The Farmer's Husband

A father and his son are hurt in a car crash.  While the father’s injuries are being dealt with in the emergency room, the boy is rushed in for surgery. But on entering the operating room, the surgeon says, "I can't operate on this boy. He's my son."  How can this be?

I first heard this riddle when I was about the age my kids are now (riddles are epidemic among second-graders).  I’m pretty sure it took me a minute or two to figure out the answer.

The surgeon was the boy’s mother.

This merited a laugh of surprise.  How tricky! 

I don’t think it occurred to me at the time that this question shouldn’t have been difficult – or even worthy of being a riddle.  “Surgeon,” after all, is not a word that has a gender, in the English language – not, that is, unless we mentally assign it one.

At the age of seven, my brain was already chock-full of preconceptions.  Not only were default-doctors male, but I’d accepted that “the farmer’s wife” was a character who showed up in songs and stories, while “the farmer’s husband” never, ever did.  I was already sexist – and, most likely, ageist, sizeist, and racist, too.  Not explicitly, that is.  Not consciously.  Unconsciously, though, I was a bouncy little bundle of biases. 

But then, we all are.

Yeah, that’s a controversial piss-off-your-friends kind of statement.  What?  Me?  No way!  But, based on my not-terribly-scientific personal observation of our society (The World as Nancy Knows It), it’s nonetheless a true statement.  Yes, we’ve made some splendid progress between my generation and my kids’.  We’ve gotten past much of the most egregious and overt “but can she type?” discrimination that my mother had to suffer, and we’re capable, as a nation, of electing people with appreciable melanin.  But even in the radically modern world of 2013, I’m both fascinated and horrified by the degree of differential treatment – “profiling,” if you will – dished out to both children and adults by people who are NOT nasty racist creeps or slimy sexist pigs. Many of our skewed assumptions are hidden even from ourselves.

If my anecdotal ramblings don’t pass muster, I can offer data to back them up. (Data!  Full of numbers!)  Researchers at Harvard (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz, 1998) have come up with a whole battery of tests that use paired words, reaction times, and error rates to tease apart that subtlest and trickiest of mental knots: separating what people think they think from what they actually think.   (Those Harvard types are tricksy).  The “Implicit Association Tests” (IATs) measure everything from consumer preferences to self-esteem.  I’ve taken a few of these tests over the years – mostly when my procrastination reaches epic proportions (which is common), and when I remember they exist (less common).

I hadn’t thought of IAT’s for a while – and I hadn’t yet tried out the mom-surgeon conundrum on my kids – when I brought them to the first day of 4H camp a couple of weeks ago.  The camp director was all smiles as she wielded her clipboard and greeted the children.  “Are you a wild man?” she teased the little boy in front of us, who shyly shuffled his feet.  She offered the same riposte to his brother.  “How about you, are you a wild man?” And then she moved on to the next kid in line -- my petite, blonde little girl.

“Oh, you’re so cuuuute!” cooed the 4-H leader.

No, she’s a wild woman, I wanted to snap – but I didn’t, of course.  I couldn’t act all frothy-mad and self-righteous – not only because a middle-aged mom who starts taking out leaders of the 4H in the botanical garden is likely to end up as the most amusing item on the daily police blotter, but also because this woman was so plainly a nice person.  A good, kind, well-meaning person. I would have bet ten bucks on a nickel that she was not consciously trying to “profile” the children in her care.  She was not a malevolent biased cretin.  She was merely… just like the rest of us.  But she did remind me of the existence of the IATs.

Viewing “implicit associations” through the lens of parenthood gives me a whole new rationale for self-examination.  Am I passing on my own biases to my offspring?  Are they picking up biases from other well-meaning adults? 

