Bad Gender Science alert

It's my birthday today and what a gift The Telegraph have sent! Two of my least favourite things wrapped up in one. Bad science being used to justify sexism!

Apparently, we're told, men need nights out with the lads. Not someone's opinion or the advice of their in-house agony aunt, no. This is SCIENCE, we're told.

The subtitle reads "Researchers in Germany found it was good for a man's health to be allowed time to bond with fellow males".

But read the article and they found nothing of the sort. They found it was good for a male Barbary macaque's health. They add "a type of ape which exhibits remarkably human-like social behaviour" so presumably it spends half the morning nursing a hangover while playing Angry Birds and then writing about how it "really needs to get more organised" on Facebook?

The tenuousness of the link is made even more apparent when they try to compare men "watching each other's backs" with Barbary macaques picking ticks and fleas off each other. Hmm, alerting your mate to someone looking at him aggressively in the queue for a kebab doesn't strike me as obviously analogous to combing his back hair for him if he can't reach.

The only reason to assume that what applies to Barbary macaques will also apply to humans would be if humans and macaques shared a common ancestor who also exhibited this behaviour. Not so.

Humans are much more closely related to bonobos. Do you know what bonobos do to relieve stress? They wank off members of their own family. Really they do. Who wants to write a piece in The Telegraph about the health benefits of familial mutual masturbation? No me either.

The reality is that the only reason this piece got published at all was because they know perfectly well that guys out there wanting to shirk other commitments and responsibilities and go out drinking will latch onto it. Well sorry, not fooled.

Look at the all-male groups in most pubs and clubs night after night. Look at the crowd at football matches across the country. Believe me, if all-male socialising was the key to male health you'd all be immortal by now! Instead your life expectancy is considerably shorter than ours.

I'd bet the exact opposite is true in humans - all male groups are likely to drink more, smoke more, get in more fights, eat more fast food, do more dangerous activities. I'd bet all-male socialising is linked to to poorer health in human men. But no-one's going to publish that in The Telegraph are they?

WOW, in every sense

Yesterday for International Day of the Girl I took part in a mentoring session on the London Eye with some teenage girls from Tower Hamlets. This was being organised by the Women of the World/WOW team at the South Bank Centre (in case you thought I had just hijacked the London Eye). And here's a lovely photo of the rainbow that showed up halfway through to remind us about the importance of gay rights or that God sometimes needs to drown people.

One of the conversations I had shocked me to the core. A thirteen year old girl told me that when she grows up she wants to be a physicist. Awesome, right? Then she asked me about GCSE choices. I said "do all the sciences". She explained that her school only lets a few students do all three sciences, and she doubted they'd pick her. So I suggested writing to her head teacher, talking to her science teachers, generally making a fuss, etc. At this point her teacher who was monitoring the mentoring stepped in and advised her to "pick which two sciences she liked best". The girl said physics and biology. The teacher advised dropping chemistry.

I jumped back in to the conversation and said if you want to be a physicist you need to do chemistry GCSE too. The girl said she wanted to do chemistry, but it was the science she found the hardest so they wouldn't let her do it.

Then I asked both of them, the girl and the teacher, what other GCSEs she would do. The teacher replied "everyone does English, everyone does Maths and everyone does R.E."!

A thirteen year old girl from a deprived inner city area who dreams of being a scientist is being forced to study religion instead of chemistry?

I am going to turn green and smash things.

New Pseudo-Scientist

Terrible article in this week's New Scientist about the royal wedding. The link is here but sadly you have to register which is a bit of a pain. Here, anyway, is my letter to them complaining about it:

I was intrigued when I saw [P36, Issue 2809] your coverage of the royal wedding and hoped to read something that explained the public and media excitement about a relationship between two people who most of us don't know at all. Sadly the article seemed to be distinctly lacking in science. Firstly author Geoffrey Miller claims "male brains will be sparked by Will's military titles", without offering any evidence of this. I happen to be married to a former military journalist but when I asked him what William's titles were he said "I dunno, something over the top that he doesn't deserve". He didn't even seem interested in finding out.

Then we are given the classic outdated theories about sex appeal. Will likes Kate because she's attractive (obviously) but also because of her sense of humour which indicates fertility. Speaking as a professional comedienne I can assure you than men who find my jokes funny are rarely overwhelmed by a pressing need to impregnate me. You might well argue however that it is pretty logical when committing to spending large amounts of time with someone to pick someone whose company you enjoy. Perhaps it's not evolutionary prerogative at work here but conscious common sense?

Then we hear about Kate's cunning in convincing William to marry her because of the benefits to her potential children. We seem to have forgotten that William's genes also stand to benefit from his commitment to the wellbeing of their children. The notion that men only make good fathers because women have lured and tricked them into doing so is an insult to the many great caring dads in Britain.

