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Loading...The Myth of the “Girl Brain”
Written by Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett, co-authors of The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children
Has your local public school opened up a new all-girls classroom? Are you tempted to enroll your daughter in it? After all, the principal may have offered up impressive evidence that girls learn in very different ways from boys, and this segregated classroom seems to be a great boon to girls.
The idea that the brains of girls and boys are so different that they should be parented and educated in different ways and steered towards very different careers is one of the most successfully promoted media narratives of the decade.
A small group of advocates have pushed this notion so hard that it’s become the conventional wisdom. They write best-selling books, speak to large groups of teachers, parents and school administrators, and are quoted—endlessly and usually uncritically–by the news media. They claim that due to vast differences between boys and girls, the single sex classroom will improve children’s academic achievement. That’s the argument made by Leonard Sax, head of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education and best-selling author of Why Gender Matters, and Michael Gurian (The Wonder of Girls).
They’ve been very successful. The New York Times reports that,
There were only two single-sex public schools in the mid-1990s; today, there are more than 500 public schools in 40 states that offer some single-sex academic classes or, more rarely, are entirely single sex.
But don’t drink the Kool Aid. Much of what we are being told today about single-sex classrooms is junk science, a great deal of it actually harmful to girls. These “boy-girl” classrooms are being set up on the basis of science that is outdated, incomplete or just plain wrong.
For example, while “boy” classrooms are active and rowdy, “girl” classrooms are quiet and subdued, and children are encouraged to sit close to teachers and to speak in soft voices. In South Carolina, teachers in all-girls classes say they have learned to speak more softly, because their students can take yelling more personally than boys.
The quiet classroom is based on the “fact” that girls hear better than boys. In Why Gender Matters, Leonard Sax claims that girls hear 10 times better than boys. “If a male teacher speaks in a tone of voice that seems normal to him, a girl in the front row may feel that he is yelling at her.”
But do girls in fact hear better? No. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says that Sax misrepresented the studies he examined to make that claim. In reality, “There is no functionally significant difference between boys and girls in auditory sensitivity.”
In many single sex-classrooms, gender becomes the center of the curriculum. And the educators assign action novels for boys to read or allow girls to evaluate cosmetics for science projects. In classrooms in Mobile, teachers encourage kids to use highly gendered words in writing assignments. According to one school,
[A] writing prompt for a boy might be what place in the world he would most like to go hunting or to drive on a racetrack, while girls might write about their dream wedding dress or their perfect birthday party.
In 2009, the Today show profiled a single-sex school located in suburban St. Louis, and the reading materials for the two sexes were quite different. Boys read stories featuring monsters while girls read stories featuring movie stars.
Such classes are based on the notion that the very different brains of boys and girls motivate them in very different ways—with girls interested in relationships and fashion and boys interested in sports, combat and building things.
But there is no such data. Recent research finds the differences between girls’ and boys’ brains are trivial.
Lise Eliot, Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School, did an exhaustive review of the scientific literature on human brains from birth to adolescence and concluded, in her book, Pink Brain, Blue Brain, there is “surprisingly little solid evidence of sex differences in children’s brains.”
Rebecca Jordan-Young, a sociomedical scientist and professor at Barnard College, also rejects the notion that there are pink and blue brains, and that the differing organization of female and male brains is the key to behavior. In her book Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, she says that his narrative misunderstands the complexities of biology and the dynamic nature of brain development.
Nonetheless, a major tenant of the segregated classroom is the idea that boys naturally relate to objects and understanding systems and math and science, while girls gravitate towards relationships and caring. Girls are not natural leaders or risk takers, and don’t take naturally to math, it’s argued.
British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen claims that the “male brain” is the “systematizing brain” while the “female brain” is the “empathizing brain.” (Though Baron-Cohen says that women can have “male brains” and men “female brains,” he makes clear that “on average, more males have systematizing brains while more females have empathizing brains.”) He has been published in the New York Times, quoted in a Newsweek cover story, and featured in a PBS documentary and in countless other major media outlets.
This idea was based on a study of day-old babies which found that the boys looked at mobiles longer and the girls looked at faces longer. “Male brains,” Baron Cohen says, are ideally suited for leadership and power. They are hard-wired for mastery of hunting and tracking, trading, achieving and maintaining power, gaining expertise, tolerating solitude, using aggression and taking on leadership roles.
And what of the “female brain?” It is specialized for making friends, mothering, gossip, and “reading” a partner. Girls and women are so focused on others that they have little interest in figuring out how the world works.
Is this true? No. Baron-Cohen’s study had major problems. It was an “outlier” study. No one else has replicated these findings, including Baron-Cohen himself. It is so flawed as to be almost meaningless. Why?
Read more: brains, female stereotypes, ms magazine, public schools, same-sex classrooms, science, sexism
Photo from woodleywonderworks via flickr
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Thank you for sharing..Interesting informations.Best regards!!!
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+ add your ownNatasha Walter in Living Dolls is very good on this. Do read it if you haven't already. (What is Kool Aid?)