In this regard, I know I’m a second-generation worry-wart. Years ago, my mother told me that she chose an ophthalmologist solely based on her gender, because she wanted her kids to know that women could be doctors.  In other subtle and not so subtle ways, she tweaked my view of the world with examples: the daddy who did the cooking, the family with a black stepfather, and so forth. There weren’t necessarily a lot of examples – it was barely even the 80s yet – but there were some.  And… maybe it was enough to render me Not A Total Jerk.

Or was it?  Thinking back to IATs of the Past, I recalled being ashamed to find out that I was ageist, a bias that I can regret at leisure as I become increasingly ancient.  I couldn’t recall what other results I’d received.  So I went and found the tests again.

The first set I found were randomly assigned, so I ended up taking three.  I discovered that although (whew) I associated Caucasian and Latino surnames indiscriminately with words representing intelligence vs. brawn, I linked the white-person names more closely with “human” words, and Hispanic names with “animal” words.  Um…ouch. 

My results for black/white race bias… well, I’ll admit I was kind of holding my breath.  I spent more than two years living in Jamaica, being the pale-white fleck in a dark ocean of humanity.  That was many years ago, but during that time, I feel like I at least made progress in quelling any latent idiocy.  Plenty of recent news has made it clear that our nation isn’t even remotely close to surmounting this problem.  I’m not even talking about profiling unarmed teenagers in hoodies; there are also the people who can’t even handle a Cheerios commercial.  Luckily, however, my IAT results were reassuringly balanced.

Moving on, I was particularly curious about how I’d do on a gender-related test.  Was I really any better than the 4H leader I’d felt so snotty about?  After years of noticing how often people praise girls for being pretty, sweet, charming, cute, and well-dressed – and then, barely pausing to draw breath, praise their brothers for being strong, fast, brave, smart, and tough – I somewhat dreaded finding out what was embedded, parasite-like, in my own brain. 

As it turned out, the particular test that I unearthed linked gender-specific first names with words related to either “career” or “family”.  Would my fingers be quicker to find matches when “Julia” was on the same side of the screen as “home” and “Ben” was paired with “office”, or when “Rebecca” was over by “professional” and “Daniel” was with “children”?

Conveniently, the website gave me a rundown on what thousands of other participants have demonstrated regarding the dusty inner recesses of their brains.  And they put it in a nice table, like this:

Test Result	% of Test Takers
Strong association between male and career	40%
Moderate association between male and career	15%
Slight association between male and career	12%
Little or no gender association with career or family	17%
Slight association between female and career	6%
Moderate association between female and career	5%
Strong association between female and career	5%

What did this really mean?  I wasn’t entirely sure.  It certainly showed that my kids are going to have to battle a few assumptions – and so are the boys, because “home” and “family” are not dirty words.  The skew is still steep – but then again, most of the people in that top 55% or so would probably not try to kick women out of the boardroom, or even realize that their own instincts were anything but fair.

So, how did I fit in? What did my results tell me about me own peculiar brain?

“Your data suggest a slight association of Female with CAREER and Male with FAMILY compared to Male with CAREER and Female with FAMILY.”

So, I was one of the renegades, although not wildly so.

Although I was a bit smugly pleased, I was also surprised. Yes, I deeply believe that men and women should be equally matched to “career” and “family.”  The tough choices made in balancing the two should be equal choices.  Among my friends, this is mostly the case.  For me, Jay, and the kids, it’s certainly true.  But in the world at large, and in the formative years of my upbringing… not so much.

Why would my results not reflect this?  Why, in fact, would they reflect a slight opposite bias, a kind of Alice-through-the-looking-glass world full of female CEOs?  What made my fingers do the backward tapdance on the computer keys?  This seemed important, given that I want to figure out how to raise non-biased kids.

I thought a bit more about the test, and realized what might have happened.  I’d been asked to repeatedly pair four female names and four male names with words relating to home or office.  But the names, in order to have genders, had to be real names.  And real names (sometimes) already have associations in my head.  I know several Bens, Daniels, Julias, and Rebeccas.  But I can only think of one Emily.  In my head, she is firmly – and I think she’d be pleased to know this – associated with “Professional” – and not with “Children”.  On the other hand, the “Paul” who springs to mind is pretty clearly linked with “Family.”  And that’s not at all a bad thing, either.

