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I’d like to follow up on our last lecture about the sociological imagination and talk about three questions

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that are characteristic of the discipline of sociology.

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And the first is: How are the things that we take to be natural socially constructed?

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How are the things that we take to be natural socially constructed?

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There’s a basic flaw in common sense, and human reasoning more generally, that goes something like this:

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The things we see before us every day are “supposed to be that way”; they come from nature.

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But sociology teaches us that many of the things

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that we think are natural are actually man- and woman-made —

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which does not necessarily mean this makes us freer from so-called “nature” —

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in fact, we may not be as free as we think, even armed with this insight.

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But that hasn’t stopped many people from using the insight to try to bring about very important social changes,

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some of which have succeeded and some of which are slow to progress.

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For example, let’s say that you go up to a baby or a small child on the street —

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at least here in Princeton, New Jersey — perhaps in a stroller or crawling next to the parents.

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What’s the first question you’re going to ask those parents?

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Very likely you’re going to say, “Does your child have a penis or a vagina?”

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You need to know the answer to that question right?

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Because without knowing the answer to that question you cannot proceed any further in the interaction —

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that is, if you are a typical human being, like me.

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And this is because without knowing if the child has a penis or a vagina

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you don’t really know how to interact with that child.

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Now in fact, it’s probably not the best thing in the world to ask that question in that way to a parent.

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In fact, if you were to go up and ask the question in that way,

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at least here in Princeton, and all of the other places where I have lived,

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you would be considered very unusual, if not strange.

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So instead, we ask the question in a more benign way:

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We say, “Is your child a boy, or a girl?”

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Well, actually, even if you ask it like that, some parents will not be thrilled

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because they want to believe that you can tell what their child is.

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Which highlights how significant it is that we be able to interact with a child in an appropriate way.

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So when you go up to a child on the street,

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the first thing you might say to a parent is; “What’s your baby’s name?”

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That’s a kind of subtle way of asking the sex of the boy or the girl

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without saying “I can’t really tell if your child is a boy or a girl.”

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And once you’ve figured out whether or not you are interacting with a boy or a girl,

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that might cause some significant difference in the way that you will interact, or what you will say next.

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So if you find out that it is a little boy named Michael — which is a popular boy’s name

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when people currently at Princeton were born in the early 90’s —, you might say, “Hey buddy, how are you doing?”

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Or if you find out that it’s a little girl named Ashley — which was also a popular girl’s name in the early 90’s,

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when many of the students at Princeton who are here today were born —,

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you might say, “Hi sweetie, how are you?”

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That will be the beginning of a kind of interaction that is gender-based.

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By gender, we mean The social, cultural and psychological meanings

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which get attributed to sex.

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And I’d be curious, by the way, about how this all works in the places that you live.

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Why is gender so important to social interaction?

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There’s nothing else quite like that.

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If we go up to a baby on the street, and we don’t know what race they are,

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we can pretty well interact with them, at least here in the United States.

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Sure, there are parents who will signal a certain racial affiliation by how they fix the child’s hair,

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or what kind of garments they have the child wear;

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but on the whole, people don’t need to know the race of a child in order to interact with it.

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Whether the child is black or white or Latino or Asian for example,

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is not going to have a significant impact on the nature of the interaction.

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The same thing with social class, right?

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We don’t really need to know what social class a child comes from in order to interact with it.

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In order for an interaction to be successful, we don’t need to know

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whether a child is from the working classes or the middle classes or the upper middle classes

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or that group that has become popularly known as the top one percent.

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There are many of the people of the upper classes

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who dress their children in clothes from the Gap or Old Navy,

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stores which sell their products very widely to people of many different classes.

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And likewise, there are many poor people in the United States

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who dress their children in labels that come from elite names like Ralph Lauren or Tommy Hilfiger.

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You can’t necessarily tell what social class a baby comes from.

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And more importantly, you don’t feel you need to know.

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But gender is completely different.

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You expect to know the gender of a child before you can interact with it.

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Now the one thing that occurs to you, or to me when you need to know the gender of a child

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and that all interactions are gendered from the beginning is you come to the realization

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that from a very early age a child is going to be enacting the role of a boy or a girl.

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They re going to respond to the expectations of the people around them with regard to gender.

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And through processes of interaction, they are going to come to think about themselves as a boy or a girl.

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And because this happens at such a young age, when they’re infants, in fact,

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we can see the ways that gender expectations come to be socially constructed at the earliest part of life.

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Now this is not to suggest that this thing I am saying is social, does not have some biological basis to it.

