The furore over the case of James Damore – the Google employee sacked after suggesting inborn differences between the preferences of men and women might help to explain why there were fewer women in technical positions – raises important questions about the family. On the other hand, perhaps it doesn’t.
Such questions include, to what extent is gender constructed? And to what degree can I, as a parent, ensure that my child gets the full menu of possibilities put within their reach, whatever gender (or non-binary category) they happen to be?
Damore might add, “And what proclivities might they intrinsically be likely to harbour?” He cites psychometrics to claim that such proclivities exist. Psychometrics is a branch of psychology that purports to identify differences across five traits – openness, extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness and agreeableness. (These all have technical definitions that shouldn’t necessarily be confused with their popular usage.)
Whether you live in Saudi Arabia or Sweden, the average differences pertain. Interestingly, and perhaps counterintuitively, the more gender-equal a society is, according to a meta-analysis of lots of studies (Schmitt et al, 2008), the more pronounced the gender differences seem to be.
A number of contributors have vigorously contested these findings in this newspaper. However, the insistence that the findings are ideologically driven or “bad science” is perhaps a little too convenient and so far as I can tell very far from being conclusive.
Yet it is not entirely obvious to me why they should be so controversial – if you as a person were described as open, extraverted, conscientious and agreeable, you might not be overly offended. And if you substituted the term “sensitivity” for “neuroticism”, likewise. Why then does this finding arouse such intense debate – and opprobrium? Because it seems to suggest that we are all trapped within gender stereotypes by biology. This is an outcome I would passionately oppose for my four daughters, or for any men or women.
But identifying tendencies in the mass of the population is not the same as saying any individual is determined by these tendencies. Certainly, no particular family is a statistically significant sample. I find it hard to work out how much of my daughters’ behaviours – they are all very different individuals – fit into these patterns. Do they tend to be “agreeable”? “Conscientous”? It differs. I don’t have a clue to what degree their gender identities are constructed. “Somewhat” is probably the most sensible answer.
Furthermore, I can’t see that it matters at the family level (at the institutional, political and corporate level, it may be a different matter). If it is true that my daughters tend, on average, to be more inclined towards certain interests and behaviours, what difference would that make to parenting or, for that matter, to their particular life outcomes?
If I were to take psychometric testing seriously and misunderstood it sufficiently to apply it at a micro (ie familial) level, it wouldn’t incline me to push them in any particular direction anyway – because I don’t believe in pushing children in any particular direction as a matter of principle. And there is plenty of room within psychometric parameters for them to develop along their own particular lines according to their own propensities.
One can say this much, perhaps. It is beyond debate that girls or boys should not be held within gender stereotypes, and part of the great progress of the past 50 years has been the breaking down of those stereotypes. However, beyond this general conclusion, the Damore case, whichever side you take, has virtually no implications for upbringing.
So parents can relax about it. Unless they are particularly neurotic – in which case, according to psychometrics, they won’t be able to. And this is slightly more likely, across the general population, to happen to mothers than fathers. But – and this is crucial – no particular mother, and no particular father.
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