So, the test didn’t work for me.  It was unfairly weighted.  Not valid.

Or… was it?  True, single individuals do not constitute average results.  But, on the other hand, we all experience humanity as a series of single individuals, rather than as a statistical phenomenon. Single interactions.  Role models.  Real human beings.  Sure, we might always imagine a male when the word “surgeon” appears, but confronted with a female in her scrubs, holding a scalpel, we adjust pretty quickly. 

It was in conjuring this image, and recalling the riddle that went with it, and reminiscing about my mother’s earnest ophthalmologist selection, that I remembered an incident from way back when the kids were no more than four.  They’d recently had two sets of checkups, first from our excellent family dentist, Phyllis, and then from the doctor who has been caring for them since they were fetuses, our friend Corrine.  A few days later, out of nowhere, Molly asked me, “Mama, can boys be doctors, too?”

The memory made me smile – and it also made me relax.  I can’t protect my kids from all the subtle differences in treatment that they are already facing – and will face throughout their lives, based on the crap-shoot of their skin color, their hair color, and the genitalia they came equipped with.  Nor can I stop them from developing biases, based on the world they experience and the osmosis of other people’s preconceptions.  At some level it drives me nuts to know that I can’t mathematically balance the stereotypes so that the numbers come out even.  But for every stereotype, I can at least make sure that the kids see occasional counterexamples.  Or even, perhaps, too many counterexamples. 

Out of amused curiosity I wondered -- had my kids’ “backward” gender bias regarding medical professionals changed in the past few years?  The opportunity to test this arose today, when the twins were in the bathtub together, doing more arguing than washing. I decided to distract them.  “Can I ask you a riddle?”  Quickly, I related the car-accident/surgeon old chestnut.

The kids looked puzzled for only a second or two.  Then they both started talking. (I’ve gotten pretty good, over the past few years, at decoding two conversations at once).  Molly reasoned, “Well, the dad was in the car, to the surgeon must have been the boy’s mo…”

But Lizzy was way ahead of her.  Before her sister’s sentence was half done, she’d already demanded, “But why couldn’t she do surgery on her own kid?” 

Lizzy, honey, there’s something you should know.  If boys work very, very hard in school, they can grow up to be doctors, too.  So if you meet a boy doctor, I don’t want you to be biased against him, ok?

Maybe next bath night, we’ll discuss the farmer’s husband.

http://www.understandingprejudice.org/iat/index2.htm

Leaning ... toward baking cookies for the office

Photo courtesy of the Breakup Triathlon

A few days ago, a friend of mine brought my attention to an online story highlighting Susan Stamberg's stellar career with National Public Radio.  The article – perhaps inspired by the recent Lean In buzz -- focused on the question of what advice older women would give to their younger selves.  Reader comments were numerous, but my friend enthused that “by far the best comment” was:  “Dear Self: To be taken seriously, dress better and learn earlier how to act like a pro in meetings. Keep your "business face" on in all communications and don't bake for the office.”

When I saw this, I blanched. If this quote offered any indication of the grading scale by which I am measured, I thought, I am not just doing poorly; I am earning an irredeemable F.

Professionalism is not my strong suit. 

Last Sunday, I was standing around in Spandex shorts and a sports bra, drenched, when I spotted someone I knew.  I greeted her by name, my voice only slightly obscured by the huge chunk of honey-oat bagel I was shoving in my mouth. 

She smiled uncertainly – the polite greeting of someone who has no idea who the heck you are, but is much too nice to say so.

“I’m Nancy,” I reminded her.  Was it the raggedly dripping pigtails on either side of my head that threw her off, or was the bare skin of my torso blinding her with its fish-underbelly whiteness?  “I interviewed you for the ACCAP job last week.”  Then I bit off another large hunk of bagel.