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This is not to suggest that brain science does not have a significant amount

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to contribute to our understanding by looking at the differences between male and female brains.

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But what it does suggest

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is that there is a very strong component of male and female which is socially constructed.

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Part of my agenda in this lecture is

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not to say that the biological is a residual category that doesn’t matter,

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but to say that we’re going to engage in an enterprise of disentangling,

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to try to figure out which parts are biological, and which are social;

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because from the standpoint of common sense, it is all biological.

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Most people who are not educated in sociology see these differences as rooted in nature.

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A few years ago, the president of Harvard, Larry Summers made a deliberately provocative statement —

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for which he later apologized — suggesting that the existence of fewer women in science

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might have something to do with there being fewer women

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at the higher end of the intelligence distribution as measured by IQ scores.

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He was trying to suggest that there was something innate or natural about this outcome.

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Now, once we know that there is a strong social component to male and female,

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we may hope that there are things that we can do to influence the environment

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that may actually have an impact on the long-term outcomes of men and women.

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We know that there is significant amount of gender inequality even in the United States today,

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a country that has been thinking about these differences longer than some other countries.

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And at the same time we find that many of these differences are intractable, or very difficult to eradicate.

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But to come back to the statement by the president of Harvard,

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there’s actually been some progress in getting more women into fields like biological sciences.

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Summers’ remarks ignored some very important data.

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In 1966, less than one percent of U.S. doctoral degrees in engineering were awarded to women;

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while in 2001, the number had risen to about 17%.

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Surely the IQ of women at the high end of the distribution

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did not change that significantly during this period.

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These numbers suggest that a lot of progress still needs to be made.

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Some of our institutions in American society are working very hard

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to ask what we can do to change gender inequality

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and to change the sense of how it is natural for men and women to behave or act in particular ways.

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In math and science training, a vast amount of sociological research has demonstrated

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that when teachers or parents have low expectations for girls,

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then women will not develop their potential talents.

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We know that, for a very long time in universities like Princeton,

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there were very few women who went into science and engineering.

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And there was a sense on the part of many women

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who went into these universities that it was a male thing to do.

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This view was something encouraged at the earliest stage of life.

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Over time expectations have changed,

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and we have more and more women going into science and engineering.

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But these are things that the university knows begin with a pipeline.

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and they can only be changed if the stereotypes

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and the sense of what is appropriate and natural for different genders to take on

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changes at the earliest parts of life,

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coinciding, perhaps, with the very moment when we are starting to interact with children in gendered ways.

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Or let’s take an even more controversial example: racial differences in IQ.

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Sometimes, when white people find out that I’m a sociologist

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they’ll ask why it is that blacks are doing worse than whites in the United States.

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And it’s not uncommon for folks to suggest to me that it is because they’re not as smart.

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And they’ll cite evidence that blacks have lower IQ scores in general —

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Quote, they’re not as smart so they don’t do as well, right?

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Now it is true that blacks have lower IQ scores, in general, than whites in the United States.

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People who argue this argue that it’s based on genetics.

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One explanation is that they have smaller brains than whites; but that is wrong.

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In his book « Intelligence and How to Get It », Richard Nesbitt says

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that Albert Einstein had a smaller brain than the average black person —

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Brain size is not the cause of these differences.

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There’s also the claim that these lower IQ’s are inherited.

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Well, there are many studies that have been done that have demonstrated

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the ways that IQ is also based on the environmental influences — the social context in which people live.

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Thus, according to Nisbett, the average child in a poor family will hear

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substantially fewer words, per day, than someone in an upper middle class family.

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By a time a child reaches five years old,

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he or she will have heard many more words in a higher income family.

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Vocabulary, it turns out, is a very significant determinant of how people do on IQ tests.

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According to Nisbett, the average IQ in the United States

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over the course of the past 50 years — since World War II — has gone up 15 to 20 points.

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That is just the average for Americans as a whole.

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And it’s impossible for the genetics of the country to have changed that much over the past 50 years.

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So we know that there is something about the environment of the United States

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that is affecting the group as a whole.

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And during this period, the average difference in IQ between blacks and whites decreased significantly.

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It was fifteen points in 1945 and it’s nine points today.

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According to Nisbett, that corresponds to a certain level of improvement in the black population —

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compared to the white population — in their standard of living.

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The average black today has a higher IQ than the average white in 1950 — another interesting thing to explain.

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So these are some examples of how it is

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that one of the great achievements of the social sciences and thinking about IQ

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has been to understand the way that many things we take to be natural

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are not completely based on genetics, but are themselves a function of the social environment.