WEBVTT 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 00:00:06.503 --> 00:00:10.583 that are characteristic of the discipline of sociology. 00:00:10.583 --> 00:00:16.847 And the first is: How are the things that we take to be natural socially constructed? 00:00:16.847 --> 00:00:22.032 How are the things that we take to be natural socially constructed? 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: 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. 00:00:37.056 --> 00:00:40.299 But sociology teaches us that many of the things 00:00:40.299 --> 00:00:45.549 that we think are natural are actually man- and woman-made — 00:00:45.549 --> 00:00:50.626 which does not necessarily mean this makes us freer from so-called “nature” — 00:00:50.626 --> 00:00:56.824 in fact, we may not be as free as we think, even armed with this insight. 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, 00:01:05.028 --> 00:01:10.907 some of which have succeeded and some of which are slow to progress. 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 — 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. 00:01:21.809 --> 00:01:25.981 What’s the first question you’re going to ask those parents? 00:01:25.981 --> 00:01:33.043 Very likely you’re going to say, “Does your child have a penis or a vagina?” 00:01:33.043 --> 00:01:36.422 You need to know the answer to that question right? 00:01:36.422 --> 00:01:43.758 Because without knowing the answer to that question you cannot proceed any further in the interaction — 00:01:43.758 --> 00:01:48.000 that is, if you are a typical human being, like me. 00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:53.169 And this is because without knowing if the child has a penis or a vagina 00:01:53.169 --> 00:01:57.894 you don’t really know how to interact with that child. 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. 00:02:05.109 --> 00:02:09.655 In fact, if you were to go up and ask the question in that way, 00:02:09.655 --> 00:02:14.621 at least here in Princeton, and all of the other places where I have lived, 00:02:14.621 --> 00:02:19.353 you would be considered very unusual, if not strange. 00:02:19.353 --> 00:02:23.138 So instead, we ask the question in a more benign way: 00:02:23.138 --> 00:02:28.637 We say, “Is your child a boy, or a girl?” 00:02:28.637 --> 00:02:34.354 Well, actually, even if you ask it like that, some parents will not be thrilled 00:02:34.354 --> 00:02:38.037 because they want to believe that you can tell what their child is. 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. 00:02:44.863 --> 00:02:47.558 So when you go up to a child on the street, 00:02:47.558 --> 00:02:53.014 the first thing you might say to a parent is; “What’s your baby’s name?” 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 00:02:57.883 --> 00:03:03.929 without saying “I can’t really tell if your child is a boy or a girl.” 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, 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. 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 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?” 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, 00:03:35.136 --> 00:03:39.024 when many of the students at Princeton who are here today were born —, 00:03:39.024 --> 00:03:41.361 you might say, “Hi sweetie, how are you?” 00:03:41.361 --> 00:03:46.813 That will be the beginning of a kind of interaction that is gender-based. 00:03:46.813 --> 00:03:52.226 By gender, we mean The social, cultural and psychological meanings 00:03:52.226 --> 00:03:55.477 which get attributed to sex. 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. 00:04:02.375 --> 00:04:06.698 Why is gender so important to social interaction? 00:04:06.698 --> 00:04:09.235 There’s nothing else quite like that. 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, 00:04:14.326 --> 00:04:18.806 we can pretty well interact with them, at least here in the United States. 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, 00:04:25.470 --> 00:04:28.040 or what kind of garments they have the child wear; 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. 00:04:34.937 --> 00:04:39.501 Whether the child is black or white or Latino or Asian for example, 00:04:39.501 --> 00:04:45.418 is not going to have a significant impact on the nature of the interaction. 00:04:45.418 --> 00:04:47.758 The same thing with social class, right? 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. 