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Answer by Joyce Schenkein, Ph.D. in neuropsychology:
An early answer to this question was offered by Sigmund Freud in his statement that “anatomy is destiny.” His opinion was that all girls experience penis envy, whereby they endlessly feel cheated by nature. In contrast all boys undergo an Oedipal complex, whereby they sexually desire Mama and then live in constant fear that Papa discover their lust and castrate them. Furthermore, Freud postulated that boys must resolve their complex, ultimately by identifying with Papa (and thereby acquiring social values). Because girls do not go through this complex, Freud postulated that women were “amoral” (which means they should not be empowered to vote or hold political offices, etc).
Later Karen Horney tried to level the playing field for girls. She postulated that girls go through an Electra complex (love Daddy, fear Mommy), which leads to similar dynamics to boys. And finally others have pointed out that being able to bear a child actually tops having a penis. As a result, new imaginary terms emerged, such as “womb envy.”
Because of Freud’s belief that a male must identify with his father to masculinize, he explained homosexuality as a failure in this process. In other words, homosexuality was “caused” by family dynamics and therefore could be reversed by psychotherapy. Turns out not to be true. It is also not possible to reverse gender-related preferences with electric shock therapy or hormones in adulthood, as in the travesty regarding Alan Turing.
Eventually, Bronislaw Malinowski, who studied young males in the Trobriand Islands, failed to support Freud’s notion of the Oedipal complex.
Welcome to the scene, Margaret Mead. She appeared to dispel Freud’s ideas by identifying three tribal societies in which the male-female behaviors all differed (Arapesh, Mundugumor, and the Tchambuli). In one culture both men and women were gentle. In another both were aggressive. And in the third, roles were reversed so that men were vain and preened a great deal while women were the hunters.
Never mind that Mead’s work was not well-substantiated by others. Even her husband who traveled with her had no idea how she derived her conclusions. At the time, however, her monograph was a force in liberating women by suggesting they were shaped according to a cultural model. Thank you, Margaret Mead.
The new belief that culture was responsible for masculinization/feminization lead to a emergence of unisex clothing during the 1970s in the U.S., men wearing pink shirts, girls to wear pants, and a deliberate departure from buying dolls for girls only (and the emergence of G.I. Joesfor boys). Girls were also pictured on the covers of construction toys.
Regarding this hypothesized lack of brain-based gender bias, John Money further claimed that a baby can be raised to be either gender. Therefore, a child with ambiguous genitalia could be surgically altered and raised as whichever sex the parents/surgeon decided. But David Reimer fell victim to this thinking. Following a botched circumcision, David’s parents were advised to surgically alter him to be a girl, give him a girl’s name (Brenda), and withhold the truth. However, David suffered tremendously, always wanting to play the same games as his twin brother, to urinate facing the toilet etc. Eventually, he was told the truth. He elected to be surgically restored to a male body. The book As Nature Made Him by John Colapinto describes the enormous pain attendant in David’s life. Revisiting the children studied by Money, it became very clear Money altered his data and intimidated his subjects. The new conclusion is that any decision regarding a child’s gender must be made by the child.
Later studies by Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin found that males and females do differ. In all cultures, males are more aggressive than females. In IQ testing, women perform better on verbal tests while men are superior on spatial or performance test. (Note: This is a statistical difference between men and women. It applies to large populations only. The majority of the distributions that describe these traits overlap, which means in many areas, men and women are alike. Certainly, a given woman may be more spatially adept than a given man. And a given man may far exceed a given woman in verbal abilities.)
We are currently much more sophisticated about brain gender. We know that the presence of or absence of sensitivity to various hormones during fetal development has a profound effect upon gender related behavior and mating preferences.
Finally, Daphna Joel protests the unidimensional model of gender where bias can be measured along a single continuum. Instead, she points out that gender consists of many different components, such as parenting or nurturing behavior; cognitive styles; aggression; response to stress; or tendency toward depression, autism, learning disabilities, criminality. Many of these trait are independent of one another (have their own genetic bases), but they interact with gender and life experience. For example, in rats being conditioned to an eye-blink task, exposure to stress improves learning in male mice but hampers it in female mice. Her model would consider all these factors in deciding one’s male and female predilections. So a very female person would have more of the many female-type responses on a large variety of attributes, whereas a male would have the opposite bias. But males and females show much overlap.
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