysis accurately and in a way that indicated that a large metro analytic study might trump the small Yale one. Worse, just over half of all citing articles cited the Yale study without mentioning the existence of any contradictory data whatsoever. I share Eliot's frustration and fully endorse her criticism of popular writers, but clearly the scientific community needs to lead by example. A second important lesson from the Yale study is you would think for neuroscientists to try to avoid offering up too many cherries for popular writers to pick in the first place, and it turns a false positive results. Yet again and again, when I was reading popular books about gender, following up their claims would take me to functional neuroimaging studies with extremely modest sample sizes. But were these just isolated cases? I recently looked at the sample sizes of all functional neuroimaging studies published in 2009 and 2010 that had sex differences as their primary focus so they were mentioned in the title. Of these 31 studies, about 60% had fewer men and women than the Yale study. Some studies also subdivided their groups by, for example, clinical status. Nearly 80% of studies had fewer than 20 men and women in each of their groups of interest. Excluding the studies that were also interested in age affects, for which you would reasonably expect a larger sample size, 86% of studies had a sample size at least as inadequate as the Yale study. Of course it is not the intention of researchers to litter the neuroscience literature with spurious findings of sex differences, but if it were their intention, this would be an extremely good way of going about it. [ Pause ] The second difficult issue to be dealt with by neuroscientists is this. Even if the male brain were more compartmentalised and the female brain more interconnected, what difference, if any, would it make for how males and females think, feel or behave? In the High Impact Journal Science, Cambridge psychologist, Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues suggested that the more compartmentalised style of the male brain may be better at understanding systems, such as legal systems, scientific systems, business systems, plumbing systems, because, to quote, systemising involves a narrow, attentional focus to local information in order to understand each part of a system. They then suggest that the more interconnected style of the female brain may be better at empathising because empathising involves integrating a lot of different kinds of information in a way that, apparently, understanding systems does not. In a similar way, neuroscientists, Ruben and Raquel Gur, suggest in the book, Why Aren't There More Women in Science?, that the male brain might be better suited to research disciplines that, to quote, require detailed scrutiny of narrowly characterised processes such as physics and maths, while the female brain may be better for, to quote, disciplines that require integration. Unfortunately, this is completely the wrong way of thinking about the relationship between the brain and the mind. As philosopher of science, Ian Gold, has said, may as well say harrier body, so fuzzier thinker [Audience Laughing] or that human beings are capable of fixing fuses because the brain uses electricity. If you consider what's involved in zooming in your attention on say a small aspect of the system of photosynthesis, is it really the case that only a little bit of the brain gets involved because only a local detail is being processed or is there activity all over the brain that is extracting information that is suppressed, the inner voice formulates ideas and poses questions, visual stimuli process, emotion is imagined and information is retrieved from memory. In truth, if it were suddenly decided that it was actually the male brain that is more interconnected, and believe me, there are such examples of these kinds of flip flops in the neuroscientific history, neuroscientists can come up with no less plausible explanations for why actually it is this that makes them better at solving difficult problems and physics. The fact is, we are still at the very beginning of our journey of understanding how the neural circuits of the brain enable our mental processes. We just don't really know what it means psychologically for the amygdala to be a little bit on the large size or for the anterior singular to activate a bit more in a particular task. And so, to quote neurobiologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, despite the many recent insights of brain research, this organ remains a vast unknown, a perfect medium on which to project even unwittingly, assumptions about gender. And when scientists project assumptions onto supposed sex differences in the brain, they license others to do the same, a task that popularisers take on with gusto, confidence and enviable levels of imagination. Give them a concept like greater male lateralisation, and they take it and they run. Popular child psychologist, Steve Biddle, for example in his book, Raising Boys, claims that greater male lateralisation has enormous ramifications such as for boys mathematical skills, where being lopsided is good, and ability to talk about feelings, where being lopsided is bad. Any parent reading the book who also has a daughter will, of course, not