1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:06,503
I’d like to follow up on our last lecture about the sociological imagination and talk about three questions

2
00:00:06,503 --> 00:00:10,583
that are characteristic of the discipline of sociology.

3
00:00:10,583 --> 00:00:16,847
And the first is: How are the things that we take to be natural socially constructed?

4
00:00:16,847 --> 00:00:22,032
How are the things that we take to be natural socially constructed?

5
00:00:22,032 --> 00:00:29,784
There’s a basic flaw in common sense, and human reasoning more generally, that goes something like this:

6
00:00:29,784 --> 00:00:37,056
The things we see before us every day are “supposed to be that way”; they come from nature.

7
00:00:37,056 --> 00:00:40,299
But sociology teaches us that many of the things

8
00:00:40,299 --> 00:00:45,549
that we think are natural are actually man- and woman-made —

9
00:00:45,549 --> 00:00:50,626
which does not necessarily mean this makes us freer from so-called “nature” —

10
00:00:50,626 --> 00:00:56,824
in fact, we may not be as free as we think, even armed with this insight.

11
00:00:56,824 --> 00:01:05,028
But that hasn’t stopped many people from using the insight to try to bring about very important social changes,

12
00:01:05,028 --> 00:01:10,907
some of which have succeeded and some of which are slow to progress.

13
00:01:10,907 --> 00:01:15,478
For example, let’s say that you go up to a baby or a small child on the street —

14
00:01:15,478 --> 00:01:21,809
at least here in Princeton, New Jersey — perhaps in a stroller or crawling next to the parents.

15
00:01:21,809 --> 00:01:25,981
What’s the first question you’re going to ask those parents?

16
00:01:25,981 --> 00:01:33,043
Very likely you’re going to say, “Does your child have a penis or a vagina?”

17
00:01:33,043 --> 00:01:36,422
You need to know the answer to that question right?

18
00:01:36,422 --> 00:01:43,758
Because without knowing the answer to that question you cannot proceed any further in the interaction —

19
00:01:43,758 --> 00:01:48,000
that is, if you are a typical human being, like me.

20
00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:53,169
And this is because without knowing if the child has a penis or a vagina

21
00:01:53,169 --> 00:01:57,894
you don’t really know how to interact with that child.

22
00:01:57,894 --> 00:02:05,109
Now in fact, it’s probably not the best thing in the world to ask that question in that way to a parent.

23
00:02:05,109 --> 00:02:09,655
In fact, if you were to go up and ask the question in that way,

24
00:02:09,655 --> 00:02:14,621
at least here in Princeton, and all of the other places where I have lived,

25
00:02:14,621 --> 00:02:19,353
you would be considered very unusual, if not strange.

26
00:02:19,353 --> 00:02:23,138
So instead, we ask the question in a more benign way:

27
00:02:23,138 --> 00:02:28,637
We say, “Is your child a boy, or a girl?”

28
00:02:28,637 --> 00:02:34,354
Well, actually, even if you ask it like that, some parents will not be thrilled

29
00:02:34,354 --> 00:02:38,037
because they want to believe that you can tell what their child is.

30
00:02:38,037 --> 00:02:44,863
Which highlights how significant it is that we be able to interact with a child in an appropriate way.

31
00:02:44,863 --> 00:02:47,558
So when you go up to a child on the street,

32
00:02:47,558 --> 00:02:53,014
the first thing you might say to a parent is; “What’s your baby’s name?”

33
00:02:53,014 --> 00:02:57,883
That’s a kind of subtle way of asking the sex of the boy or the girl

34
00:02:57,883 --> 00:03:03,929
without saying “I can’t really tell if your child is a boy or a girl.”

35
00:03:03,929 --> 00:03:09,944
And once you’ve figured out whether or not you are interacting with a boy or a girl,

36
00:03:09,944 --> 00:03:16,586
that might cause some significant difference in the way that you will interact, or what you will say next.

37
00:03:16,586 --> 00:03:22,279
So if you find out that it is a little boy named Michael — which is a popular boy’s name

38
00:03:22,279 --> 00:03:29,219
when people currently at Princeton were born in the early 90’s —, you might say, “Hey buddy, how are you doing?”

