And? Who Cares if Boys are Different From Girls?

~ Laura

Mom and I were just screaming at each other about the Brooks column from Sunday. Thought I would share with the blogosphere.

Brooks writes about the conclusions of Loann Brizendine’s book, The Female Brain

ll human beings, she writes, start out with a brain that looks female. But around the eighth week in the womb, testosterone surges through male brains, killing cells in some regions (communications) and growing cells in others (sex and aggression).

By the time they are three months old, girls are, on average, much better at making eye contact with other people and picking up information from faces. During play, girls look back at their mothers, on average, 10 to 20 times more than boys, to check for emotional signals. Girls can also, on average, hear a broader range of sounds in the human voice, and can better discern changes in tone.

The impact of estrogen on the female brain results in major differences between men and women during childhood and adolescence. Later, after menopause, women lose estrogen and undergo a personality shift. Brooks says that scientists no longer point to environmental differences between the genders. It’s all genes and chemicals.

After I read this article, I thought “and?” And what’s the point, Davie? So, boys and girls are different*, But what does that mean. I mean this isn’t a science column; it’s a political and social column on an opinion page, but he never spits it out. Mom and I were fighting over the Brooks’ unstated point.

Mom: Brooks is just saying, “ha” to the feminists who kept telling me over and over in the 70s that you kids were different, because we were messing with them. If only we were more nurturing to Chris, he would like dolls. And I told them they were crazy.

Me: Brooks is also saying something else, Mom. If we’re all just slaves to genetics as Brooks says, then women have to be the moms and dad have to go to the office or war or the soccer field. I think that’s what he’s really saying there, but he’s too chickenshit to get it out.

* I grudgingly agree that boys and girls are different now that I have kids of my own. However, I think they grow more alike as they get older. There is also wide range of behavior, with lots of outliers. And environment can do a great job in softening differences, playing to strengths, and reducing the social and political inequities that grow out of personality differences.

Published by Laura

13 thoughts on “And? Who Cares if Boys are Different From Girls?”

  1. “I grudgingly agree that boys and girls are different now that I have kids of my own. However, I think they grow more alike as they get older.”
    Hmm. My simplistic snap judgment on this ridiculously difficult issue (and isn’t it wonderfully annoying how Brooks is always picking up on these meaty issues that many other pundits often ignore, and then after clumsily poking it once with a stick says “Well, guess that explains everything”?) is actually the opposite for yours. Or maybe not entirely opposite; I think it goes in stages. 0-4, quite different. 5-11, increasingly similar. 12-young adulthood, increasing differences again. Then with adulthood, increasingly similar once more. How’s that for a theory?

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  3. And can I just add, not always? As the mother of a girl child who hates dolls, loves books, loves math, hates sports, wants to be a wildlife biologists, is great at music, and spends most of the day yelling at the top of her lungs? This vast interest is saying girls this, boys that would do this child a vast disservices, so what would the Republicans do with kids like her? The hell with treating people like categories, can we please?

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  4. The question, I think, is how much work we put into making girls like trucks, math, etc., and making boys like dolls, reading, etc., when they’re young, and how panicked or angry we should become when they fall into the stereotypes, either as children or adults.
    I had a similar fight with a friend of mine when I suggested that Lawrence Summers was right: having studied early childhood development, I knew the research indicated that boys and girls develop differently, and these childhood differences could certainly lead to long-term differences in aptitude, especially at really high levels. This doesn’t mean we discourage girls from doing math – we develop teaching styles that build on their strengths, starting at a very early age, so they succeed as much as they possibly can. And some girls will be great at it no matter what. It just means we don’t *automatically* assume that it’s discrimination if, as a group, they don’t succeed at the highest levels. (Not that discrimination might not still play a huge role – and I assume it does now.)

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  5. Yeah, my argument is not with biological differences between males and females, but with how cultures (like America’s) build on top of those differences and value some differences over others in ways that foster systemic inequity.
    In other words, girls playing with dolls (or not) = fine by me. Systematically undervaluing caregiving work because it’s traditionally female? Not fine by me.

