Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and pop gender science is from Uranus
March 2nd, 2008 by Vicki BakerAs some of you may know, I am a dedicated reader of Language Log, the blog where a bunch of linguists hold forth on a variety of topics, sometimes only tangentially related to linguistics. Their posts ridiculing ignorant peeve-rants about the degeneration of English are hugely enjoyable; but another frequent theme is bad science writing and modern forms of innumeracy.
However, in this post Mark Liberman singles out an article in the New York Times Magazine for praise for finding a way to explain how “small but statistically reliable differences in group distributions” should not be seen as “essential properties of the groups themselves.”
The article profiles a school that is changing its educational policies based on hack theories about male and female brains:
On an unseasonably cold day last November in Foley, Ala., Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender’s fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls. The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls don’t appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex public education.
Are there differences between male and female brains? Research findings suggest there are some. Does any brain research yet suggest that differential single-sex education is superior to co-ed classrooms? Hardly.
Scans of boys’ and girls’ brains over time also show they develop differently. Analyzing data from the largest pediatric neuro-imaging study to date — 829 scans from 387 subjects ages 3 to 27 — researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health found that total cerebral volume peaks at 10.5 years in girls, four years earlier than in boys. Cortical and subcortical gray-matter trajectories peak one to two years earlier in girls as well. This may sound very significant, but researchers claim it means nothing for educators, or at least nothing yet. “Differences in brain size between males and females should not be interpreted as implying any sort of functional advantage or disadvantage,” the N.I.M.H. paper concludes. Not one to be deterred, Sax invited Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging at the Child Psychiatry Branch at N.I.M.H., to give the keynote address at his N.A.S.S.P.E. conference in 2007. Giedd spoke for 90 minutes, but made no comments on schooling at all.
One reason for this, Giedd says, is that when it comes to education, gender is a pretty crude tool for sorting minds. Giedd puts the research on brain differences in perspective by using the analogy of height. “On both the brain imaging and the psychological testing, the biggest differences we see between boys and girls are about one standard deviation. Height differences between boys and girls are two standard deviations.” Giedd suggests a thought experiment: Imagine trying to assign a population of students to the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms based solely on height. As boys tend to be taller than girls, one would assign the tallest 50 percent of the students to the boys’ locker room and the shortest 50 percent of the students to the girls’ locker room. What would happen? While you’d end up with a better-than-random sort, the results would be abysmal, with unacceptably large percentages of students in the wrong place.
Of course, in elementary school the height/locker room assignment would be almost completely random, and in middle school, there might be more girls than boys in in boys locker room, and vice-versa. A better analogy would be an adult fitness club that made locker room assignments based on height. How many people reading this might find themselves in the “wrong” locker room on this basis? And remember that the correlation between gender and height is stronger than the correlation between gender and brain development rates, (and also remember that there’s no evidence that the differential development rate is related to learning in any way.)
While being assigned to the wrong locker room would no doubt be traumatic, think about the harm that is caused by teaching girls that it is unfeminine to to like reptiles, or depriving boys of opportunities to learn how to work together cooperatively.
It’s time to chuck the “evidence-free rubbish” out of our schools.
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:24 am
Evidence-free rubbish has always been in our schools. But traditionally it was in the material taught, such as the old taste areas of the tongue science exercise. Pure rubbish. Much of what was traditionally taught (and often still is) is tradition that is comforting to textbook buyers. But Columbus thought the world was round, as did anyone at that time with an education. The Mayflower was of the second generation of European immigrants, not a pure forerunner. Madison started and lost the war of 1812.
But the point of the post is that now (perhaps more than before) the administration of schools is muddled up with feel-good programs to show comforting progressive methods bereft of demonstrable value. Do you remember New Math? ITA spelling? How about the cyclic way in which school segregate and integrate those of differing learning abilities? Yep, either we’ve leaving kids behind, or we’re holding kids back. Pick your battle cry.
I have always been a feminine learner. I liked to read, I happily sat quietly to watch and think. I never understood the antic games of boys at recess. But the stealthy and subtle relationship dominance games of girls also disturbed me. Give me a warmly lit room in which to read any time.
The locker room analogy strikes me as very apt.
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:18 pm
To the extent that there are measurable differences between populations of men and women, to what extent is that difference socialized versus innate? And how does one tell the difference? Extremely difficult questions. So difficult that it is a ridiculous foundation for social engineering.
Vicki: I agree with your conclusion–chuck the evidence-free psuedo-science. Why care about a child’s gender when it comes to being a student, especially when many girls are doing better than many of the boys in “boy” classes (even though, on average, the boys might be scoring better than the girls).
Perhaps it’s because I am the father of two young daughters, but I find it offensive that so many people are so willing to conclude that girls are biologically less capable when it comes to their math, science, history (or whatever) capabilities. We live in a world where all too many parents (many of them claiming to be neutral and well-intentioned) consciously steer their daughters away from the blocks and toward the dolls. My daughters have been invited to Princess parties where it is obvious that the mothers organizing the parties planted those dress-up-like-a-princess ideas in their daughters’ heads a long time prior to the party, through the toys, clothes and movies to which they have chosen to expose their daughters. Our society is working very hard to tell girls that they are different. For those in complete denial, compare the type of clothes made available to girls versus those made available for boys at a mainstream retailer like Target: http://www.target.com/ . I dare you to point out the girls’ clothes that shout “I want to be good at math and science!” or “I don’t need the approval of others!”
Until we rule out that our society (not genes) is providing the “I can’t compete” poison to girls, we should critically question the need for sex-based special treatment in academic classes.
Might there be some difference between a particular girl and a particular boy some of the time? You bet! Should we presume such a difference? As you wrote, Vicki, we presume such difference only at a potential risk of harm to the girl. Only at the risk of teaching a girl that she is incapable of doing something that she CAN actually do, because she is a girl.