Of course the true agenda of the piece emerges about half way through. Apparently the media fail to give Kate the credit she deserves for bagging herself a future king. We are (allegedly) tripping over ourselves to praise Oprah, Meryl, Hillary and Nigella but not Kate. Has Miller bothered to open up a single page of the national press in the last three months? Articles praising Kate for every outfit she chooses, every comment she makes, every smile she throws at a waiting paparazzo take up page after page of coverage that could have been dedicated to a tsunami or human rights crisis. And the only coverage I can find of Nigella recently is a nasty article in the Daily Mail calling her fat (which surely ought to be a compliment for a chef, but clearly isn't intended as such).

And whose fault is this mythical lack of coverage of the royal bride-to-be's evolutionary man-bagging prowess? According to Miller - feminism. Yes those pesky equal rights campaigners. Can Miller give a single example of a feminist who has criticised Ms Middleton? Evidently not. I'll explain why: the pay gap in this country is wide and not closing, the latest round of government cuts are set to hurt women on an unprecedented scale, rape has a 6% conviction rate against reporting and two women a week are murdered in Britain by their male partners or ex-partners. We feminists have bigger fish to fry than attacking a (probably) lovely posh girl about to marry a (probably) lovely posh boy she met at college.

[I hope they publish it though probably they'll edit it down to the line "...feminism. Yes those pesky equal rights campaigners." and leave it at that!]

Review: Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine

Review of Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine.

Oh dear. Drain out the money-banks, you are going to need a lot of copies of this!

Stop me if you've heard this one before. You're chatting to a friend with kids and you mention being a feminist. They give you sage look that says "Hey I once had unprotected sex and now I'm an expert on humanity" and explain how despite the entirely gender-neutral upbringing their kids have had little Marlon Rambo and Rosie-Boobookins-Princess are just "hard-wired" to adopt traditional gender roles. Well great news, starting now you can respond by simply pushing this book into their hands, muttering "hang on in there" to the kids and walking away.

And while she's on the subject Fine also neatly does away with the raft of Men - Mars, Women - Snickers and Why Women Should Try Shutting Up And Following Orders-type books that seem to have become so utterly commonplace recently. Admittedly in debunking this nonscience she does have to go into a fair amount of heavy-going methodology but she does a careful job and keeps it humourous and interesting throughout.

And to top it off she also takes care of indirect unintentional discrimination. The manner in which people make subconscious sexist decisions and then justify them to themselves in non-sexist ways. "I'd hire him because he's more _________* than her" *insert any old rubbish here.

One side effect of the book has to be looking back through my own life at times when I've missed out on promotion or work I wanted and was well qualified for. Only a few weeks ago I was talking with someone who runs a high profile comedy show which I would be ideal for. I emailed my CV and demo reel over in advance and then in person suggested he should consider auditioning me for the show. He laughed like a drain. Like it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. And that's exactly it. If you asked him if he was sexist he'd be horrified and insist he wasn't but he doesn't regard me as a serious performer despite the fact that I'm undoubtedly better at it than most of the people (men) he does use. If I had a penis he might tell me he wasn't hiring right now but he wouldn't find it quite so hilarious.

So you should read this book as an eye-opener on your own life. You should also keep a couple of spare copies about your person for throwing at idiot parents and anyone who thinks the shortage of female Nobel prize winners is something to do with rotating three dimensional objects rather than raging sexism. Delusions of Gender is really important, much-needed and should be compulsory reading for parents, educators, employers and politicians. Well written and convincing. Just great.

Interesting Link Of The Day

If you've got 20 seconds to spare today - I thought this was interesting about the scale of the universe.

A Tale of Three Articles

I spent a lot of time on the bus yesterday and as I didn't have a book with me I picked up the free newspapers. I guess I should have known better. Three stories left me banging my head against the windows/hand rails/emergency exit door. Firstly the amazing case of the disappearing wife-killer...
Here we have a victim and a "cause" in the headline but no perpetrator. What happened to "man kills wife"? Or even "Wife-killer claims...". Phrasing it that way is step one on a slippery slope to victim-blaming. Also - is anyone else sensing that contrary to the spirit of the headline "not being a virgin" isn't actually a legitimate reason for murder? I know there are quote marks round it, but that IS the headline and that appears to be the reason for publishing the story - to let people know that for some at least that is a reasonable thing to do. But most importantly - there is a real story here, totally buried. The daughter of the couple concerned had asked the clinic where the murderer was being treated for depression to keep him in. And they refused, discharged him, and he went on to murder his wife and then commit suicide. The story should be about NHS provision of mental health care for people at risk. Instead it reads like a warning of retribution to women planning to marry in white!

