Lecture 2 - Segment 1

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

that are characteristic of the discipline of sociology.

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

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

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

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

But sociology teaches us that many of the things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You need to know the answer to that question right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

you would be considered very unusual, if not strange.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

which get attributed to sex.

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

Why is gender so important to social interaction?

There’s nothing else quite like that.

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

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

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

or what kind of garments they have the child wear;

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

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

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

The same thing with social class, right?

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

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

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

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

There are many of the people of the upper classes

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

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

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

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

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

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

But gender is completely different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what it does suggest

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

Part of my agenda in this lecture is

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

might have something to do with there being fewer women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summers’ remarks ignored some very important data.

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

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

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

did not change that significantly during this period.

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

Some of our institutions in American society are working very hard

to ask what we can do to change gender inequality

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

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

that when teachers or parents have low expectations for girls,

then women will not develop their potential talents.

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

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

And there was a sense on the part of many women

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

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

Over time expectations have changed,

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

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

and they can only be changed if the stereotypes

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

changes at the earliest parts of life,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brain size is not the cause of these differences.

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

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

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

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

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

By a time a child reaches five years old,

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

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

According to Nisbett, the average IQ in the United States

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

That is just the average for Americans as a whole.

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

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

that is affecting the group as a whole.

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

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

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

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

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

So these are some examples of how it is

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

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

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