THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYAs Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, was that he never
took to being a girl. Reimer resumed his male identity at age fourteen
and later underwent surgery to restore his maleness, as far as this was
possible. He married and became a stepfather to three children. Sadly,
Reimer committed suicide in 2004 – his wife had recently left him and
his brother had died from a drugs overdose in 2002.
GENDER BIAS
Another area that’s seen a great deal of controversy in recent years is the
under-representation of women in science and maths. A media storm
kicked off in 2005 when the then Harvard President Lawrence Summers
suggested that one reason why women are a rare sight in science and
engineering is because of innate biological differences between the
sexes. As we’ve seen, it is certainly true that outstanding ability in maths
is more common among males than females. However, the size of this
difference is not enough to explain the massive gender disparity in
science and engineering.
An alternative explanation was provided in 2009 by the psychologist
Stephen Ceci and his colleagues at Cornell University, after they reviewed
more than four hundred journal articles and book chapters on the topic.
They found that it was women’s decisions to have children and their
related career-choices that was the strongest factor. For example, the
researchers found that women with strong maths skills were less likely
than their male peers to choose to go into science, perhaps because,
unlike most men, they also tended to have superior verbal skills. This
inclined many of them towards careers in law and medicine, which are
often more accommodating with regard to starting a family.
A related study, also published in 2009, used an Internet quiz to test the
implicit gender beliefs of more than half a million people across 34 coun-
tries. Brian Nosek and his team compared these results with actual science
performance scores achieved by twelve-year-olds in these same countries.
The researchers’ finding was that the two correlated: those countries with
old-fashioned gender stereotypes tended to be the same countries where
girls underperformed in science. The study can’t show which way the
causal direction flows, but given that other research has shown that stere-
otypes can harm people’s performance, it looks as though traditional ideas
about gender roles could be holding back female success in science.
Another gender bias that affects women’s careers is known as the glass
cliff. This is the tendency for women to be chosen to lead organizations