I wish I had gone to an all-girl high school! I went to a co-ed high back in the 1970's (yes, I know, an aeon ago!) and the boys were so very rowdy that the teachers, male and female, spent much of the classroom time trying to get them to listen, to pay attention, to sit down and SHUT UP! that an hour-long lesson didn't really get started properly until about 10 minutes before we were due to go to the next one, when the whole rigmarole would start again.
Meanwhile, we girls sort of got on with learning the best way we could while the teacher flew about trying to settle the boys down. But back in those days, and in a rural farming community in Australia besides, girls were not expected to do anything much after high school, perhaps just get a job as a shop assistant for a little while before she married the local farmboy neighbour and settled down to having children.
Ah, but the 1970's was the time of the Women's Movement, and most of we girls sitting trying to study in the classroom hit the ground running and went on to university, we became doctors, lawyers, scientists, researchers, journalists! Despite the noise and disruption we still managed to thrive. And now the boys who couldn't be bothered to study are left in the dust, saying "Wut happend? Didn't we s'posed to get all the good jobs?"
Sorry guys. You should have sat and listened.
Who are these people? I had 4 boys, so I was in the habit of looking at boy toys [no I didn't choose based on the concept of boy or girl just bought toys that the were interested in] so anyway now I have grandchildren one son has a 6 yr old girl and a 4 yr old boy. They share toys. I still look at legos and cars. toy story,etc. They get a lot of electronics like leap pad. But otherwise they have a gender balanced amount of toys. What I have noticed is that my grandson will play just as happily with the plastic kitchen with food etc as he does with the toolset and cars etc. They both like Dora and all disney toys regardless of gender associations like girl princesses and boy cars My granddaughter excelles at math and loves legos. And is quite happy playing with cars and trucks. There is really little differences in the toys they like. [though my granddaughter does love princesses and fairies. while my grandson just "likes" them. So what I have discovered that if left alone and not influenced one way or the other they'll pick the toys they liked best regardless if they are labeled boy or girl.
This is happening all over the world, not just in the States. Supposedly children (more precisely: boys) and the education system have been "feminized" and boys are not being given enough attention and encouragement anymore. The evidence? Why, all those female teachers and all those female high school graduates and high achievers! Surely they must be to blame for everything that was ever wrong with any boy in any school. In truth girls are simply very hard-working, because they have to be, and it is starting to show. Also teachers and nursery nurses have low incomes and little prestige is associated with their position, so naturally there are few men in these professions. People fail to understand that what they are seeing are the results of the oppression of women and their successes in struggling against it. It has nothing to do with the oppression of men, but if male privilege is eroded even a little, that's what they all dread and scream about: boys are no longer the undisputed rulers of the classroom? It's gotta be because due to all those women, they are being ignored, oppressed, neglected!
And the solution to these destructive people is segregation. More apartheid in this world, and they truly think it is for the better! Put the girls away and have them sit still with their heads down and dream of a wedding cake with pink frosting while the boys learn to rule the world, build cities, and look down upon women (because all these are their natural, biology-given right
I don't see any arguments in favor of sex-separated schools/classrooms. Be it girls or boys, people develop in different ways, show different abilities. It's no use forcing kids to focus on the subjects which best fit their sex, because it's limiting them and "To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state."
This myth is entirely to do with culture. People learn at different speeds and have different abilities. They also mature at different rates. No-one has an inherent advantage because of gender, or any other factor. Ability is a matter of the right mixture of DNA, culture provides or limits the potential for ability to be realised. If a culture promotes a stereotype it is hard to go against it. We need another generation or two of films and tv programmes showing diverse people succeeding, not just barbie and ken lookalikes.
I am a girl, and my test scores were always highest in math. I think the subject is fascinating. In addition, I never wear makeup unless it's for a play. We seriously still have these attitudes?
Much of this talk of 'male' and 'female' brains boils down, in the end, to 'masculine, as defined by our culture' and 'feminine, as defined by our culture'.
Yes, of course there are biological sex differences in the brain! But ALL such differences that have been identified as "inherent" (e.g. entirely biological, insensitive to environment) are related directly to specific aspects of physiology (e.g. hormone production cyclicity, control of sex-specific anatomical structures), and are NOT related to any aspect of cognition in any meaningful way.
If everyone would start treating children from birth as though there were no cognitive or behavioural differences between boys and girls, or men and women... But until that happens, we do need to be mindful of the *socialization-induced* differences in behaviour and responses that exist, recognize them for what they are, and work to teach children to recognize that the gender differences currently observed in cognition and behaviour are not inherent. Perhaps after a few generations of such thought, we'll get it right.
...and this is affecting the 21st century classrooms. Clearly, a teacher can differentiate and give all of the students choices for writing prompts and science projects. There are most definitely more things in common with male and female brains that differences. Each can benefit from experiencing the differences.
What if, instead of separated classes, we teached that there are no "boys" or "girls" subjects?
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