How much do you “know” about the differences in brain chemistry and function between females and males? Studies are reported in the media every week claiming men use their brains one way and women another. We intuitively think that seems likely, and we accept the findings because they’re scientific. So, based on what we know about the differences, we look at children and think “well, obviously she loves pink because she’s a girl and that study said that women are drawn to bright colours”, or something similar.
Except, and it’s a simple distinction we sometimes forget, children are not adults. This is what Pink Brain, Blue Brain reminds us.
Dr Lise Eliot is a neuroscientist who specialises in studying the plasticity of the brain; that is, its ability to change and develop in response to various stimuli. She set out to discover the actual differences in brain usage between infants and children of different sexes, to see if they mirrored what had been researched in adults. What she discovered is while there are differences, they’re substantially smaller than in adults.
Children grow and change as a result of the expectation of their carers and peers. Unfortunately, those expectations are heavily coloured by what we think is the inevitable role of that particular sex (remember, sex is biological, gender is social). So it’s commonly believed that boys struggle with language, particularly writing, but are more adventurous and braver than girls. Yet, as Dr. Eliot discovered, while boys might, on average, demonstrate language abilities slightly later than girls, they are not necessarily ‘behind’; vocabulary, for example, is much the same in both sexes, despite girls appearing to demonstrate a wider range of words. But because we think we know that boys find it harder, we give them a free pass and fail to work on helping them express themselves. Equally girls show a little less aggression because of lower levels of testosterone, so we assume that they can’t and won’t be challenged physically, inadvertently encouraging them to be more passive and less physically able.
I’ll give one example from the book that was very telling. One experiment involved a carpeted ramp that could be set at a variety of angles to the floor. Mothers were asked to estimate how much of a slope their infant children would be prepared to crawl down. The children were then tested by gradually increasing the incline without the mothers present. Across the board, mothers routinely overestimated the slope their sons could cope with, and underestimated their daughters’ confidence. Not only that, but across the whole experiment, the average slope angle was slightly higher for girls than it was for boys. If your own mother makes these assumptions based on nothing more than your sex, isn’t it inevitable that the world will mould you into what it thinks you should become?
In Pink Brain, Blue Brain, Dr. Eliot painstakingly works through mountains of available studies to pick out the actual sex differences from the perceived ones. At the end of each chapter she summarises the findings along with suggestions about how to combat the weaknesses being built into each sex and encourage a comprehensive set of strengths and skills in both. Her writing is straightforward and engaging without being excessively simplified, and her interjections of personal experience with her own children welcome and human. She knows – just as we all do – that just knowing that we’re influenced by society isn’t enough to combat that influence. We have to accept that as siblings, parents, relatives and friends we are going to come into any situation involving children with preconceptions about sex and gender, but there’s still lots of things we can do to try not to give in to them wholeheartedly.
This book is not about pretending there are no differences, but about accepting that they’re much smaller than we think and that we are doing children a disservice by assuming there are things they simply ‘can’t’ do because of their sex.
Pink Brain, Blue Brain will of course be of particular interest to parents or potential parents, but educators, relatives of youngsters, fellow researchers and indeed anyone just interested in the science of sex identity (particularly if they have questions about Simon Baron-Cohen’s reports) will also find this an interesting read.
Image via Amazon.co.uk