The myth of #mommybrain and why it matters to women

by Kathleen McCoy | September 24, 2014

UAA social scientists Claudia Lampman, left, and Gwen Lupfer, far right, and their undergraduate research student, senior Kivalina Grove, center, presented their findings on pregnancy brain bias at a behavioral science conference on campus. The scientists are preparing a paper for publication, and designing another experiment that will gauge the effect on pregnant women when they hear pregnancy will affect their memory adversely, and when they hear it will not. (Photo by Katie Behnke/UAA)

If you want a quick litmus test on contemporary attitudes toward pregnant women and their mental capacity, just search the Twitter hashtag #mommybrain. I did it one recent Thursday:

When you go all the way home because you think you forgot your wallet....but it is in the middle console of your car. #mommybrain

I totally did think it was Tuesday. #mommybrain

Filled a crockpot with meat and spices, set timer for 8 hours, felt like super mom. Hour later realized I hadn't plugged it in. #mommybrain

There's even advice:

#mommybrain is not a #myth. Here is how you can master it. (Links to a radio show about the science behind overcoming#mommybrain)

The only problem is, there's not much science behind #mommybrain.

UAA social scientists Claudia Lampman and Gwen Lupfer, and their undergraduate researcher, senior Kivalina Grove, have looked.

"The research does not support that there is even a major memory deficit going on," Lampman said. "The only thing we found is a minor memory deficit late in the third trimester."

"And even that could not be replicated," Lupfer added. "And rats even perform better at certain things when they're pregnant."

"Exactly!" Lampman laughed. "You have massive blood flow when you are pregnant. I was like super mom....So I was really interested in not just the memory thing, but that it had crossed over into stupid."

Lampman first noticed the trend when she was working with a student on a research project. The student had made an error in her work, and Lampman was advising her on ways to salvage it.

"She explained her mistake just like this," said Lampman, striking her own forehead and saying "'Pregnancy brain.' I was dumbfounded that someone (who wasn't pregnant) would use that as a synonym for stupid."

Even more bluntly, Lampman considers it dangerous.

Discrimination against women in the workplace is still rampant, she says. A passive or even good-natured acceptance of hormone-induced cognitive decline-even though it is false-will hurt women, she says.

"What happens if you're a lawyer and you're pregnant. For nine months, everyone at your firm thinks you are stupid. When you come back and you aren't pregnant anymore, do they go back to not thinking you are stupid? I don't think so."

Worse still, women are complicit.

Sample of images used in the implicit association tests to detect bias regarding the intelligence pregnant women. (Photo courtesy of Gwen Lupfer/UAA)

"Women like it," Lampman says. "It's nice to have an excuse for why you are being ditzy or forgetting where you parked your car. We like having something to blame it on. So I think the people we have to convince are women: You are not dumb because you are pregnant."

The scientists know both women and men have bought into mental deficits during pregnancy because they ran subjects through an implicit association test (IAT) last spring that supported it.

An IAT surfaces our unconscious associations between certain concepts, like "dumb," and an image of a pregnant woman. First introduced in 1998 by social scientist Anthony Greenwald, it has been used to detect racism and other discriminatory attitudes we may not realize we function under.

Grove, the undergraduate researcher, set me up at a computer so I could take the IAT. I clicked away as images of women-pregnant and non-pregnant- alternated on the screen next to positive words like "rational," "clever," and "productive" or, negative words like "dumb," "irrational" and "unproductive."

Image used in the implicit association test. (Courtesy of Gwen Lupfer/UAA)

You can't fool an IAT. "Actually trying makes you worse at it," Lampman said, "because it is a test of your reaction times. If you try not to be biased, your reaction times get messed up."

We didn't record my results, but even I could tell my times were revealing. "It is human," Lampman said, "automatic."

So here we are, all believing something that isn't true, that hormones during pregnancy make women dumber.

In fact, Lupfer points out, dads-to-be experience hormonal shifts, too, with increased prolactin and oxcytocin. "But I don't think anybody looks at a man becoming a father and thinks that he is going to be stupider."

Even more outrageous, Lampman says, is the pass men get over testosterone.

"We call women hormonal, but there is no correlation whatsoever between estrogen and bitchiness," she said. "Testosterone makes you aggressive. Men are much more likely to act in a way tied to their hormones."

Over the weekend, Lampman had seen a football commentator speak to the Ray Rice domestic violence controversy.

"He said of football players, 'We need to start owning up we are dangerous to women. We do dangerous things. This is a mental health problem and people need help.' And I thought to myself, 'You are a god. That is what we need to hear. That is the hormone harming people."

A version of this story by Kathleen McCoy appeared in the Alaska Dispatch News on Sunday, Sept. 21, 2014.