Dignity and I are not closely acquainted.  Not ever, not in any context.  But should I, I wondered, be trying a bit harder in the “professional” realm?

Officially, I’m the Network Coordinator at the Scenarios Network for Alaska and Arctic planning, a climate change research group at the University of Alaska.  Unofficially, the nametag outside my cubicle grants me the title “Head Monkey.”  It was put up about three years ago by a coworker (and friend), as a joke.  It sports a photo of a chimp (which, I of course know as a biologist, is an ape, not a monkey).  It was never taken down. 

I regularly wander around the office in sweatpants, T-shirts left over from college, and bare feet. I make jokes in meetings – and some of them are vaguely risqué.  I sign my emails “N,” call people by their first names regardless of rank, and admit to my collaborative partners at government agencies that my work schedule is dictated by when the school bus comes and goes.  I also (oh, the shame!) wantonly leave apple cake and leftover brownies on the break room table.

Is this really so wrong?  And does it have anything to do with gender?

Well, maybe.  I can’t possibly comment on Lean In, in which Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, exhorts women to strive for the professional pinnacle.  For one thing (note to internet commenters in general – this is kinda a key point with regard to vehement and vituperative editorializing), I haven’t read it.  However, I do know that women are still mired in a wage-gap rut that has barely closed in my lifetime.  ABC news reports that “Women working full-time earned just 80.9 percent of what men earned per week in 2012.”  The Center for American Progress Action Fund puts the figure at 77%.

There's simply no joking about this.  It’s a problem long overdue for a solution, and it pisses me off.  But if I (a PhD-holder and a research professor, for heaven's sake) am not setting myself up to be taken seriously, am I somehow part of the problem?

Ok, I lack dignity, I tell myself defensively, but it doesn’t have anything to do with being a woman.  Besides, I usually have a reason for it.  My semi-nude bagel-consumption was perfectly logical, given that I had just completed a triathlon.  The young woman I’d interviewed – who was, in fact, the top candidate for the job – had done the same.  She was just as damp as I was, and probably just as hungry.  Moreover, there was no clear avenue toward “professionalism” in this soggy context, because I was in the awkward position of not being able to tell her that we were about to offer her the position.  The paperwork hadn’t yet cleared with HR.  (Gods of bureaucracy, I have you in my sights, y’hear?)

Instead, I started a conversation about something I knew she’d relate to.  At her interview, she’d mentioned that she’d been out of the workforce for a short time because she has a two-year-old.  So I talked about small children.  And stomach flu.  That’s right – knowing exactly how much I had in common with this vibrant young scientist, based on her résumé and her interests, I talked about my puking first grader.  And when, a few minutes later, I spotted another post-race coworker in the poolside crowd, we talked about … daycare for her toddler.

I know, I know.  Anyone care for a stereotype with their bagel?  How on earth can I be taken seriously if I don’t know how to “keep my business face on”?  Indeed, many debaters in the wage wars argue that women earn less than men because they choose to do so.  Women pick careers that are less stressful, more flexible, more open to part-time employment, more “female” – so that they can spend more time with family.  On the other hand, others argue that the reason women choose to be the ones to take more time off with kids is because they are being paid less to begin with.  

Either way, was this a choice I made?  And if it was, should I feel defensive about it?  Irascible?  Guilty? What flavor of guilty?

I like chocolate-chip-guilty the best – I always have.  Luckily, when I went back to work on Monday morning, I found that our IT director, wizard of computer hardware and cookies, had left a generous number of the latter in the break room.  He’s a new dad, and working only part time these days, but he still manages to keep up with the software licensing, the network issues, all our terabytes of data storage, and the gooey treats.

