Delusions of Gender (27 page)

And it’s all happening at a school near you. At a coeducational school in my neighbouring suburb, ‘parallel education’ is provided for boys and girls in certain years. As a journalist explains, ‘teaching boys [maths] was more about hands-on practice: drawing, doing the exercise. But in a class with girls, Davey [the middle school principal] discusses the issues for a full 10 minutes at the start of the class, while the graph is put in the context of a relationship between two people.’
³⁵
Perhaps Davey has read one of the other ‘neurofallacies’ propagated by Sax, that because boys process maths in the hippocampus (another one of those primitive parts of the brain that males so seem to favour), but girls process geometry and maths ‘in the cerebral cortex’ (a statement so unspecific as to be a bit like saying, ‘I’ll meet you for coffee in the Northern Hemisphere’), this indicates a need for very different educational strategies. Sax claims that because the primitive hippocampus has ‘no direct connections to the cerebral cortex’ [um, again, not quite right] boys are happy dealing with maths ‘“for its own sake” at a much earlier age than girls are.’ But for the girls, because they’re using their cerebral cortex, ‘you need to tie the math into other higher cognitive functions.’
³⁶
The goal of inspiring children to get
excited about maths is certainly admirable. But Sax’s claim that the results of a neuroimaging study of maze navigation point to a brain-based need to teach girls and boys in these different kinds of ways is simply neurononsense.
³⁷

Mark Liberman has analysed in meticulous detail many of Sax’s dubious brain-based educational claims, and has described the way so-called educational experts like Sax and Gurian use scientific data as ‘shockingly careless, tendentious and even dishonest. Their over-interpretation and mis-interpretation of scientific research is so extreme that it becomes a form of fabrication.’
³⁸
While it might be amusing to think up romance stories involving stolid Mr. X-Axis and flighty Ms. Y to amuse the girls, or an interesting challenge to discuss a book without mentioning mental states, the danger is that self-fulfilling prophecies are being delivered alongside the new-look, single-sex curriculum.

Vicky Tuck, while president of the Girls’ School Association, recently argued that there are ‘neurological differences’ between the sexes that are ‘pronounced in adolescence’. The practical implication? ‘You have to teach girls differently to how you teach boys.’
³⁹
Is she right? Remember how easily spurious findings of sex differences can lead to premature speculation. Remember what Celia Moore and Geert De Vries have pointed out – sex differences in the brain can be compensation, or a different path to the same destination. Bear in mind that neuroscientists are still quarrelling over the appropriate statistical analysis of highly complex data. Recall that many sex differences in the brain may have more to do with brain size than sex per se. Remember that psychology and neuroscience – and the way their findings are reported – are geared towards finding difference, not similarity. Male and female brains are of course far more similar than they are different. Not only is there generally great overlap in ‘male’ and ‘female’ patterns, but also, the male brain is like nothing in the world so much as a female brain. Neuroscientists can’t even tell them apart at the individual level. So why focus on difference? If we focused
on similarity, we’d conclude that boys and girls should be taught the same way.

You’re not convinced? You feel sure these brain differences must be educationally important? Okay, fine. Separate your boys and girls. Or, if you want to be really thorough, because there is overlap with these sex differences, strictly speaking one should provide separate streaming for, say, Large Amygdalas and Small Amygdalas, or Overactivated versus Underactivated Left Frontal Lobes. And now tell me
how
you tailor your teaching to the size of the amygdala, or to patterns of brain activity to a photo of a fearful face. There is no reliable way to translate these brain differences into educational strategies. It is, as philosopher John Bruer has poetically put it, ‘a bridge too far’: ‘Currently, we do not know enough about brain development and neural function to link that understanding directly, in any meaningful, defensible way to instruction and educational practice. We may never know enough to be able to do that.’
⁴⁰
And so, instead, we quickly find ourselves falling back on god-awful gender stereotypes.

We never seem to learn.

No discussion of the brain, sex and education would be complete without mention of the now-notorious theory of Professor Edward Clarke of the Harvard Medical School. In his highly successful nineteenth-century book,
Sex in Education
(subtitled, somewhat ironically as it turned out,
Or, A Fair Chance for Girls
), he proposed that intellectual labour sent energy rushing dangerously from ovaries to brain, endangering fertility as well as causing other severe medical ailments.
⁴¹
As biologist Richard Lewontin dryly remarked of this hypothesis, ‘Testicles, apparently, had their own sources of energy.’
⁴²
From our modern vantage point we can laugh at the prejudice that gave rise to this hypothesis. Yet we may have little cause for complacency.

Tuck says she has ‘a hunch that in 50 years’ time, maybe only 25, people will be doubled up with laughter when they watch
documentaries about the history of education and discover people once thought it was a good idea to educate adolescent boys and girls together.’
⁴³
But when I survey the popular literature, I suspect that this will not be where the people of the future will find their biggest laughs. Frankly, I think they will be too busy giggling in astonished outrage at the claims of early twenty-first-century commentators who, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, reinforced gender stereotypes with crude comparisons of male or female brains; or who, like Brizendine with her talk of ‘overloaded brain circuits’, attempted to locate social pressures in the brain. (
Here it is, Michael! I finally found the neural circuits for organising child care, planning the evening meal and ensuring that everyone has clean underwear. See how they crowd out these circuits for career, ambition and original thought?
)

I end with a plea. Although, as we’ll see in the next chapter, there is something captivating about neuroscientific information, please, no more neurosexism! Follow the four simple steps I set out at the beginning of the chapter or leave the interpretations to the trained professionals. Neuroscience can be dangerous when mishandled, so if you’re not sure, be safe.

