1 INTRODUCTION
A new biological determinism is sweeping through American society. Old myths about gender differences are being packaged in shiny new bottles and sold to parents and teachers desperate to do the best they can for the children in their care. And the major mediaâincluding PBS, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Parents magazine, and many othersâare uncritically embracing these new-old stereotypes.
From the media, youâd think that there is a scientific consensus that boys and girls are profoundly different from birth, and that these differences have huge consequences for aptitude and performance in such areas as math and verbal abilities, for how the sexes communicate, for the careers for which they should aim, and for the kinds of classrooms they should attend.
As a parent or teacher, you can be forgiven for assuming that all of these beliefs are based on fact; the idea of great differences between boys and girls is the new scientific truth, âprovedâ by many experts and many studies. This toxic messageâwhich is everywhere todayâhas real-life consequences. Important new research shows that kids pick up very earlyâoften as early as two years of ageâon gender stereotypes, and if parents and teachers donât intervene, kids may get stuck in damaging straitjackets.
The true story is exactly the opposite of the popular narrative. The overwhelming consensus, validated by dozens of researchers using well-designed samples, is that girls and boys are far more alike than different in their cognitive abilities and the differences that do exist are trivial. Thatâs not to say there are no differences between the sexesâindeed there areâbut when it comes to the way boys and girls learn and the subjects they are good at, sweeping statements about innate gender differences donât hold up. Human beings have multiple intelligences that defy simple gender pigeonholes.
Unfortunately, the real (and complex) story line is generally missing from the popular media. It is buried in scholarly peer-reviewed journals and articles that seldom see the light of day. The stories that dominate the headlines frequently come from a few âexpertsâ and a few studies that are often deeply flawed. In many cases, the samples are too small, the studies are poorly designed, and the subjects are animals, not people. Moreover, many researchers make wild leaps from small, inconclusive findings to Grand Theories.
Others see conspiracies everywhereâsuch as American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, who claims in her book of the same title that there is a war against boys and that female teachers are deliberately destroying their male students.
Such arguments are repeatedly debunked by serious scientists, but the story line rolls merrily along. We hear that boys are interested in objects while girls are interested in people, that boys have poor verbal skills and girls canât do math, that boys need to read books about combat and girls need to learn science through cosmetics. (These are opinions actually parroted back to the media by classroom teachers.)
If this were all simply arcane scientific trivia, it might not be dangerous, but such ideas are gaining credence among educators across the country, and new curricula are being designed to cater to the âBoy Brainâ or the âGirl Brain.â In fact, many school districts are reshaping their educational systems, racing to set up single-sex classrooms on the premise of proclaimed massive gender âdifferences.â In short, educational policy decisions are being based on scant or no scientifically sound data.
Even the most enlightened parents canât help but respond to the unending media messages that boys and girls have such different brains, different ways of reasoning, and different hormones that they might as well belong to separate species. Parents are led to believe that their little girls and boys need different stimulation; they need to be handled differently, educated differently, and given different levels of protection.
Educators, too, fall prey to such ideas. Many teachers are buying books that promote extreme gender differences based on questionable science. At the 2006 National Association of Independent Schools convention (where we were keynote speakers), one teacher told us that his headmaster was redesigning the entire curriculum on the ideas of best-selling author Leonard Sax, who promotes pseudoscientific ideas about boys and girls. Unfortunately, management gurus are also telling young women that they should focus on their communication skills and multitasking abilities, while accepting the âfactâ that men have more ability to focus and command.
The New Segregation?
Today, there is a major drive under way to create more gender-segregated public school classrooms. The Bush administration issued new rules in 2006, letting schools override the antidiscrimination provisions of Title IX, thereby clearing the way for many more classrooms segregated by gender. As of January 2010, 547 public schools in the United States offered single-sex classrooms. South Carolina has recently set the goal of having such classrooms widely available. Not surprisingly, then, more school administrators, teachers, and parents are considering this idea carefully. They appear to be buying the notion of great gender differences in cognitive abilities, while the opposing viewâbacked by the latest peer-reviewed scienceâgets short shrift.
