Male and female ability differences down to socialisation, not

genetics

Behavioural differences between the sexes are not hard-wired at birth but are the result of society's
expectations, say scientists

Gender agenda: Mel Gibson in What Women Want. Photograph: Icon Film Distribution

It is the mainstay of countless magazine and newspaper features. Differences between male
and female abilities – from map reading to multi-tasking and from parking to expressing
emotion – can be traced to variations in the hard-wiring of their brains at birth, it is claimed.

Men instinctively like the colour blue and are bad at coping with pain, we are told, while
women cannot tell jokes but are innately superior at empathising with other people. Key
evolutionary differences separate the intellects of men and women and it is all down to our
ancient hunter-gatherer genes that program our brains.

The belief has become widespread, particularly in the wake of the publication of international
bestsellers such as John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus that stress the
innate differences between the minds of men and women. But now a growing number of
scientists are challenging the pseudo-science of "neurosexism", as they call it, and are raising
concerns about its implications. These researchers argue that by telling parents that boys have
poor chances of acquiring good verbal skills and girls have little prospect of developing
mathematical prowess, serious and unjustified obstacles are being placed in the paths of
children's education.

In fact, there are no major neurological differences between the sexes, says Cordelia Fine in
her book Delusions of Gender, which will be published by Icon next month. There may be
slight variations in the brains of women and men, added Fine, a researcher at Melbourne
University, but the wiring is soft, not hard. "It is flexible, malleable and changeable," she
said.
In short, our intellects are not prisoners of our genders or our genes and those who claim
otherwise are merely coating old-fashioned stereotypes with a veneer of scientific credibility.
It is a case backed by Lise Eliot, an associate professor based at the Chicago Medical School.
"All the mounting evidence indicates these ideas about hard-wired differences between male
and female brains are wrong," she told the Observer.

"Yes, there are basic behavioural differences between the sexes, but we should note that these
differences increase with age because our children's intellectual biases are being exaggerated
and intensified by our gendered culture. Children don't inherit intellectual differences. They
learn them. They are a result of what we expect a boy or a girl to be."

Thus boys develop improved spatial skills not because of an innate superiority but because
they are expected and are encouraged to be strong at sport, which requires expertise at
catching and throwing. Similarly, it is anticipated that girls will be more emotional and
talkative, and so their verbal skills are emphasised by teachers and parents.

The latter example, on the issue of verbal skills, is particularly revealing, neuroscientists
argue. Girls do begin to speak earlier than boys, by about a month on average, a fact that is
seized upon by supporters of the Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus school of
intellectual differences.

However, this gap is really a tiny difference compared to the vast range of linguistic abilities
that differentiate people, Robert Plomin, a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London,
pointed out. His studies have found that a mere 3% of the variation in young children's verbal
development is due to their gender.

"If you map the distribution of scores for verbal skills of boys and of girls you get two graphs
that overlap so much you would need a very fine pencil indeed to show the difference
between them. Yet people ignore this huge similarity between boys and girls and instead
exaggerate wildly the tiny difference between them. It drives me wild," Plomin told the
Observer.

This point is backed by Eliot. "Yes, boys and girls, men and women, are different," she states
in a recent paper in New Scientist. "But most of those differences are far smaller than the Men
Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus stereotypes suggest.

"Nor are the reasoning, speaking, computing, emphasising, navigating and other cognitive
differences fixed in the genetic architecture of our brains.

"All such skills are learned and neuro-plasticity – the modifications of neurons and their
connections in response experience – trumps hard-wiring every time."

The current popular stress on innate intellectual differences between the sexes is, in part, a
response to psychologists' emphasis of the environment's importance in the development of
skills and personality in the 1970s and early 1980s, said Eliot. This led to a reaction against
nurture as the principal factor in the development of human characteristics and to an
exaggeration of the influence of genes and inherited abilities. This view is also popular
because it propagates the status quo, she added. "We are being told there is nothing we can do
to improve our potential because it is innate. That is wrong. Boys can develop powerful
linguistic skills and girls can acquire deep spatial skills."
In short, women can read maps despite claims that they lack the spatial skills for such efforts,
while men can learn to empathise and need not be isolated like Mel Gibson's Nick Marshall,
the emotionally retarded male lead of the film What Women Want and a classic stereotype of
the unfeeling male that is perpetuated by the supporters of the hard-wired school of
intellectual differences.

This point was also stressed by Fine. "Many of the studies that claim to highlight differences
between the brains of males and females are spurious. They are based on tests carried out on
only a small number of individuals and their results are often not repeated by other scientists.
However, their results are published and are accepted by teachers and others as proof of basic
differences between boys and girls.

"All sorts of ridiculous conclusions about very important issues are then made. Already
sexism disguised in neuroscientific finery is changing the way children are taught."

So should we abandon our search for the "real" differences between the sexes and give up
this "pernicious pinkification of little girls", as one scientist has put it?

Yes, we should, Eliot insisted. "There is almost nothing we do with our brains that is hard-
wired. Every skill, attribute and personality trait is moulded by experience."

URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/15/girls-boys-think-same-way