So over the past couple of years there have been some meta-analyses looking at all of the peer-reviewed research on brain differences between male and female babies and children. Some of this ends up on my radar because some colleagues and I published an article in Science a few years ago about a topic somewhat related to this, and so they mention that paper and we get connected to the conversation.
Anyway, the meta-analyses show a very clear set of results from the peer-reviewed research: for young children, there is surprisingly little evidence for any brain differences between boys and girls. In fact, there is a compelling lack of evidence for all kinds of things: no evidence that young girls and boys learn differently, for instance. No evidence that girls are inherently better at reading and English and boys are inherently better at math and science. No evidence that boy babies are more focused on objects and girl babies are more focused on people. The evidence for the popular assumptions about sex-based differences just isn't there.
This is in clear contrast to the set of popular books (not based on science) that receive a lot of positive and uncritical attention from the media. These books suggests that girls learn one way and boys learn another, they suggest that schools are failing boys, there is a boy problem, boys are in trouble, men are from mars and women are from venus, etc., etc. People are eager to buy into biological sex-based differences, and this is the dominant set of assumptions guiding our conversations today.
I had an interesting experience in which I put the statement on Facebook about peer-reviewed research failing to show sex-based brain differences in children. As I anticipated, there has been something of a response from people expressing disbelief about this. Some folks say things like, "But my daughter and my son are so different."
I find it interesting that people I talk to are, in general, very very resistant to the notion that the differences you find with boys and girls are not attributed to biology. I think there are a couple of reasons for this.
For one thing, if you have a boy and a girl, and they are different in somewhat stereotypical ways (boys like to play with boy toys, girls like to play with girl toys, etc.), then you don't want to believe that you yourself are somehow responsible for this. In fact, you probably don't even want to believe it's preventable. If it's just biology, then there's nothing we can do about it. Some parents might even say, "We're not doing anything to encourage this. This is just how they are. Boys and girls are just different." It reminds me of Larry Summers' description of how he gave his girls trucks, and they played with those trucks as if they were dolls. See? Girls just play differently! (As if the anecdote were evidence of some sort.)
This argument doesn't take into account all of the ways in which kids are socialized by the broader culture. The only ways in which one could argue that boys and girls act differently and know that it's not due to socialization is if all of these factors are in place:
-- The kids are too young to be influenced by outside friends, or by other kids at preschool or daycare, etc.
-- There is no television in the house, no advertising, no commercials, no popular magazines with ads, no videos.
-- All of the books in the house are totally gender neutral. So there are just as many truck characters that are girls as boys, and just as many mommies in the books go to work as the daddies, and just as many daddies in the books change diapers as the mommies.
-- The roles played by mom and dad in the house aren't gender stereotyped. So mom works just as much as dad, and mom's career is as important as dad's. Dad does as much cooking, cleaning, and baby caring as mom does. Mom does just as much yard work and fixing of things as dad does.
And so forth. I highly doubt Larry Summers' house was like that. (To be fair, he did later come back and admit that his statements had been inaccurate.) Even if parents aren't *explicitly* encouraging different ways of behaving, we model it all the time. I'm not making an argument that having gender-stereotyped roles in a family is necessarily wrong, I'm simply arguing that if those roles exist, we can't assume they don't influence the kids in those families. We also exist in a larger cultural context that very young children pick up on. Children learn in a myriad of ways about who they are, how they belong, and what they should be doing.
I think another reason for this resistance to accepting a lack of hard-wired sex differences in children is that if we accept it, then we have to then face many more uncomfortable implications. Boys and girls do act differently. Men and women do play different roles in our society, as evidenced by the small percentage of women at the very top of the STEM fields, the small percentage of women who represent us in our political system, and the small percentage of women who are CEOs and presidents of companies. If this isn't hard wired, if men aren't somehow biologically better at object manipulation and therefore mathematics, for instance, then what does this say about the fairness of our culture? It challenges the myth of meritocracy, a myth that most Americans hold dear.
So, I've found that you'll get all kinds of resistance (from women as much as men, which makes sense to me) to the suggestion that boys' brains are no different from girls' brains. Maybe we should be taking a harder look at how we treat all of our children.