As it happened, my boss was home sick that day.  His two little girls had passed on to their daddy the latest horrific chest cold.  Luckily, he got hold of me via email.  Sure, I told him, I could cover the interview he had scheduled with the guy from Switzerland’s public radio.  This sort of thing happens regularly around here, and we always cover for one another.  When the temperature hits forty or fifty below zero, people’s cars get finicky.  There are sudden dental emergencies; sick parents who live on the other side of the map; and ailing dogs.  Once, my boss called me at the last minute to give a presentation for him.  He couldn’t make it in to the office, he explained, because his goat was kidding. 

When the Swiss guy showed up, I was wearing old jeans and a t-shirt, but that was fine, because so was he – and this was a radio interview, after all.  I told him a heck of a lot about climate change science in the far north.  I also told him about the vagaries of living in an environment underlain by thawing discontinuous permafrost.  I described how Jay and I built our cabin.  I described the variety of biomes to be seen in the space of the half-mile walk to the school bus stop.  He asked more questions about those personal aspects of the interview than about anything else.  We called each other by our first names, and I offered him coffee.

Back at my desk, I found an email from our tech lead.  Like me, he’s part of the office’s four-person “management team”.  “A few of us are headed over to HooDoo today after work.  If others would like to join, I'll pitch in for a few pizzas…”  He’d cc’d the entire staff list. 

Well, why not?  If you work in a cool office, then everyone is invited to the local brewing company at the end of the day.

Somewhere between the brewery invitation and the quick dash across the road with the inhabitant of the cubicle next to mine to see if Hotlicks Ice Cream had opened for the season, I decided that the well-meaning advice about how to be taken seriously as a Professional Woman was not so much wrong, as utterly inside-out. 

We don’t need women to dress better.  We don’t need them to “keep their business face on” at the expense of taking time to care for their children -- or their parents, or their dogs, or their goats.  We certainly don’t need them to stop baking chocolate-swirl pound cake with streusel topping.  What we need is for men to do all these things, too.  And at my office, it’s happening.

Yes, it’s important to Get Stuff Done at work.  Yes, sometimes we all need to stop multi-tasking and focus on getting the report written, the documents signed, and the &%$@ paperwork back from HR.  Sometimes it’s even necessary to come in and work a bit of utterly unpaid overtime on the weekend (although if you’re a non-exempt employee you must never, ever admit to this, lest you face dire consequences such as paperwork, and maybe spanking).  Being professional can be important, and I even have a few semi-respectable clothing items to prove it.  But in my opinion, being human is more important than being “professional” – for women and for men.

Being human means having a life that’s complicated, messy, multifaceted, rewarding, funny, and real.  It means juggling the pieces to make them fit as best you can.  When I drop by the office on weekends, I bring along the kids, and let them draw on the one-sided paper supply and make cool stuff out of the cardboard and plastic recycling.  Jay does the same.  No one has ever complained about stray rainbows on the whiteboards.  Being human means passing on our well-worn stroller/bike trailer to the guy down the hall with a new baby, giving the little green pull-wagon and wooden cars to the triathlete with a toddler girl, and donating the itty-bitty moose slippers to whomever snagged them from the break room.  I’m not sure who that was, but there are an awful lot of small people to choose from.  And if the coworker who asks me for breast-feeding advice when we run into each other at the coffee pot is male, I’m not in the least bit surprised.

Of course, even as I paint this rosy picture, I know I’m incredibly lucky.  I work thirty hours per week.  So does Jay.  We use the extra time to hang out with our kids, take part in ludicrous outdoor adventures, and (upon occasion) bake stuff.  We choose to live an inexpensive lifestyle, but we’re also immensely fortunate to have the skills, the degrees, and the jobs required to make this workable.  Most people don’t.

