Pink Brain, Blue Brain

[joreth]

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.

Comments

[christinaathena.livejournal.com]

Yeah, whatever natural - STATISTICAL - differences might exist, it's difficult if not impossible to disentangle from social influences. And they'd be very poor predictors of an individual child's potential anyways

[joreth]

Exactly. That's what this author is trying to do, actually, disentangle "nature" from social influences. That was the idea of testing babies for how fearless they are and simultaneously testing how their mothers treated their perceived abilities.

I think it's impossible to completely separate these things, but there are quite a lot we can do to show inferences, like this study :-)

[christinaathena.livejournal.com]

Indeed. :-) It's also a good example of how early subtle gendering begins

[joreth]

BTW, love the usericon!

[christinaathena.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[christinaathena.livejournal.com]

Sexing the Body by Anne Fausto-Sterling is another good book on that topic.

[may-dryad.livejournal.com]

Yes, I want the book just for the comparison graphs. That's such an excellent way to explain the concept that there more differences among the sexes than between them in a lot of areas.

And as I mentioned, her earlier book, What's Going in in There?: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life, is also an excellent read. One of the things she explains in it is that the brain begins with exponentially more neural connections than it ends up needing. Whichever pathways get used the most are the ones that remain and grow stronger, while pathways that are found to be less efficient wither away. A microcosmic survival of the fittest. And it definitely seems to fit in with the idea that the process of learning (gendered) behaviors physically alters the brain, so that even biological differences between the brains of men and women could be ascribed to nurture rather than nature. Cool stuff.

[joreth]

Yeah, another study not to long ago showed that men and women (with comparable training) often arrived at the same answers or conclusions or performed similarly, but different areas of the brain lit up when they were processing. The point was that the brain is highly flexible and elastic and is capable of doing a great many things no matter who the person is, but different parts of it can be "trained" to perform the same activity or to compensate for another part.

Another interesting study is where people who have had some kind of brain damage or even other kind of impairment and the brain creates new pathways to compensate for that loss or alteration.

So, yeah, when you don't use a part of the brain, that part gets diminished as unnecessary, but it doesn't automatically mean that a person is "naturally" any particular thing.

One of our greatest evolutionary achievements is the malleability of our brains, the ability to adapt and alter ourselves to suit the circumstances. If survival requires girls to be "girlie", then the girls who are best at developing those parts of the brain will pass on that ability, but when girls are encouraged to be something other than "girlie", for however you want to define it, we're totally capable of that too (and guys).

[petite-lambda.livejournal.com]

I'm in the middle of "Same Difference" now, and I wanted to thank you again for the recommendation -- this, and others!

Btw., maybe you'll like what I just wrote on the subject: http://petite-lambda.livejournal.com/14220.html

[octarinelouise.livejournal.com]

Every now and then, one of my partners gets to hear me bitch about the expectations, assumptions, and general stupidities that I encounter from people reacting to the fact that I have a biologically female form. Partner (gendered pronouns are an issue) would gladly swap bodies so we could try it the other way around for a bit, as they experience weird social anomalies from the perspective of the biologically male, and find it just as irritating.

Neither of us are quite happy with the concept of 'he' or 'she'; and yet, if we could choose, much prefer the idea of dealing with the social situation of the _other_ gender than the one we have been raised with due to accident of biology. I'm not sure how much of this is because our brains and perspectives are actually better suited to the situation of the other, and how much is just that we're tired of our own gendered situation - possibly a bit of both.

So, yeah. Social reform would be awesome, and the more parents are encouraged to raise their children to see themselves and everyone else as individuals rather than halves of an imagined binary, the awesomer the future will hopefully be.