Pink Brain, Blue Brain
Everyone of my Regular Readers should know by now that one of my pet peeves is the perpetuation of the myth that men and women are inherently different.
Of course there are some obvious physical differences, even aside from the genitalia. But study after study after study have shown that the differences among men and the differences among women are far greater, but a HUGE margin, than the differences between men and women.
I have also posed the probability, backed up again by study after study, that when we *do* see gender differences, it is because we are trained from birth to be different. Our brains are really good at adapting to the situation, so if you are encouraged to play with cars and get dirty, and discouraged from cooking, those are the skills that will appear to be "natural" to you when you are an adult. Since most of us have no real, clear memories of being 18 months old and trying to reach for the toy truck but having our mothers push a doll in our hands instead, only those of us who had *really* strong desires for the opposite of what we were being trained for have any sense of this cognitive dissonance.
Well, here's a book (that I haven't read) that makes all those points that I rant about. It's called Pink Brain, Blue Brain and it shows side-by-side graphs of the bell curves of different sex-related traits, such as height, and also *perceived* sex-related traits like math skills. I love the example that the review talks about here:
In one of the eye-opening studies cited in Lise Eliot's masterful new book on gender and the brain, mothers brought their 11-month-olds to a lab so the babies could crawl down a carpeted slope. The moms pushed a button to change the slope's angle based on what they thought their children could handle. And then the babies were tested to see how steep a slope they could navigate.
The results?
Girls and boys proved equally adept at crawling and risk-taking: On their own, they tried and conquered the same slopes. But the mothers of the girls -- unlike the mothers of the boys -- underestimated their daughters' aptitude by a significant margin.
"Sex differences in the brain are sexy," Eliot writes. And so we tend to notice them everywhere. "But there's enormous danger," she says, in our exaggeration. It leads us to see gender, beginning at an early age, only in terms of what we expect to see, and to assume that sex differences are innate and immutable. We forget that the differences within each sex -- among girls and among boys -- are usually greater than the gaps between the two.
Our assumptions "crystallize into children's self-perceptions and self-fulfilling prophecies." Girls' slightly lesser interest in puzzles and building toys is reinforced instead of challenged, and it turns into a gap in spatial skills and map reading. Parents and teachers see a boy lagging in reading and verbal skills and shrug it off with, "But of course, he's a boy."
I'm planning on picking up a copy of this book and I recommend everyone else do the same. I'm also going to buy a copy of this book for my sister, who just had her second son, and my parents, who are helping to raise my nephews. I also recommend the book Same Difference. Thanks to
may_dryad for the recommendation.
Of course there are some obvious physical differences, even aside from the genitalia. But study after study after study have shown that the differences among men and the differences among women are far greater, but a HUGE margin, than the differences between men and women.
I have also posed the probability, backed up again by study after study, that when we *do* see gender differences, it is because we are trained from birth to be different. Our brains are really good at adapting to the situation, so if you are encouraged to play with cars and get dirty, and discouraged from cooking, those are the skills that will appear to be "natural" to you when you are an adult. Since most of us have no real, clear memories of being 18 months old and trying to reach for the toy truck but having our mothers push a doll in our hands instead, only those of us who had *really* strong desires for the opposite of what we were being trained for have any sense of this cognitive dissonance.
Well, here's a book (that I haven't read) that makes all those points that I rant about. It's called Pink Brain, Blue Brain and it shows side-by-side graphs of the bell curves of different sex-related traits, such as height, and also *perceived* sex-related traits like math skills. I love the example that the review talks about here:
In one of the eye-opening studies cited in Lise Eliot's masterful new book on gender and the brain, mothers brought their 11-month-olds to a lab so the babies could crawl down a carpeted slope. The moms pushed a button to change the slope's angle based on what they thought their children could handle. And then the babies were tested to see how steep a slope they could navigate.
The results?
Girls and boys proved equally adept at crawling and risk-taking: On their own, they tried and conquered the same slopes. But the mothers of the girls -- unlike the mothers of the boys -- underestimated their daughters' aptitude by a significant margin.
"Sex differences in the brain are sexy," Eliot writes. And so we tend to notice them everywhere. "But there's enormous danger," she says, in our exaggeration. It leads us to see gender, beginning at an early age, only in terms of what we expect to see, and to assume that sex differences are innate and immutable. We forget that the differences within each sex -- among girls and among boys -- are usually greater than the gaps between the two.
Our assumptions "crystallize into children's self-perceptions and self-fulfilling prophecies." Girls' slightly lesser interest in puzzles and building toys is reinforced instead of challenged, and it turns into a gap in spatial skills and map reading. Parents and teachers see a boy lagging in reading and verbal skills and shrug it off with, "But of course, he's a boy."
I'm planning on picking up a copy of this book and I recommend everyone else do the same. I'm also going to buy a copy of this book for my sister, who just had her second son, and my parents, who are helping to raise my nephews. I also recommend the book Same Difference. Thanks to
may_dryad for the recommendation.