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  6. Here I get a chance to bloviate about something I think I know about, having one girl and two boys. Different, from the starting blocks. Different, different, different. The honor roll at their elementary school is consistently girl-heavy. Girls are good at keeping quiet, doing reports with nice covers, remembering their homework. These traits are rewarded. Factoid: the Thai civil service is 70% women. It’s always been an examination hiring system, civil service jobs are good and desired jobs there, 70% of those succeeding are women.
    Much of my parental effort is devoted to nudging my guys toward acting more girlish, I guess: complete your assignments, do as good a job as you CAN, guys, not just enough to get by.
    College, these days, is more and more a female province, men are thin on the ground at many of them. This despite a lot of covert affirmative action, admissions officers demanding a lot more for a young woman’s application to be successful than for a young man’s. How do I keep my guys in the running? And, how do I help my girl (about whom I am less worried, she seems to me to be on a path which will serve her well, as near as one can tell this young) retain her current vigor and assertiveness?
    Now, Brooks. Besides the fact that he has to churn out two columns a week to get paid, and it’s a nice gig: tens of thousands of American parents tried putting their daughters in overalls and offering their boys dolls in the 70s, and those children are now filling out sex roles not too different from their parents. So I think he’s not wrong. I am with Jackie that you look for ways the system is skewed to underreward ‘female’ tendencies and work choices, and try and change them.

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  7. While I find it suspicious that Brooks and others who write about sex differences use them to bolster “Leave-it-to-Beaver” type sex roles as somehow innate, I agree with the commenters here who note that we have a problem in our culture with valuing “boy stuff” over “girl stuff.” We value toughness and aggression over gentleness and nurturing. We value being good at math over verbal ability. And we certainly do not value caretaking.
    Anthropologist Peggy Sanday has studied the Minangkabau, a matrilineal egalitarian society in Sumatra. The Minangkabau value what we might call “girl stuff” – gentleness, docility, nurturing, family – and punish aggression and belligerence. What we consider normal “male” behavior is censured among the Minangkabau. It’s very interesting to see a society that is almost a mirror-image of ours – and, incidentally, the Minangkabau are simultaneously proud of their “matriarchaat” whilst being devout Muslims.

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  10. Yeah, now I have, meg. Thanks. Lizardbreath, your post helped out, too.
    Oooh, interesting info, Ailurophile.
    Dave, I wonder if schools value and reward “girl” behavior, while the real world rewards “male” behavior. So, even if your sons are struggling now, when given the opportunity to break rules and be aggressive, after college, they’ll acheive more than your daughter who is neat and quiet. Schools are training the girls to be submissive. Just another way that our educational system is bad for women. I don’t know. Half baked ideas on this rainy afternoon.

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  11. Just because girls’ and boys’ brains look different doesn’t mean that the differences aren’t environmental. Isn’t it possible (even likely) that environmental effects actually literally shape our brains? We are embodied, and it’s not surprising to me that our behaviours could be/ are evident in our brain chemistry.
    Boys are treated differently from girls from the moment they’re born. The cumulative effect of these differences are likely to be evident in their brains. The way we treat them are systematically different, so the differences in brain chemistry could be too.
    I say this as someone who is the mother of two girls, and a sociologist! I sit firmly on the nurture side of this debate.

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  12. The “nature-nurture” debate, like all such dichotomous struggles, tends to persist for far longer than it should because of the incessant, and irrational need for so many people to believe that it must be one thing or the other. In fact, the two sides can both marshall evidence for their side because there is evidence for both things, because the truth of the situation is best represented by a model that incorporates both.
    It is indisputable that males and females have different sets of genes that are the foundation of different brain and body chemistries. And the pattern of expression of those genes is different as well. And these differences have been selected, for millions of years. Some sex differences are as ancient as sexual differentiation itself – which is hundreds of times older than the human species.
    I tend to view the “nurture” side of this debate as the one that is most guilty of confusing the issue – for they are the side that has most forcefully pushed the notion that it must be one or the other (and in their case, obviously the environmental factors). I fail to see how anyone who accepts that life has evolved, and who studies human biology could possibly be attracted to the “blank slate” view of human nature. Although most people holding this view probably think they accept evolution, it certainly seems like they actually reject what is one of the central “discoveries” of evolutionary biology – that humans are evolved creatures just like all the other species.
    Environmental factors, culture, teaching can all obviously affect the manner in which individuals develop, but it seems to me that these are peripheral effects. Females (the overwhelming majority – not necessarily every last one) have been more nurturing than males for over 200 million years, ever since the rise of mammals – our lineage that is defined by having females give birth to live young and to then provide them with sustenance for some period of their development. This is an adaptation with critical survival benefits that has been selected for for millions of generations. To think that encouraging boys to play with dolls can somehow overcome that is to be completely out of touch with our evolved nature.

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