As the blogger known as Neurosceptic wisely advises those who peddle neurononsense, ‘Save yourself … put the brain down and walk away.’
⁴⁴

I
once bought a toy drum that promised to stimulate my child’s auditory nerve. I took this to mean that it made noise. Clearly, the genius minds behind the marketing had stumbled on the discovery that information sounds far more impressive when couched in the grand language of neuroscience. (By the way, have I mentioned yet that these words of mine you’re reading are stimulating your occipital lobe, as well as refining the neural circuitry of your anterior cingulate gyrus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex? This isn’t just a book – it’s a neurological workout.) There’s something special about neuroscientific information. It sounds so unassailable, so very … well,
scientific
, that we privilege it over boring, old-fashioned behavioural evidence. It brings a satisfying feel to empty scientific explanations. And it seems to tell us who we really are.

After Lawrence Summers’s controversial suggestion that women might be inherently less capable of high-level science, Steven Pinker and Simon Baron-Cohen were not the only ones to talk brain differences. So did Leonard Sax. Refreshingly, Sax did not argue that brain research hints at an innate female inferiority, on average, in science and maths. Instead, he argued that the problem lies in an educational system that teaches boys and girls the same things at the same time. This is a mistake because, as he explained in the
Los Angeles Times
, ‘while the areas of the brain involved in
language and fine motor skills (such as handwriting) mature about six years earlier in girls, the areas involved in math and geometry mature about four years earlier in boys.’
¹
Sax argues that teaching should be sensitive to sex differences in the timing of development of the various regions of the brain because ‘[a] curriculum which ignores those differences will produce boys who can’t write and girls who think they’re “dumb at math.”’
²

Now, I’m all behind Sax’s goal of improving educational outcomes for boys and girls. There might be good reasons for single-sex schooling. But what are we to make of his claim that, as he put it to
CBS News
, ‘[b]oth boys and girls are being shortchanged as a result of the neglect of hard-wired gender differences’?
³

By now, you will probably be uneasy about the idea that complex psychological skills like language, maths and geometry can be pinpointed to a single part of the brain. It’s simply not the case that people use one particular lobe, or a circumscribed area of the brain, to read a novel, or write an essay, or solve an equation or calculate the angle of a triangle. And, unfortunately, neuroscience has yet to reach the stage at which it can peer into the brain and determine capacity for solving simultaneous equations or readiness to learn calculus. I can understand why this relatively subtle point didn’t set off alarm bells in Sax or the editors or journalists who brought comments like this to the public eye. But why did no one query the relevance of Sax’s statement on the grounds that boys are clearly
not
, in fact, four years ahead of girls in maths – they are not ahead of them at all, as it happens.
⁴
Nor, of course, is the language ability of a twelve-year-old boy comparable to that of a six-year-old girl. Even if we are happy to relate one part of the brain to complex cognition, clearly, this concept of neural maturation is a very poor index of actual ability – a far worse measure than, say, a maths test. So why does this kind of neurononsense get column inches?

One reason may be that neuroscience easily outranks psychology in the implicit hierarchy of ‘scientificness’.
⁵
Neuroscience, after all, involves expensive, complex machinery. It generates smart-looking three-dimensional images of the brain. The technicians
almost certainly wear white coats. It involves quantum mechanics, for goodness’ sake! I ask you, what kind of a match for this is a simple piece of paper on which a six-year-old girl has successfully added 7 and 9? Bioethicist Eric Racine and colleagues coined the term ‘neuro-realism’ to describe how fMRI coverage can make psychological phenomena somehow seem more real or objective than evidence collected in a more ordinary fashion. They describe how, for example, brain activation in the reward centres of the brain while people ate unhealthy food was provided as evidence that ‘[f]at really does bring pleasure.’
⁶
If patterns of firing in the brain can be seen as better proof of someone feeling pleasure than them selecting the box on the questionnaire marked ‘Yes, I really enjoyed eating that doughnut’, then it’s not surprising that children’s actual academic skills can be so easily overlooked when brain research is enjoying the spotlight.

I also suspect that because the brain is such a biological organ, with its axons and fat and neurochemicals and electrical impulses, there is the temptation to chalk up whatever sex differences we see in the brain to differences in male and female nature, as Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens do in
The Minds of Boys
:

The social thinkers of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s did not have PET scans, MRIs, SPECT scans, and other biological research tools available to them.… Because they could not look inside the heads of human beings to see the differences in the brains of males and females, they had to lean away from nature-based theory towards social trends theory. They had to overemphasize the power of nurture in gender studies because they didn’t have a way to study the actual nature of male and female.
⁷

Gurian and Stevens seem to equate ‘actual nature’ with ‘brain’. But really, when you think about it, where else but in the brain would we see the effects of socialisation or experience? As Mark Liberman puts it, ‘how else would socially constructed cognitive
differences manifest themselves? In flows of pure spiritual energy, with no effect on neuronal activity, cerebral blood flow, and functional brain imaging techniques?’
⁸
The ‘neuro-curmudgeons’ from the James S. McDonnell Foundation have picked up on this ‘brain = innate’ tendency, too. In response to an article in the
New York Times
that claimed from an fMRI study that ‘a mother’s impulse to love and protect her child appears to be hard-wired into her brain’ one neuro-curmudgeon put out a plea to ‘take experience and learning seriously. Just because you see a response [in the brain] – you don’t get to claim it’s hard-wired.’
⁹