have too much difficulty working out what this supposedly means for her. The prolific author, Michael Gurian, becomes impressively quantitative on the topic, explaining in an educational journal that the female corpus callosum, to quote, is up to 20% larger than in males, giving girls better cross-talk between the hemispheres of the brain and that, to quote, because boys' brains have more cortical areas dedicated to spatial mechanical functioning, males use, on average, half the brain space that females use for verbal and motor functioning. Meanwhile, Allan and Barbara Pease, authors of, Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps, take the lateralisation hypothesis to its natural extreme by claiming that the female brain is so unspecialised for spatial processing that it doesn't even have a specific area of spatial ability; thus, neatly furnishing an answer to the second part of the title of their book. In leadership in the sexes, we learn that female managers are more intuitive and less logical in their problem solving, thanks, perhaps, to the larger female corpus callosum and in the ultimate neural justification of male inconsiderateness, John Gray of Mars and Venus, Fame and Fortune, informs us that the more compartmentalised male brain explains why he can never remember to buy milk. [Audience Laughing] Clearly, scientists are not responsible for these ludicrous exaggerations and claims, but it is usually possible to identify the seeds of scientific speculation from which these monstrous fictions grow. [ Pause ] The third issue for neuroscientists to deal with in their research is the malleability of both brains and minds. Our brains are the ever-changing product of a complex and dynamic interaction between brains, genes, hormones and the environment, the experiences we encounter. And sex differences in thinking, feeling or behaviour, are not fixed and eternal, but change across historical period, culture, socioeconomic status and so on, and even in response to subtle changes in a social situation from moment to moment. What this means is that even if you find a reliable sex difference in the brain in a particular group at a particular time and you link it convincingly to a difference in behaviour, which by the way has yet to be achieved, if you only take this one snapshot, you're left knowing nothing about how that difference came about or what might reduce it, increase it, or make it disappear all together. Yet in 2009 and 2010, how many functional neuroimaging studies went beyond a snapshot approach to investigate the effects of gender experience, say, or demographic factors or social queues on sex differences in the brain? None. So certainly, neuroscientists can and should criticise the many popular writers who mistakenly think that in the brain equals innate. But while the snapshot approach doesn't logically imply the idea of fixed and eternal differences between male and female brains, it also does nothing to challenge it or to illuminate other possibilities. If the research literature were full of studies investigating the malleability of neurological sex differences, would popular writers brandish the term hardwired around quite so freely? It's worth explicitly saying at this point, that there is certainly excellent, thoughtful and cautious work in this area, but the overall picture of the neuroscientific investigation of sex differences is, in my view, concerning. And while there's no time for me to go into it here, it's simply not possible to tear down the entire scientific patriarchy in just 45 minutes, although much more of this tearing down is available in my book [Audience Laughing]. It is a similar story for research supposedly showing the effects of sex differences in foetal testosterone levels on gender stereotypical abilities and interests. So, here again, are poor methodologies, untested assumptions, mere lip service paid to the role of experience and development and prematurely confident conclusions. What does it say about political values that we seem to care so little about getting it right in the science? And we can ask the same question about the readiness with which schools, businesses and spouses open their doors to anyone with a nice picture of a brain and a familiar gender stereotype. And what is a growing educational trend, both in Australia and overseas, boys and girls are being segregated in schools because of supposed hardwired sex differences in the brain. This small neuroimaging study of virtual maze navigation, for example, which had a participant pool of just 12 men and 12 women, fewer, in other words, than the Yale study, has taken on educational implications in the eyes of some self-anointed experts. These ideas are then picked up by a number of other self-anointed experts. Supposedly the findings show that while boys find numbers intrinsically interesting, girls need to have maths put in context. Now these neuroimaging studies -- these neuroimaging findings from this particular study, even if it was actually anything to do with mathematics, which it wasn't, and even if they were reliable, which they almost certainly aren't, show nothing of the sort. Neuroscientists would not even know where in the brain to look for intrinsic interest in numbers. But nonetheless, brain data like these are being translated into