This brings me back to that wage gap, and all the politics and social injustice that go with it – a hydra of a problem if ever there was one.  The United States is woefully backward with regard to affordable childcare, healthcare coverage (particularly for part time workers) and wage gaps not only between males and females, but also between CEOs and workers.  I could rant about this for pages (or for hours, depending on whether you like to take your rants visually or aurally) but that would be, as I’ve been noting in fifty different spots on the spreadsheet-du-jour, “Outside the scope of this project.”

I will add, however, one salient postscript.  In the ABC article I perused, Ariane Hegewisch of the Institute for Women's Policy Research notes that “there may also be some reluctance to hire women for high-powered, lucrative jobs when there is the chance that they may take time off in the future to have children.” 

Our top candidate for that ACCAP job – the mother of the two-year-old – mentioned in the course of the interview that she plans to have another child. 

Well, excellent.  When she does, maybe someone will have an extra car seat or a pair of moose slippers to pass on to her.  It will be easy to find her -- because yesterday the Bureaucracy Gods reached down from on high and gave us the green light.

Welcome, New Person.  I’m the Head Monkey; feel free to ask me whatever you’d like.  There are muffins on the counter.  I hear you enjoy triathlons…

How to be a Zero

Your Overall Performance…

Yes?  Yes?  I wasn’t sure I bought into the idea that this webpage was going to tell me anything non-bogus, let alone insightful, but I was kind of curious.  I mean, who wouldn’t want the scoop on their Overall Performance? 

No, this was not an I.Q. quiz.  Nor did it claim it would tell me what my patronus is, what video game character I am channeling, or how many  minutes I’d survive after the Zombie Apocalypse. The test at hand had been provided by the BBC’s Science and Nature department – not exactly peer-reviewed literature, but dorky enough to seem credible.  The purported goal of the survey was to provide “an indication of where you fall in the male-female brain continuum.”

In truth, the whole concept made me squirm.  What is “brain-sex”, exactly? I’ve always railed against the mindset that brought us Teen-Talk-Barbie (“Math class is tough!”)  I’ve always maintained that beyond the obvious hormonal and physical differences, the two genders aren’t as inscrutably alien to one another as we insist on pretending they are.   Women can change tires!  Men can change diapers!  Come on, people, trendy books notwithstanding, we are not actually from different planets.

Or… are we?  Being of an analytical mindset (how very male of me), I’ve never given much credence to joke-memes about male vs. female shopping habits, communication habits, and showering habits (except to note that I am invariably doing it wrong, and don’t own a loufa).   However, present me with a few salient facts about hemisphere dominance and the relative sizes of the inferior-parietal lobule, the limbic system, and the parietal region, and I start to take notice. 

It seems that researchers have found measurable differences in brain structure and function, which yield significant disparities in performance.  According to the BBC webpage, the average female respondent tipped the scales at 50 points in the “womanly” direction.  The average man leveraged fifty points on the opposite trajectory.  As I worked on the test, I couldn’t stop myself from wondering where I’d fall – and I couldn’t prevent my defensive pre-reaction:   Hey, whose inferior-parietal lobule are you calling “small,” buddy?

I’ve always felt justified in my knee-jerk reaction to gender rules.  After all, many of the cultural trimmings and trapping of male vs. female are so obviously arbitrary.  The color pink is not scientifically linked to estrogen.  George Washington and his compadres wore high heels.  Tailors and seamstresses do exactly the same job.  In some cultures, only women are allowed to go fishing.  And I do like a man in a kilt.  

Besides, I’ve known for a long time – forever, possibly – that I can’t cram myself into the mold of most female stereotypes.  I have no sense of fashion, I am terribly out of practice at crying, I studiously avoid shopping, and I sigh longingly over power tools, science fiction, and higher mathematics. 

Then again, male stereotypes don’t usually do it for me either.   Beer pretty much tastes like sump-water to me, and I don’t give a rat’s fundament what kind of vehicle you drive.  I enjoy reading aloud Shakespeare. I reserve the right to snuggle with cats and small children

I sometimes think I come across as a defensive boor in my all-female writers’ group; I keep trying to inject science and logical theory into other people’s Very Personal Essays, and I want the novelist to know whodunnit before she crafts the first three chapters of the murder mystery.  This group is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a girly bunch of females.  This is a split-your-own wood kind of crowd.  And yet I still feel, sometimes, a bit like an interloper.