Secondly - justification for the above behaviour from the animal world...You should be able to read the article by just clicking on it. Anyway it's about a probably rather interesting subject - the sex life of the cricket. Apparently scientists with too much time on their hands (presumably AIDS and cancer have already been cured) have discovered the male crickets smell out females who have mated less with other males and allocate more sperm to them. They're wrong (according to Mr Cru) when they say this is the first time a species has been discovered to sniff out and react to competitors sperm, but let's overlook that. The thing is the whole set up of the article seems to be saying that this applies to humans and justifies a social revulsion of promiscuous women.

The opening paragraph explains that human women are viewed as "sluts" if they sleep around, "whereas men doing the same are hailed as studs". This may be true in their strange out-of-date world but in mine women who sleep around are defiant feminist mavericks and men who sleep around are just assholes... Then the article explains "now it seems this type of chauvinism may serve an evolutionary purpose - in crickets anyway".

Except that (a) The actual report in no way suggests that the findings have any relevance to human reproductive strategies. (b) In terms of sperm distribution it would make sense for humans to have exactly the opposite of the cricket pattern. Human females can produce at most around one infant per year so for a woman with only one partner there is no great urgency to impregnation - one sperm will do the job and if the man is unsuccessful this month, he can try again next month. Whereas a woman with many partners is likely to be pregnant soon, so there is an incentive to provide as much sperm as possible as quickly as possible - so more frequent sex and more sperm each time. Mr Cru tells me he has read studies suggesting that this happens. (c) A biological reaction does not always come with a corresponding social reaction. Men may subconsciously seek out fertile women based on smell and hip shape but I've never found "I'm not on the pill and I don't use condoms" works as a chat-up line. Guys are not consciously trying to help their sperm out. And (d) So what! So what if men's sperm count were to react to the smell of other men's sperm? Does that justify treating promiscuous women as second class citizens? And why should women be judged on the basis of the reaction they engender in men? Lets measure women by who's the smartest and who's the best at singing, weight-lifting and playing the didgeridoo (not all at the same time)!

Thirdly - over in the London Paper. And this one makes me the angriest (those of a sensitive disposition please do not read on)...
The crime itself is so horrible, it's hard to discuss other aspects of it. A mentally disabled woman gang-raped by ten men, who then burned her with caustic soda. And by the way this was on page four - the front page was reserved for "Madonna Gets Divorced". The prosecutor - Rosina Cottage - who is supposed to be representing the interests of the victim is (apparently) saying the victim "may have been raped because she had recently slept with three men known to the gang". And the paper is copying that verbatim as though it were a reasonable thing to say. Now there is an issue already about how exactly a 16-year-old with a mental age of eight was able to give meaningful consent to the three men listed. And of course the other issue is how anyone could dare to imply that she brought the gang-rape or the agonising assault upon herself.

When are these awful sub-gutter press publications going to understand that a woman who chooses to have sex outside of marriage does not deserve scorn, hatred, gang-rape, serious assault or murder? When we see these sorts of attitudes in other parts of the world we react with quite justified disgust, but every day free copies of these hate-promoting, murder-and-rape-justifying newspapers are handed out to thousands of Londoners. Anyone want to go picket something? Let me know, I'm there!

Doing It Monkey-Style

A report on Yahoo says male monkeys "pay" for sex by grooming females (physically, not on the Internet, that is). It's being offered as evidence that prostitution has evolutionary roots. Now theres two little issues I have with this.

1. It's natural to shit in a ditch. Genocide is "natural" - chimps do it. Killing and eating your young is "natural" - polar bears in German zoos do it. Natural as defined by "an animal does it" or even "our primitive ancestors probably did it" has nothing to do with "it's a good idea" or "we should keep doing it". Which is what seems to be the author (of the piece and possibly the report)'s rather smug message.

2. How exactly is grooming parallel behaviour to paying? I could understand the implication if the male chimps gave the females food in exchange for sex. But surely grooming is more like petting. And no-one considers themselves a prostitute because they don't like to have sex without a bit of foreplay. Actually if you look at social evolution it is widely accepted that as ape social groups grew in size, chatting replaced grooming as the glue of social cohesion. So the grooming behaviour would be akin to chatting a woman up. Again talking to your sexual partners does not make you a prostitute.

The report goes on to "back up" the initial theory by pointing out that females require less grooming when there are other females around. But then maybe they just don't like all their mates watching them being chatted up. Or maybe they want to get it over with and go hang out with their female friends.

Drawing conclusions that fit your own sexist preconceptions is a real waste of time in an area of science that could really use a lot more attention.