39
00:03:29,219 --> 00:03:35,136
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,

40
00:03:35,136 --> 00:03:39,024
when many of the students at Princeton who are here today were born —,

41
00:03:39,024 --> 00:03:41,361
you might say, “Hi sweetie, how are you?”

42
00:03:41,361 --> 00:03:46,813
That will be the beginning of a kind of interaction that is gender-based.

43
00:03:46,813 --> 00:03:52,226
By gender, we mean The social, cultural and psychological meanings

44
00:03:52,226 --> 00:03:55,477
which get attributed to sex.

45
00:03:55,477 --> 00:04:02,375
And I’d be curious, by the way, about how this all works in the places that you live.

46
00:04:02,375 --> 00:04:06,698
Why is gender so important to social interaction?

47
00:04:06,698 --> 00:04:09,235
There’s nothing else quite like that.

48
00:04:09,235 --> 00:04:14,326
If we go up to a baby on the street, and we don’t know what race they are,

49
00:04:14,326 --> 00:04:18,806
we can pretty well interact with them, at least here in the United States.

50
00:04:18,806 --> 00:04:25,470
Sure, there are parents who will signal a certain racial affiliation by how they fix the child’s hair,

51
00:04:25,470 --> 00:04:28,040
or what kind of garments they have the child wear;

52
00:04:28,040 --> 00:04:34,937
but on the whole, people don’t need to know the race of a child in order to interact with it.

53
00:04:34,937 --> 00:04:39,501
Whether the child is black or white or Latino or Asian for example,

54
00:04:39,501 --> 00:04:45,418
is not going to have a significant impact on the nature of the interaction.

55
00:04:45,418 --> 00:04:47,758
The same thing with social class, right?

56
00:04:47,758 --> 00:04:55,173
We don’t really need to know what social class a child comes from in order to interact with it.

57
00:04:55,173 --> 00:04:59,618
In order for an interaction to be successful, we don’t need to know

58
00:04:59,618 --> 00:05:04,883
whether a child is from the working classes or the middle classes or the upper middle classes

59
00:05:04,883 --> 00:05:10,459
or that group that has become popularly known as the top one percent.

60
00:05:10,459 --> 00:05:13,506
There are many of the people of the upper classes

61
00:05:13,506 --> 00:05:16,554
who dress their children in clothes from the Gap or Old Navy,

62
00:05:16,554 --> 00:05:21,647
stores which sell their products very widely to people of many different classes.

63
00:05:21,647 --> 00:05:24,617
And likewise, there are many poor people in the United States

64
00:05:24,617 --> 00:05:31,814
who dress their children in labels that come from elite names like Ralph Lauren or Tommy Hilfiger.

65
00:05:31,814 --> 00:05:35,933
You can’t necessarily tell what social class a baby comes from.

66
00:05:35,933 --> 00:05:39,738
And more importantly, you don’t feel you need to know.

67
00:05:39,738 --> 00:05:42,611
But gender is completely different.

68
00:05:42,611 --> 00:05:47,835
You expect to know the gender of a child before you can interact with it.

69
00:05:47,835 --> 00:05:54,306
Now the one thing that occurs to you, or to me when you need to know the gender of a child

70
00:05:54,306 --> 00:06:01,001
and that all interactions are gendered from the beginning is you come to the realization

71
00:06:01,001 --> 00:06:07,199
that from a very early age a child is going to be enacting the role of a boy or a girl.

72
00:06:07,199 --> 00:06:13,622
They re going to respond to the expectations of the people around them with regard to gender.

73
00:06:13,622 --> 00:06:21,209
And through processes of interaction, they are going to come to think about themselves as a boy or a girl.

74
00:06:21,209 --> 00:06:26,554
And because this happens at such a young age, when they’re infants, in fact,

75
00:06:26,554 --> 00:06:33,987
we can see the ways that gender expectations come to be socially constructed at the earliest part of life.

76
00:06:33,987 --> 00:06:41,320
Now this is not to suggest that this thing I am saying is social, does not have some biological basis to it.

77
00:06:41,320 --> 00:06:46,287
This is not to suggest that brain science does not have a significant amount

78
00:06:46,287 --> 00:06:53,060
to contribute to our understanding by looking at the differences between male and female brains.