educational practice. As an age journalist described what's going on at a school near me in Melbourne, because of, to quote, natural differences in brain function between boys and girls, teaching boys math was more about hands-on practice, drawing, doing the exercise. But in a class with girls, the middle school principal discusses the issues for a full 10 minutes at the start of a class while the graph is put into the context of a relationship between two people. In other words, boys are getting on with maths while girls are being amused with stories of romances between stolid Mr. X axis and the flighty Miss Y. [Audience Laughing] And educators are listening. Last year, the head master of Eaton College told a Sunday Times journalist that boys are, to quote, hardwired differently from girls and that he would like to see ministers looking at the neuroscience and getting teachers to use it in state schools. [ Pause ] In the business world, employers are being told to both appreciate and make allowances for the innate qualities of male and female brains. For example, this book targeted to business leaders states that, quote, when the male brain becomes angry, the swelling of the amygdala often leads to a new closure of a lot of a man's verbal circuits. [Audience Laughing] Despite the fact that the swelling of a brain region generally calls for a neurosurgeon, rather than the conflict resolution gender tools offered in the book, the authors go on to suggest that this quirk with the amygdala implies that women, to quote, rethink their expectations of their male colleagues behaviour during conflict. Don't, in other words, expect them to be able to calmly talk about it. And business leaders are listening. The gender science presented in this book, for example, has apparently been used by IBM, Nissan, PWC, Deloitte, and other major companies. [ Pause ] And of course, let's not forget the important rather neuroscience in love and relationships. In the introduction to his book, What Could He Be Thinking?, a question I asked myself many times of the author while reading it, [Audience Laughing] Gurian describes the epiphany he shared with his wife, Gail, on seeing MRI and Pet Scans of male and female brains at work, to quote, I said, we thought we knew a lot about each other, but maybe we haven't known enough. Gail said, there really is such thing as a male brain. It's hard to argue with an MRI. That's true, it is. We realised that our communication, our support of each other and our understanding of our relationship were just beginning after six years of marriage. When Gurian described information from neurosciences, marriage saving, I can't help but wonder whether it was the neurobiological evidence supposedly saying the male brain isn't very well suited to seeing dust that really saved the day. [Audience Laughing] And, leaders of the third wave feminist movement are taking notes. In an opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald, Naomi Wolf used the word "insights" to describe Gurians neurotosh and described an entirely inappropriately respectful fashion Gurian's suggestion that women accept the biological differences that make men less capable of observing a pile of laundry. [ Pause ] And women's brains, the neuropsychiatrist, Louann Brizendine, has drawn on neuroscience to set a new and demanding standard for emotional care-taking in women. She describes the female brain as, to quote, a high performance emotion machine geared to tracking moment by moment the non-verbal signals at the innermost feelings of others. In fact, so skilled are women at this task that the female characters in the book know what their husbands are thinking before they even think it. Fact checking, however, revealed that the idea of a female brain wired to empathise in a way that the male brain is not, is based on somewhat shaky, empirical grounds. A study of dead brains, for instance, where empathising abilities tend to be at baseline, [Audience Laughing], a study that included only women, studies that did not test for sex differences, and personal communication with a neuroscientist that, when I contacted her, transpired to have never taken place. And readers are reading this book, was a New York Times bestseller, and I would just like to note that my book [Whispering] was not. [ Audience Laughing ] I find the current situation concerning. It is not that I think that the neuroscientific investigation of sex differences is intrinsically problematic. My argument is not that it should not be done at all or that it should not be open for discussion and debate. But suppose scientists were publishing unreliable reports of differences between black brains and white brains and speculating prematurely on their innate basis on psychological implications. Suppose media outlets were hyping up these reports and disseminating popular claims without even basic fact checking. Suppose opinion writers were suggesting that inequality is therefore natural and inevitable. Suppose educational speakers were promoting racially segregated classrooms and corporate consultants were offering training packages promising to build on the different hardwired strengths of black and white employees. Would we be comfortable with that situation? This is the state of affairs we are currently in with the guise of sex