On the other hand, not surprisingly, I also feel like an interloper when I’m part of a boys’ club, although (thanks to the good graces of some fantastic male friends) I’ve been there often enough.  Many years ago, I spent three summers working on a trail crew with a daunting gender ratio.  Despite my participation in wrestling matches, Tabasco-drinking dares, and farting contests, I never got male bonding 100% right.  I wrestled without first consuming cheap canned Budweiser, and I drew the line at eating horseflies on a Ritz cracker.

In other words, I screw things up in both directions.  I tend to think that when a woman tells me her problems, it’s because she wants me to solve them, rather than Just Listen.  Note to self: she doesn’t.  But when a good male friend tells me about his softball victories – or lack thereof – I’m not really there for him the way I should be, either. 

Could a BBC brain-quiz explain any of this? I had my doubts.

Whatever was up with my brain, I was pretty sure it was a congenital and permanent condition. As a kid, I adored climbing trees, making up stories, wrestling, giggling, playing checkers, and playing with dolls.  This mostly worked out fine; I made up stories in trees, giggled while wrestling, and played checkers with my dolls (yes, really).  In the years that followed, I didn’t mind being the only girl in the Huntington Public Library Dungeons and Dragons Club, and the only girl on the fifteen-person Metropolitan New York All-Stars Mathlete team… three years running.  (We were bused to Penn State to compete in the national championships.  We played bridge, discussed calculus, and did logic problems en route.  One year the bus caught fire in the middle of the night on the way home.  It was, in a word, awesome.)

On the flip side, I was also happy to attend all-girls sleepover parties and watch LadyHawke and The Princess Bride approximately eleventeen times.  Moreover, there was a goodly portion of my brain that deeply, secretly, shame-facedly, wanted Sweet Wesley to accompany my sorry little teenaged self through the Fire Swamp. I was pretty sure I’d be more use against the ROUS’s than Buttercup, but still… Farm Boy?  Fetch me that linear algebra textbook…

Such daydreams were clearly less-than-obvious to all the people who, over the years, implied -- or flat-out stated -- that I was most definitely a lesbian, or that I ought to be attracted to women.   What’s a butch straight girl to do? [Note: moving to Alaska helps]. Someone out there is probably cursing my flippancy, because being gay in our society – or any society – still is not piece of cake.  I know that.  I also know that it’s not a choice, one way or another, because it was never my piece of cake.

Annoyed at assumptions and generalizations, I tried to compartmentalize.  Gender differences were merely physical, I decided.  Brains were gender-neutral.  Brains were unbiased.  Brains were fair.  But the data was stacking up against me.  And now, here was a test purporting to measure – quantitatively! – mental traits that really do differ, on average, between the XYs and the XXs. 

What traits were they, exactly?

The results are based on the angles, spot the difference, 3D shapes, and words tasks.

Even as I worked my way through the test, I felt the scores slotting into place.  Angles?  That was probably a boy-task, but it didn’t seem too hard.  Words?  Oh, indubitably, I am an unrepentant logophile, girlishly besotted with perspicacious badinage.  Spot the Difference was a different story.  Women are supposed to notice subtleties – in shades of lip gloss, in friends’ hairstyles -- but I am the sort of person who permanently loses a pair of heavy-weight hiking boots in a thousand-square-foot home, and who once failed to notice when her housemate shaved off his full beard.  If asked to determine what items have been removed or rearranged from an arbitrary assortment of line-drawings of teapots, lawn chairs, and hats, my brain sneaks away to hide.  On the other hand, mentally rotating objects… well… don’t tell anyone, but I do it even when not completing online quizzes, just for kicks. 