79
00:06:53,060 --> 00:06:54,950
But what it does suggest

80
00:06:54,950 --> 00:07:01,630
is that there is a very strong component of male and female which is socially constructed.

81
00:07:01,630 --> 00:07:04,099
Part of my agenda in this lecture is

82
00:07:04,099 --> 00:07:08,044
not to say that the biological is a residual category that doesn’t matter,

83
00:07:08,044 --> 00:07:12,973
but to say that we’re going to engage in an enterprise of disentangling,

84
00:07:12,973 --> 00:07:18,367
to try to figure out which parts are biological, and which are social;

85
00:07:18,367 --> 00:07:22,391
because from the standpoint of common sense, it is all biological.

86
00:07:22,391 --> 00:07:28,279
Most people who are not educated in sociology see these differences as rooted in nature.

87
00:07:28,279 --> 00:07:35,145
A few years ago, the president of Harvard, Larry Summers made a deliberately provocative statement —

88
00:07:35,145 --> 00:07:40,300
for which he later apologized — suggesting that the existence of fewer women in science

89
00:07:40,300 --> 00:07:43,867
might have something to do with there being fewer women

90
00:07:43,867 --> 00:07:49,760
at the higher end of the intelligence distribution as measured by IQ scores.

91
00:07:49,760 --> 00:07:54,802
He was trying to suggest that there was something innate or natural about this outcome.

92
00:07:54,802 --> 00:08:00,266
Now, once we know that there is a strong social component to male and female,

93
00:08:00,266 --> 00:08:04,901
we may hope that there are things that we can do to influence the environment

94
00:08:04,917 --> 00:08:08,931
that may actually have an impact on the long-term outcomes of men and women.

95
00:08:08,931 --> 00:08:14,141
We know that there is significant amount of gender inequality even in the United States today,

96
00:08:14,141 --> 00:08:19,679
a country that has been thinking about these differences longer than some other countries.

97
00:08:19,679 --> 00:08:26,001
And at the same time we find that many of these differences are intractable, or very difficult to eradicate.

98
00:08:26,001 --> 00:08:29,949
But to come back to the statement by the president of Harvard,

99
00:08:29,949 --> 00:08:35,770
there’s actually been some progress in getting more women into fields like biological sciences.

100
00:08:35,770 --> 00:08:39,480
Summers’ remarks ignored some very important data.

101
00:08:39,480 --> 00:08:45,638
In 1966, less than one percent of U.S. doctoral degrees in engineering were awarded to women;

102
00:08:45,638 --> 00:08:50,641
while in 2001, the number had risen to about 17%.

103
00:08:50,641 --> 00:08:53,704
Surely the IQ of women at the high end of the distribution

104
00:08:53,704 --> 00:08:57,581
did not change that significantly during this period.

105
00:08:57,581 --> 00:09:01,479
These numbers suggest that a lot of progress still needs to be made.

106
00:09:01,479 --> 00:09:06,309
Some of our institutions in American society are working very hard

107
00:09:06,309 --> 00:09:10,204
to ask what we can do to change gender inequality

108
00:09:10,204 --> 00:09:17,271
and to change the sense of how it is natural for men and women to behave or act in particular ways.

109
00:09:17,271 --> 00:09:23,057
In math and science training, a vast amount of sociological research has demonstrated

110
00:09:23,057 --> 00:09:26,313
that when teachers or parents have low expectations for girls,

111
00:09:26,313 --> 00:09:29,569
then women will not develop their potential talents.

112
00:09:29,569 --> 00:09:34,198
We know that, for a very long time in universities like Princeton,

113
00:09:34,198 --> 00:09:37,721
there were very few women who went into science and engineering.

114
00:09:37,721 --> 00:09:40,325
And there was a sense on the part of many women

115
00:09:40,325 --> 00:09:44,654
who went into these universities that it was a male thing to do.

116
00:09:44,654 --> 00:09:49,249
This view was something encouraged at the earliest stage of life.

117
00:09:49,249 --> 00:09:52,758
Over time expectations have changed,

118
00:09:52,758 --> 00:09:56,723
and we have more and more women going into science and engineering.

119
00:09:56,723 --> 00:10:00,541
But these are things that the university knows begin with a pipeline.

