Venten strijken niet (Overleven)
Nature nurture debat. We gaan voornamelijk kijken naar de verschillen tussen jongens en meisjes.
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http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x34tkn_venten-strijken-niet-deel-2Deel 3
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x350sv_venten-strijken-niet-deel-3With an authoritatively scientific-sounding commentary done by the actor Tim Pigott-Smith, Why men don’t
iron did nod to the social side of human development. But otherwise it was emphatic: men were fond of
taking risks because of their brain wiring and brain chemistry. Similarly, brains were the reason why women
were, on average, weaker than men in the solution of problems in spatial perception and object manipulation.
Women’s brains used both useful visual processes and redundant verbal ones to solve such problems. Men
used just visual processes, and were thus just better equipped by nature to deal with visual problems.
Meanwhile biology played a role in explaining why, on average, men found language, along with social skills
– and what Why men don’t iron called ‘mothering’ – hard to learn. 104 Yet while parental dressing, holding
and talking to newly born children differed by the sex of the parent, that itself had little moment. Even when
they were fresh out of the womb, girl babies were keener than boys on faces (boys preferred objects), and
were more sensitive to pain. In this sense, nature predated social influences.
Why men don’t iron scrutinised the home of Lionel and Amanda Smith, a middle class family in which toy
guns and swords were forbidden, but in which dolls for girls, and similarly stereotyped toys for boys, won out
all the same. It did a play-at-school experiment with young boys that showed they had short attention-spans,
were physically active, competitive and prone to issue commands to each other – and that little girls
preferred paints, books and cooperation. University of East London psychology professor Ernie Govier
argued that differences between the sexes in aggression and its close cousin, competition, were ‘heavily
biologically influenced’. 105
In a special test of rivalry in adult game-playing, done with basketball teams, Why men don’t iron arranged
for Alan Booth at Pennsylvania State University to measure hormones in human saliva 24 hrs before, just
before and just after games. Booth found that men experienced a 25 per cent increase just before the game,
but that there was no anticipatory rise in women teams. Male winners’ testosterone continued to go up; male
losers dropped by 30 per cent. By contrast, women losers could actually have higher levels of testosterone
after a game than before it, and the mood of women losers could also be good… if they had played well.
Don’t iron was made six years before Million dollar baby, Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning account of boxing
and the female sex. Yet if scientists, the programme suggested, didn’t know what testosterone does in the
brain, they did know that it improves concentration, coordination, elation and aggression – and more in men
than in women. After all, while men’s testosterone came mainly from testes, women’s came mainly from
adrenal glands, which also produced the stress hormone, cortisol. For women, therefore, any drive to
compete would naturally also be linked to anxiety. Result: all but one of the world’s top 100 players of chess,
who also reported surges of testosterone around matches, were men. Bad news, this, for women gamers!
The Moirs made much of work done by University of California at Los Angeles neuroendocrinologist and
professor Roger Gorski. His landmark studies in the 1970s among baby rats had shown that exposure to
testosterone and similar hormones gave rise to male behaviour – fucking, genital licking, male learning
strategies and, of course, aggression. Conversely, the absence of testosterone gave rise to female kinds of
behaviour. In rats, females subjected to male hormones had a ‘male’ brain. Hormones were mainly
responsible for brain structure and behaviour in rats; and whatever the differences between rats and human
beings, both, Gorski told the Moirs’ television viewers, were mammals, so ‘we assume it [the theory that sex
difference originates in hormones] applies to the human being’.
Rats neither draw on the right side of the brain, nor do they talk or write. Yet, warming to its hormonal thesis,
Why men don’t iron went on to chronicle the story of Melissa Cull, one of quite a number of female sufferers
of congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). As a female foetus, Cull had been exposed to male-typical levels of
hormones. As a child, she had preferred Hasbro’s Action Man toy to dolls. She had extraordinary spatial
skills. At school, she revelled in design. In adulthood, her hobby was model railways; her job, that of… a
quality engineer.
104 Using a functional magnetic resonance scanner at Yale University, Bennett Shaywitz and Sally Shaywitz, MDs, showed that, for language, men
activated the left side of the brain, but women activated both. See Shaywitz, B. et al. 16 February 1995. ‘Sex differences in the functional organization of the
brain for language’. Nature. 373: pp607-609.
105 For a list of Govier’s latest publications, go to
www.uel.ac.uk/psychology/research/index.htm#Ernie_Govier.
© James Woudhuysen Computer games and sex difference page 20
Pre-natal levels of testosterone (PNT), then, could make girls gain a boyish competence in spatial matters.
And that, Why men don’t iron suggested, was the identifiable exception to a general rule. In occupational
segregation, men worked with machines, and women worked in nursing and childcare because of
differences, between the sexes, in the way the brain works.
It was only PNT that had turned a woman named Carolina Bartram into a competent adult construction
engineer, and Simon Green, a rugby player, into a male nurse. Only PNT could account for why Simon, who
had left school with fewer qualifications than Carolina, could generate 34 synonyms from six words in three
minutes – double her score.
Govier confirmed it. The sex of your brain is what matters when you come to choose the type of job you do.
Brain organisation played an important part in female job selection. The continuing absence of women from
UK engineering was, Why men don’t iron said, the fault of the structure, hormones, and neurological rewards
surrounding the brain.
So: Why men don’t iron in 1998 and The secrets of the sexes in 2005 have had strong implications for the
answer to Q2. Occupational segregation in computer games, as in the rest of IT, would, in the perspective of
these two programmes, have nothing to do with discrimination, and everything to do with biology (Q1). In
other words:
• if you are a normal woman or also a male nurse, but not if you are that odd fish, a female architect,
you’re on average likely to do well in programming those few computer games involving language – such
as Wheel of Fortune, Writer’s Block and BookWorm Deluxe
• since, on average, women are neurologically disadvantaged from men in visual problems, their brains
won’t, on average, be adept at programming those many computer games that involve spatial perception
and manipulation – games such as Half-life, Halo and Unreal
• women in the games industry may fail to get promoted above the ‘glass ceiling’ because, biologically,
they don’t have enough of the spirit of aggression and competition to get ahead.
From 2000 onward, there has been a veritable publishing bonanza around neurology. 106 However, some of
the hearing that the Why men don’t iron approach gained reflected the earlier rise of another field:
evolutionary psychology.
EP is separate from, yet often invoked alongside – and popularly confused with – neurology. But there is a
difference. In EP, experts try to apply the insights of evolutionary biology to guide research not on the
chemistry and electrical functioning of the brain, but on the practical behaviour of the mind – the mind of
men, and the mind of women. Moreover while neurology invokes the brain mechanisms of the present to
explain behaviour, EP tries to explain behaviour through the evolution of the distant past.
106 The George Washington University neuropsychiatrist Richard Restak has been especially prolific. His Secret life of the brain was the subject of a PBS
television series in the US: Restak, R. 2001. The secret life of the brain. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. See also Restak, R. 2001. Mozart's
brain and the fighter pilot: unleashing your brain's potential. New York: Harmony Books; Restak, R. 2003. The new brain: how the modern age is rewiring
your mind. New York: Rodale Books; Restak, R. 2004. Poe's heart and the mountain climber: explorations into our anxious brains and culture. New York:
Harmony Books. The new brain is an alarmist account of the effects of computer games, among other stimuli.