differences. And these scientific and pseudoscientific ideas surely affect us. As AJ Herschel put it, a theory about the stars never becomes a part of the being of the stars. A theory about man enters his consciousness, determines his self understanding and modifies his very existence. Our minds are exquisitely socially attuned and surprisingly sensitive to gender stereotypes. What social psychologists find is that when gender fades into the psychological background, many women's behaviour becomes remarkably similar, even in areas where traditionally the sexes behave or perform differently. But when the environment makes gender salient, even very subtly, there's a ripple effect on the mind. Our thinking, our behaviour, the way we perceive others and even the way we perceive our own selves, what we're good at, what we're interested in, becomes more consistent with gender stereotypes. There are many demonstrations of this and I'm going to give you two examples. The first is of that quintessential female skill, empathising, because it turns out the ability to stalk the private feelings of others, like terrified prey, is surprisingly sensitive to social queues. The psychologist, William Ickes and his colleagues has developed what is, I think, the best measure of empathic accuracy. Rather than just handing people a questionnaire that asks them whether they can tell whether people want to enter conversations, for example, where women outscore men, they actually test real behaviour and ability. It assesses people's ability to guess what an interaction partner was thinking and feeling during a natural, spontaneous, social interaction. You might expect men to struggle with such a demanding task, but they don't. In the first seven studies using this test, whether it involved opposite sex partners, heterosexual dating partners, newlyweds or long-term spouses, men performed just as well as women. But then suddenly, in the next three studies, the women started to do better. In trying to understand why this is, they noticed that there had been a slight change in the form that the participants had to fill out. The new form asked participants to say, after each judgment of what the person had been thinking or feeling, also how accurate they thought they were. When this form was used, womanly intuition existed, and when the old form was used, it didn't. The researcher suggests that this small change reminded women that they should be empathic and that this increased their motivation on the task. The social context can also affect men's motivations and abilities in this area. So if you tell young men that socially sensitive men are more likely to pick up women, their performance improves. Pay them $2 for every correct answer or simply describe the test as one of more masculine sounding, complex information processing, rather than social skills, and the gender gap disappears. So what about cultural stereotypes about what men are good at? A very large body of research now shows that the widely known belief that men are better at maths interferes with women's mathematical ability, a phenomenon generally known as stereotype threat. Blow the cloud of stereotype threat away, for example, by reassuring women that on this particular test no gender differences are found or by making a social identity other than gender salient, and their mathematical ability, normally undermined, is unleashed. A recent metro analysis concluded that they performed better than you would expect from their test or course grades and they performed better than men with the same test or course grades. Even something as subtle as the suspicion that these kinds of beliefs enjoy a home in the minds of other people can influence our self perception and behaviour. Confident claims about male brains hardwired to understand the world and female brains hardwired to understand people reinforce these stereotypes, bring them legitimacy. Suddenly, we're no longer being old fashioned and sexist, we're being modern and scientific. But interestingly and disturbingly, given how careless the treatment of the topic of sex differences in the brain often is, it may be the spontaneous assumption that differences between the sexes are hardwired that gives gender stereotypes a lot of those psychological potency. As a few studies have now found, if you tell women there's a gender gap in maths and it's because of nature, it's for genetic reasons, and you see the usual stereotype threat on performance. But tell women instead, yes, there is a gender gap in performance, but it's to do with nature. It's to do with your experience or your effort, and performance improves. What this suggests is that it's not just the mere belief that there are sex differences and ability that interferes with women's ability, it's a belief that those differences are due to hardwiring, that they're natural, inevitable, and immutable. And in fact, exactly this way of thinking about gender, essentialist thinking, has been linked with other self-fulfilling psychological consequences. Gender essentialists tend to see themselves in more gender stereotypical ways. They tend to engage less with behaviour more typical of the other sex and they tend to accentuate gender differences. Gender essentialist thinking also helps people feel more relaxed about the status quo. So, people