120
00:10:00,541 --> 00:10:03,528
and they can only be changed if the stereotypes

121
00:10:03,528 --> 00:10:07,427
and the sense of what is appropriate and natural for different genders to take on

122
00:10:07,427 --> 00:10:10,787
changes at the earliest parts of life,

123
00:10:10,787 --> 00:10:17,836
coinciding, perhaps, with the very moment when we are starting to interact with children in gendered ways.

124
00:10:17,836 --> 00:10:25,039
Or let’s take an even more controversial example: racial differences in IQ.

125
00:10:25,039 --> 00:10:29,541
Sometimes, when white people find out that I’m a sociologist

126
00:10:29,541 --> 00:10:34,521
they’ll ask why it is that blacks are doing worse than whites in the United States.

127
00:10:34,521 --> 00:10:40,197
And it’s not uncommon for folks to suggest to me that it is because they’re not as smart.

128
00:10:40,197 --> 00:10:44,818
And they’ll cite evidence that blacks have lower IQ scores in general —

129
00:10:44,818 --> 00:10:48,921
Quote, they’re not as smart so they don’t do as well, right?

130
00:10:48,921 --> 00:10:55,576
Now it is true that blacks have lower IQ scores, in general, than whites in the United States.

131
00:10:55,576 --> 00:10:59,812
People who argue this argue that it’s based on genetics.

132
00:10:59,812 --> 00:11:05,623
One explanation is that they have smaller brains than whites; but that is wrong.

133
00:11:05,623 --> 00:11:09,155
In his book « Intelligence and How to Get It », Richard Nesbitt says

134
00:11:09,155 --> 00:11:14,375
that Albert Einstein had a smaller brain than the average black person —

135
00:11:14,375 --> 00:11:17,956
Brain size is not the cause of these differences.

136
00:11:17,956 --> 00:11:21,504
There’s also the claim that these lower IQ’s are inherited.

137
00:11:21,504 --> 00:11:25,676
Well, there are many studies that have been done that have demonstrated

138
00:11:25,676 --> 00:11:32,288
the ways that IQ is also based on the environmental influences — the social context in which people live.

139
00:11:32,288 --> 00:11:37,112
Thus, according to Nisbett, the average child in a poor family will hear

140
00:11:37,112 --> 00:11:42,708
substantially fewer words, per day, than someone in an upper middle class family.

141
00:11:42,708 --> 00:11:45,326
By a time a child reaches five years old,

142
00:11:45,326 --> 00:11:49,544
he or she will have heard many more words in a higher income family.

143
00:11:49,544 --> 00:11:57,030
Vocabulary, it turns out, is a very significant determinant of how people do on IQ tests.

144
00:11:57,030 --> 00:12:00,829
According to Nisbett, the average IQ in the United States

145
00:12:00,829 --> 00:12:06,977
over the course of the past 50 years — since World War II — has gone up 15 to 20 points.

146
00:12:06,977 --> 00:12:10,360
That is just the average for Americans as a whole.

147
00:12:10,360 --> 00:12:16,739
And it’s impossible for the genetics of the country to have changed that much over the past 50 years.

148
00:12:16,739 --> 00:12:21,109
So we know that there is something about the environment of the United States

149
00:12:21,109 --> 00:12:24,004
that is affecting the group as a whole.

150
00:12:24,004 --> 00:12:29,834
And during this period, the average difference in IQ between blacks and whites decreased significantly.

151
00:12:29,834 --> 00:12:35,043
It was fifteen points in 1945 and it’s nine points today.

152
00:12:35,043 --> 00:12:40,432
According to Nisbett, that corresponds to a certain level of improvement in the black population —

153
00:12:40,432 --> 00:12:44,443
compared to the white population — in their standard of living.

154
00:12:44,443 --> 00:12:52,828
The average black today has a higher IQ than the average white in 1950 — another interesting thing to explain.

155
00:12:52,828 --> 00:12:56,454
So these are some examples of how it is

156
00:12:56,454 --> 00:13:01,404
that one of the great achievements of the social sciences and thinking about IQ

157
00:13:01,404 --> 00:13:05,558
has been to understand the way that many things we take to be natural

158
00:13:05,558 --> 00:13:12,074
are not completely based on genetics, but are themselves a function of the social environment.