Increasingly, new public policies, the debate on American education, and the marketing of products to kids are being seen through the âgender lens.â
Whatâs on offer is astonishingly retrogradeâalmost Victorianâin its view of the sexes. In fact, weâre going backwards in many areas, with toy stores setting up more and more blue and pink toy aisles.
This message is couched in the language of science, but whatâs really being offered is at best pseudoscience, in which anecdotes are presented as data and sweeping generalizations are based on inconclusive research.
We hear from one best seller, The Female Brain, that such an entity does exist, but the bookâs own footnotes contradict what the author says. A runaway best seller, The Dangerous Book for Boys, urges a return to the boyhood of the rural nineteenth century, when boys skinned rabbits, shot arrows, and reenacted heroic male battle adventures. Girls have no place in this scenario of adventure and risk, but distressingly, Disney films has already bought the rights to the book. Amazon is recommending a new book by best-selling author Michael Gurian, titled The Minds of Boys. Among Gurianâs unscientific beliefs is the notion that boys have brain structures that girls donât possess, structures that allow boys to excel in math and science. The author is in great demand as a lecturer at schools and education conventions. Meanwhile, the New Republic contends that schools offer âverbally drenchedâ curricula that discriminate against boys, and New York Times columnist David Brooks writes that we have to give boys simple books about combat to overcome their lack of verbal ability.
At a time when parents, teachers, and the public at large need real information, what they get instead is bias and misinformation, and both boys and girls are being harmed by the simplistic, stereotyped view of their ânatures.â Stereotypes retain their hold, especially when they are endlessly promoted in advertising, TV, the news media, popular music, movies, novelsâeverywhere. These powerful beliefs act as funnels, directing girls and boys into particular ways of being and behaving. We are told that girls canât excel at math, and shouldnât aspire to the highest levels of management, and that boys are hyperaggressive, and canât be nurturing or cooperative even if they want to. Children internalize such stereotypes at an early age, thus putting brakes on the fulfillment of their individual potential.
However, research tells us that these stereotypical beliefs have no basis in fact. There is no evidence to support the claims of massive innate gender differences in such critical areas as math, verbal ability, nurturance, aggression, leadership, and self-esteem. Most differences are tiny, a far cry from what the media and some very vocal pundits present.
Itâs ironic that as neuroscience tells us more and more about the similarity of our brains, popular culture incessantly beams the opposite message, drowning out the real story. Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Chicago, conducted an exhaustive review of the scientific literature on human brains from childhood to adolescence and concluded that there is âsurprisingly little evidence of sex differences in childrenâs brains.â
Despite this fact, parents and teachers still operate as if the sexes were hugely different. Eliot notes, âIn many ways the world for preschoolers is more gender divided than ever.â This trend is troubling because âthe more parents hear about hard-wiring and biological programming, the less we bother tempering our pink or blue fantasies and start attributing every skill of deficit to innate sex differences. Your son is a later talker. Donât worry, heâs a boy. Your daughter is struggling with math. Itâs okay, sheâs very artistic.â
The net effect of all this is more, rather than less, stereotyping by parents and teachers, the most important adults in childrenâs lives.
A Message That Needs to Be Heard
Although we are swimming against this strong media current, our voices are starting to be heard. We were, as we noted, invited to keynote the annual convention of the National Association of Independent Schools in Denver in 2006. Between us, we have been invited to give major presentations at Columbia University and at a major conference on boys and girls sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. We have presented our ideas at schools around the United States and Canada, and we gave a major keynote lecture in Germany on coeducation and gender stereotypes. Building on our lectures and extensive research, this book has an urgent message. Adults provide the environment for our children. What we do and how we do it affect how our childrenâs brains begin to organize themselves and to process information. We now know that the young brain is not something that is formed at birth and always remains the same. New pathways are constantly being laid down and others are being destroyed.
The good news is that armed with understanding and solid information, we can avoid the traps of fostering traditionalâand restrictiveâbehavior in children. And we can limit the unintended consequences of well-intentioned parents and teachers who may be unwittingly encouraging stereotyped behavior in children.