showing scientific claims that males and females are hardwired to be different, compared with people told that these ideas are under scientific debate, express more confidence that society treats women fairly and less confidence that the status quo is likely to change. And men were more supportive of sex discrimination in the workplace after reading such material. They agreed more with statements such as, if I had worked in a company where my manager preferred hiring men to women, I would privately support him. And if I were a manager in a company myself, I would believe that more often than not, promoting men is a better investment in the future of the company than promoting women. As University of Melbourne Psychologist, Nick Hazlam, has summarised it, essentialism deepens social divides, making differences appear large, unbridgeable, inevitable, unchangeable and ordained by nature. To me, this doesn't sound like very good news for sex equality. So what can we do? Early this year I spoke at the Marxism Conference in Melbourne, where my audience strongly and confidently recommended the downfall of capitalism as the only truly effective solution to sex inequality. At the Melbourne Business School, however, we are working on a more modest Plan B. [Audience Laughing] Through the Centre for Equitable Leadership, with the support of five major industry partners, Anzet, WestPac, Cores Chamber, Westcott Law, Santos and new South Wales Police, we're starting to research how what you think about difference makes a difference in the workplace. How does it affect the way you behave? The way you perceive yourself and colleagues? The structure of your social networks? When it comes to the subtle, unintended biases against women, especially mothers that are often seen in organisational decision making, are these increased in people who take a gender essentialist perspective? Does it make employees more vulnerable to stereotype threat, less likely to take up a traditionally male role and if so, can we bring about positive lasting effects by challenging the notion of hardwired sex differences in the brain? But we also have to consider the sources of these beliefs including neuroscience itself. And I have to admit that I became quite despondent while I was writing the book. So as I mentioned, I began it in a spirit of optimism and naivety and it took me a while to realise that I was basically writing a book that has been written many times before in the past and will have to be written again many times in the future. And I also realised that to critique sexist science is to chip away only one small part of all that sustains sex inequality. But, it is something, and science enjoys great authority in our society. And I hope that the scientific community will start to pay attention to what I see as a moral responsibility to stop making the same mistakes of the past. It is not my argument that there is no natural limit to sex equality. Perhaps there is. But currently, the science does not justify that door being slammed in our faces. Hypothesis about differences between male and female brains and the kinds of things that they are good at and interested in are built on spurious results, shoddy methodologies, untested assumptions and premature conclusions and a profound under appreciation of the deep breach of cultural patterns, beliefs and expectations into our minds. [ Pause ] Both science and society have advanced a great deal since the New York Times found space for the notion that the idiosyncrasies of the female spinal cord render women likely to be driven over the edge by the sheer heady excitement and responsibility of marking an x on a ballot form. We have come such a long way, but neurosexism is slowing us down. It's time to either start handling the topic of sex and brains with the care and the caution that it deserves or to just put the brain down and step away. Thank you. [ Audience Applause ] >> For those of you who have read some of the reviews of Cordelia's latest book, I'm sure what have been described in those reviews that you'll read out resonates very much with you. So words such as the delightful, powerful, clear and scholarly, takes no hostages, sparkles with wit, passion and scholarship, truly startling, thoughtful and funny, irreverent, important. I think we've all experienced that today. Cordelia, can I assure you that I have got a queue in my household for my daughter who is just finishing her year 12 exams actually wants to be a neuroscientist and my husband and son who are queuing up to read the book. We hadn't had such a queue since Harry Potter came out so maybe that's an indication that you could be on the way to maybe not get onto the best seller there, but that's encouraging. It's been really great and given us a lot of food for thought. Very much thank you. Appreciate that. I've got a small sign of our appreciation which I will give to you. >> Thank you very, very much. >> And I guess speaking as the Department of Communities, we really value the work that we've done with Curtin University over the years for this lecture series and we hope to continue it into the future and my thanks very much to the staff across Curtin and my own department of Communities staff who have helped pull together today. Thank you very much. [Audience Applause] [ Music ]