00:04:55.173 --> 00:04:59.618 In order for an interaction to be successful, we don’t need to know 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 00:05:04.883 --> 00:05:10.459 or that group that has become popularly known as the top one percent. 00:05:10.459 --> 00:05:13.506 There are many of the people of the upper classes 00:05:13.506 --> 00:05:16.554 who dress their children in clothes from the Gap or Old Navy, 00:05:16.554 --> 00:05:21.647 stores which sell their products very widely to people of many different classes. 00:05:21.647 --> 00:05:24.617 And likewise, there are many poor people in the United States 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. 00:05:31.814 --> 00:05:35.933 You can’t necessarily tell what social class a baby comes from. 00:05:35.933 --> 00:05:39.738 And more importantly, you don’t feel you need to know. 00:05:39.738 --> 00:05:42.611 But gender is completely different. 00:05:42.611 --> 00:05:47.835 You expect to know the gender of a child before you can interact with it. 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 00:05:54.306 --> 00:06:01.001 and that all interactions are gendered from the beginning is you come to the realization 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. 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. 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. 00:06:21.209 --> 00:06:26.554 And because this happens at such a young age, when they’re infants, in fact, 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. 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. 00:06:41.320 --> 00:06:46.287 This is not to suggest that brain science does not have a significant amount 00:06:46.287 --> 00:06:53.060 to contribute to our understanding by looking at the differences between male and female brains. 00:06:53.060 --> 00:06:54.950 But what it does suggest 00:06:54.950 --> 00:07:01.630 is that there is a very strong component of male and female which is socially constructed. 00:07:01.630 --> 00:07:04.099 Part of my agenda in this lecture is 00:07:04.099 --> 00:07:08.044 not to say that the biological is a residual category that doesn’t matter, 00:07:08.044 --> 00:07:12.973 but to say that we’re going to engage in an enterprise of disentangling, 00:07:12.973 --> 00:07:18.367 to try to figure out which parts are biological, and which are social; 00:07:18.367 --> 00:07:22.391 because from the standpoint of common sense, it is all biological. 00:07:22.391 --> 00:07:28.279 Most people who are not educated in sociology see these differences as rooted in nature. 00:07:28.279 --> 00:07:35.145 A few years ago, the president of Harvard, Larry Summers made a deliberately provocative statement — 00:07:35.145 --> 00:07:40.300 for which he later apologized — suggesting that the existence of fewer women in science 00:07:40.300 --> 00:07:43.867 might have something to do with there being fewer women 00:07:43.867 --> 00:07:49.760 at the higher end of the intelligence distribution as measured by IQ scores. 00:07:49.760 --> 00:07:54.802 He was trying to suggest that there was something innate or natural about this outcome. 00:07:54.802 --> 00:08:00.266 Now, once we know that there is a strong social component to male and female, 00:08:00.266 --> 00:08:04.901 we may hope that there are things that we can do to influence the environment 00:08:04.917 --> 00:08:08.931 that may actually have an impact on the long-term outcomes of men and women. 00:08:08.931 --> 00:08:14.141 We know that there is significant amount of gender inequality even in the United States today, 00:08:14.141 --> 00:08:19.679 a country that has been thinking about these differences longer than some other countries. 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. 00:08:26.001 --> 00:08:29.949 But to come back to the statement by the president of Harvard, 00:08:29.949 --> 00:08:35.770 there’s actually been some progress in getting more women into fields like biological sciences. 00:08:35.770 --> 00:08:39.480 Summers’ remarks ignored some very important data. 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; 00:08:45.638 --> 00:08:50.641 while in 2001, the number had risen to about 17%. 00:08:50.641 --> 00:08:53.704 Surely the IQ of women at the high end of the distribution 00:08:53.704 --> 00:08:57.581 did not change that significantly during this period. 00:08:57.581 --> 00:09:01.479 These numbers suggest that a lot of progress still needs to be made. 00:09:01.479 --> 00:09:06.309 Some of our institutions in American society are working very hard 00:09:06.309 --> 00:09:10.204 to ask what we can do to change gender inequality 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. 