An example: It may be that mothers in particular have internalized stereotypes about boys, even when their children are very young. Mothers of boys, research finds, often talk differently to their sons than to their daughters. Boys are often given commands and instructionsââPick up those blocks!â âCome here!â while mothers more often infuse emotion into exchanges with their daughters (âDoes the doll feel good today?â âDo you like Michele and her mommy?â) Young boys may get the message that emotions are not âboy turf.â
Hereâs another example. Every time parents toss a ball around with their sons, the boysâ brains learn something about speed, distance, perspective, and velocity. As a boy gets better at this game, he wants to play more, and his parents are likely to want to engage more in ball playing. A daughter who doesnât get such experience doesnât develop these brain pathways and connections, is less good at playing catch, and is less likely to engage with her parents in this kind of activity. Years later, she may decide sheâs not good at sportsâor math.
And while girls in affluent schools that sponsor elite sports, such as varsity soccer, are learning great new spatial and motor skills, girls in poorer public schools are not so fortunate. In such districts, recess is being canceled and girls have many fewer opportunities to take part in sports, in school as well as at home.
Our children face a time of unprecedented change and uncertainty. One thing for sure is that we are moving fast into an information age in which skills such as problem solving, critical thinking, communication, and cooperation will be crucial for success. All our children, boys and girls, need to master these skills, and they all have the ability to do so.
Of course, over time, because of boysâ and girlsâ varying experiences, some gender differences do appear, and they can have consequences for behavior or career choice. But if parents and teachers act early enough to counteract stereotypes, these differences can be overcome.
We will look at the most popular books on parenting that deal with gender, and show how they are filled with pseudoscience. Many best-selling books have a very traditional agenda and are written in a way that makes them seem highly authoritative. But those who read these books donât know how biased and ill-informed they are.
Here are the major problems these books have, to one degree or another:
- They are not written by trained researchers in the field.
- They are based on anecdotal material or on the authorsâ own observations.
- They are based on studies of adults, not children.
- They are heavily based on animal studies.
- They are based on clinical work with disturbed patients.
- They make sweeping generalizations from small and non-representative samples.
- They are not informed by peer-reviewed scientific data.
- They are often written by people with an ideological agenda, who blithely disregard new science that challenges their entrenched positions and threatens their financial stake in promoting their ideas.
Through the incredible attention given to these books by the media, most of us believe that the sexes are vastly different. And these beliefs affect our expectations for our kids, the experiences we provide for them, our response to their behaviors and choices, the schools we select for them, and just about every other aspect of our relationships with them. They also affect the expectations kids develop about their own competencies.
Harvardâs Howard Gardner, one of the nationâs most eminent experts on learning, suggests a different way of looking at kids. His thesis is that there are seven different kinds of âintelligencesâ and that children can possess them all, although they might be most gifted in particular areas. (More detail about this later on.)
Gardner thinks that children, when they are very young, have wide-ranging curiosity and learn all sorts of things from the world around them. âIn the first five years of life, young children the world over develop powerful theories and conceptions of how the world worksâthe physical world and the world of other people. They also develop at least a first-draft level of competence with the basic human symbol systemsâlanguage, number, music, two-dimensional depiction, and the like.â
The intriguing fact is that kids donât need adults teaching them how to do all this. âChildren develop these symbolic skills and these theoretical conceptions largely by dint of their own spontaneous interactions with the world in which they live.â
But as this period closes, kids enter the culture created by adults, a culture that guides them into areas the adults think appropriate. Shortly after the age at which school begins, youngsters begin to assume a quite different stance toward the opportunities in their culture. More often than not, these opportunities are highly different for boys and girls. âThis period then functions as an apprenticeshipâan apprenticeship en route to expertise in specific domains, and an apprenticeship en route to expertise in the ways of oneâs culture. The free-ranging explorations of the young child have ceased.â
Itâs almost like the Middle Ages, when young children, especially b...