Cordelia Fine: ‘If women aren’t sweet, then they’re called bitches’

If you have ever worked alongside both men and women, you will almost certainly have seen for yourself some of the classic gender differences in behaviour. Anyone still in doubt about their existence could have observed how Cordelia Fine conducted herself this week. On Tuesday night, the distinguished neuroscientist was awarded the Royal Society’s science book prize. One of six nominees, she had flown into London from her home in Melbourne on Monday, and is trailing her suitcase behind her when we meet the following afternoon, before heading back to Heathrow for the 24-hour journey home. I assume she must have known she would win, as who would come all this way otherwise? She looks surprised and shakes her head. “No, no. I was just really, really thrilled and excited about being nominated.”

At 42, Fine is enormously successful. After graduating with a first from Oxford in experimental psychology, she took a masters at Cambridge, followed by a doctorate from University College London. Her first book was nominated for the Royal Society prize in 2007, while her second, Delusions of Gender, was listed by the Huffington Post under: “Books women think men should read”. Her third, Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds, was acclaimed by the judges this week as an “original”, “very funny”, and “cracking critique of the ‘men are from Mars, women are from Venus’ hypothesis”. With a cheque for £25,000 in her case, Fine could have been forgiven for swaggering – or at the very least strutting – across the hotel lounge to be interviewed.

But the woman who sidles up to the table is so equivocal and self-effacing, it’s hard to believe she can be the author. Her sentences are prefaced with “Ummm”, a pause, a sigh, and “I suppose …”, delivered in a barely audible murmur with the demeanour of a rabbit who hates being caught in the headlights even more than the norm for her species. If Fine looked only half as uneasy, I would ask her why, but I’m too afraid the question will only make matters worse. Instead, I draw her attention to a news story about the purported finding of a connection between men with wide faces and promiscuous or risky behaviour, all determined by varying hormone levels, thinking it will be a nice prompt to get us going. But after skimming the story, she puts it aside in inscrutable silence and begins by telling me that, while posing for our photographer earlier, on the pavement amid the crowds at Oxford Circus, she attracted the attention of a passing gaggle of teenage boys. “What’s she famous for?” they shouted. “She wrote a book which just won a science prize,” explained the publicist. “And, of course,” Fine smiles wryly, “they dispersed immediately. So if there was ever any danger of me getting a bit ...” She completes the sentence with an upwards tilt of the chin, to gesture grandeur, an alert to a danger so comically remote in her case that I could hug her.

I spend a lot of the next hour trying to work out why this eminent winner is so startlingly unlike almost every man I’ve ever interviewed after an awards-ceremony triumph. Her awkward inhibition has to be partly down to the difficulty all scientists face, when asked to explain their work in terms a scientifically illiterate fool like me can understand. But Fine’s gift for rendering complex neurological concepts comprehensible is one of the many reasons why her book is so brilliant. The daughter of the celebrated novelist Anne Fine, she writes like a dream, not just by the lifelessly humble standards of most scientific prose, but by any literary measure, and her book sparkles with pithy wit when describing, for example, a demographic of rich white men as: “Those who, in response to the social justice movement’s currently fashionable suggestion to ‘check your privilege’, would take significantly longer than others to complete the task.” Anyone who writes this well couldn’t fail to have plenty to say in person, so I’m inclined to put the discrepancy between her confidence in print and reticence in person down to catatonic jetlag.

There is, however, another plausible explanation. From the pay gap to the boardroom, we have overwhelming evidence that men are typically competitive, boastful and pushy at work, while women consistently undervalue their worth, undersell their services and underestimate their ability and potential. Fine’s book does not dispute the truth of these stereotypes, but instead challenges the widely held belief – whose popularity we can mistake for authority – that gender inequality is biologically programmed by our hormones, and thus the natural order of things. To boil the vast diversity and complexity of humanity down to testosterone, and explain everything from extramarital affairs to the financial crisis on this one hormone, is, she argues, both scientifically baseless and absurd.

For years, evolutionary biologists have claimed that men and women are programmed to be promiscuous and monogamous respectively, in order to maximise their reproductive prospects. However, according to Fine, the vast range of different sexual behaviours found both between different species and within species comprehensively disproves the myth of a universal reproductive principle dictating all of our sexual norms.

“There are many, many other factors involved that can greatly complicate the picture, whether to do with idiosyncracies within the species or the particular context they’re in, whether within one species or across species. And it just complicates the whole picture. But what it means is that you can’t generalise from one species to another.

“One of the really interesting things about humans in relation to sexual behaviour is just how inefficient our reproductive activity is, more than any other species. Our hit rate for sexual activity to reproductive success is extremely low, so that has significance for the reproductive benefits of casual sex with multiple partners versus monogamous sex. It also points to the other key feature, which is that sexual activity for us is not just about reproduction. It’s come to serve some other purpose. And you see that in other primates as well. You don’t have that tight hormonal sexual activity that you see in other species that’s like: job done.”

Similarly, our assumption that men are programmed by testosterone to take more risks, and that what caused the financial crash was an excess of testosterone among bankers, is not substantiated by the evidence. All we have to do is expand our definition of risk-taking to include activities not traditionally investigated, and account for the different benefits and costs men and women face, and the evidence for some sort of innate behavioural disappearance falls apart. For example, Fine writes: “The reported gender gap in risk-taking would almost certainly narrow if researchers’ questionnaires started to include more items like: ‘How likely is it that you would bake an impressive but difficult soufflé for an important dinner party, risk misogynist backlash by writing a feminist opinion piece, or train for a lucrative career in which there’s a high probability of sex-based discrimination and harassment?”

Fine stumbled upon her field of gender neuroscience by accident, when her two sons were still infants and she read a popular parenting book, Why Gender Matters, which cited all sorts of scientific studies in support of its thesis that boys and girls have such innately different brains they must be raised quite differently. Smelling a rat, she consulted the studies for herself, and found they had been wildly misrepresented and proved nothing of the sort. How does she explain, I ask, the popularity of the “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” oeuvre, if it is so flawed?

“When we look at the world as it is, and the continuing inequalities that we have – my book looks particularly at occupational inequalities – I think there’s some kind of a relief in thinking: ‘Well, look, it’s not injustice that’s creating this situation, it’s just naturally ordained.’ So you can think: ‘Oh well, that seemingly impossible task of creating something more like gender equality – we’re off the hook.’ I think that’s one plausible explanation.”

It’s easy to see how the theory that testosterone governs all male behaviour, making it futile to ask them to change, might appeal to men. But why have so many women been willing to subscribe to it?

What’s interesting, she says, is how easily what she calls the T-Rex theory of gender politics can be superficially misleading and easily misread “as very positive towards women. ‘Women are wonderful, they’re so warm and kind and caring.’ It’s very much an equal but different. So it’s not a kind of antipathy towards women, and I think there’s an appeal for women in being perceived more positively than men are. Unless, of course, women start to behave in ways that don’t conform. Benevolent sexism says: ‘Oh, women are so sweet and kind and caring.’ But that very easily pushes into hostile sexism, because if they’re not sweet etc, then they’re bitches.”

As the mother of two boys myself, I’m keen to know how Fine’s work has informed her own parenting, and how she hopes it will influence that of her readers. I should by now have guessed, though, that didactic prescriptions will not be forthcoming. When I ask, she almost flinches, and looks appalled.

“I don’t really feel qualified to give parenting advice.”