00:09:17.271 --> 00:09:23.057 In math and science training, a vast amount of sociological research has demonstrated 00:09:23.057 --> 00:09:26.313 that when teachers or parents have low expectations for girls, 00:09:26.313 --> 00:09:29.569 then women will not develop their potential talents. 00:09:29.569 --> 00:09:34.198 We know that, for a very long time in universities like Princeton, 00:09:34.198 --> 00:09:37.721 there were very few women who went into science and engineering. 00:09:37.721 --> 00:09:40.325 And there was a sense on the part of many women 00:09:40.325 --> 00:09:44.654 who went into these universities that it was a male thing to do. 00:09:44.654 --> 00:09:49.249 This view was something encouraged at the earliest stage of life. 00:09:49.249 --> 00:09:52.758 Over time expectations have changed, 00:09:52.758 --> 00:09:56.723 and we have more and more women going into science and engineering. 00:09:56.723 --> 00:10:00.541 But these are things that the university knows begin with a pipeline. 00:10:00.541 --> 00:10:03.528 and they can only be changed if the stereotypes 00:10:03.528 --> 00:10:07.427 and the sense of what is appropriate and natural for different genders to take on 00:10:07.427 --> 00:10:10.787 changes at the earliest parts of life, 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. 00:10:17.836 --> 00:10:25.039 Or let’s take an even more controversial example: racial differences in IQ. 00:10:25.039 --> 00:10:29.541 Sometimes, when white people find out that I’m a sociologist 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. 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. 00:10:40.197 --> 00:10:44.818 And they’ll cite evidence that blacks have lower IQ scores in general — 00:10:44.818 --> 00:10:48.921 Quote, they’re not as smart so they don’t do as well, right? 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. 00:10:55.576 --> 00:10:59.812 People who argue this argue that it’s based on genetics. 00:10:59.812 --> 00:11:05.623 One explanation is that they have smaller brains than whites; but that is wrong. 00:11:05.623 --> 00:11:09.155 In his book « Intelligence and How to Get It », Richard Nesbitt says 00:11:09.155 --> 00:11:14.375 that Albert Einstein had a smaller brain than the average black person — 00:11:14.375 --> 00:11:17.956 Brain size is not the cause of these differences. 00:11:17.956 --> 00:11:21.504 There’s also the claim that these lower IQ’s are inherited. 00:11:21.504 --> 00:11:25.676 Well, there are many studies that have been done that have demonstrated 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. 00:11:32.288 --> 00:11:37.112 Thus, according to Nisbett, the average child in a poor family will hear 00:11:37.112 --> 00:11:42.708 substantially fewer words, per day, than someone in an upper middle class family. 00:11:42.708 --> 00:11:45.326 By a time a child reaches five years old, 00:11:45.326 --> 00:11:49.544 he or she will have heard many more words in a higher income family. 00:11:49.544 --> 00:11:57.030 Vocabulary, it turns out, is a very significant determinant of how people do on IQ tests. 00:11:57.030 --> 00:12:00.829 According to Nisbett, the average IQ in the United States 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. 00:12:06.977 --> 00:12:10.360 That is just the average for Americans as a whole. 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. 00:12:16.739 --> 00:12:21.109 So we know that there is something about the environment of the United States 00:12:21.109 --> 00:12:24.004 that is affecting the group as a whole. 00:12:24.004 --> 00:12:29.834 And during this period, the average difference in IQ between blacks and whites decreased significantly. 00:12:29.834 --> 00:12:35.043 It was fifteen points in 1945 and it’s nine points today. 00:12:35.043 --> 00:12:40.432 According to Nisbett, that corresponds to a certain level of improvement in the black population — 00:12:40.432 --> 00:12:44.443 compared to the white population — in their standard of living. 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. 00:12:52.828 --> 00:12:56.454 So these are some examples of how it is 00:12:56.454 --> 00:13:01.404 that one of the great achievements of the social sciences and thinking about IQ 00:13:01.404 --> 00:13:05.558 has been to understand the way that many things we take to be natural 00:13:05.558 --> 00:13:12.074 are not completely based on genetics, but are themselves a function of the social environment.