Of course, life isn’t all rotating objects and missing teapots.  What about other purported differences between men and women?  What about the social, emotional, and communication stuff, the “He just doesn’t understand me!” stuff?  Truth be told, I’m even more leery of this kind of touchy-feely analysis than I am of Spot the Differences.  However, this BBC website wasn’t the only one I’d stumbled upon in my virtual perambulations.  The internet is always a great way to erode your sense of self and waste time, all in one simple step. 

Based on the fairy reputable Baron Cohen indices, I’d already learned that I “empathize” (that is, obsess about other people’s feelings) about as well as the average woman.  I “systematize” (which, as far as I can tell, means act like a cross between a train-spotter and a computer geek) about as well as the average man.   No mention was made of how either of these scores panned out in terms of diaper-changing and tire-changing, but I had my suspicions that whatever the mold was, I wouldn’t fit it.

And now, here was a moment of truth.  Your Overall Performance…

I scrolled down.

Your personal brain score: Zero.

Ah.  Well then. 

In a world of male 50s and female 50s, I was hanging at the fulcrum, in no-brain’s-land.  I was a Zero.  A Nothing.  A Nada.  And I wasn’t one bit surprised

In a way, it was relief to earn scores – scientific results! -- that so tidily matched my suspicions.  Still, the inevitability didn’t help me much in knowing what to do with my new label as the Null Set.  If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, was I out charting my own interplanetary orbit?  Did I simply not belong in anyone’s gravity well?  Was I likely to be evicted from my writers’ group?  Was I recalled with disdain by my trail crew friends?

Or… was there perhaps a role in this world for a Zero, after all?

As I pondered my Zero-ness, it occurred to me that in all-female groups I sometimes play the (annoying, but perhaps balancing) role of devil’s advocate.  What do you want with wilting flowers in the middle of February?  So what if he pees in the shower?  So what if he mentally rotates objects?  C’mon, it’s fine, all guys do it. 

And in male groups?  Well, I may not have gotten things 100% right among the Tabasco-drinkers, but maybe it was sometimes better to be a little bit wrong.  On trail crew, I was useful as a Giver of Backrubs.  Straight boys will not do this for each other, ever, no matter how long a day they have put in with a crowbar and shovel -- but they are so pleadingly grateful for a girl with strong, callused hands.  I also read aloud in the tent at night, like a peculiarly mud-splattered parody of a Cub Scout leader.  All those large, sweaty guys begged for just one more chapter of the Hobbit. 

I now realized another salient fact, too.  The bell-shaped curves of Normal Distributions being what they are, I am not the only Zero out here.  Yes, science shows that male and female brains differ, but they differ on average.  Even the BBC page admitted to the word “continuum”.  Statistics are meaningful at the population level, but they tell you nothing about whether little Susie thinks that Math Class is Tough.   Maybe Susie likes to mentally rotate objects.  Maybe – shocker – she’s a Zero too.  If so, I want to meet her.

When I find myself with other Zeros – suspected or confirmed, male or female – I feel a thrill of camaraderie.  When I encounter someone who mixes math-nerdery and word-nerdy into a single fruity cocktail, who sees no inconsistency in cracking raunchy jokes during a Serious Discussion of Feelings,  who gets wildly distracted by trying to explain an esoteric scientific principle to a small child snuggled on his or her lap… I get it.  We’re the Zeros.  We’re bilingual. We’re interplanetary.  We’re at once both total misfits and missing links.

I still get all edgy when too many “him vs. her” jokes clog my Facebook page.  I still want to eviscerate Teen Talk Barbie.  But I don’t need to deny the existence of Venus.  I don’t have to pout at the mention of Mars.  Even if I don’t inhabit one of those celestial orbs, I’m not adrift in space.  After all, there is a planet between the second and fourth rocks from the Sun… and I hear it has a way better atmosphere.