Why Gender Matters
Are boys and girls really that different? Twenty years ago, doctors and researchers didn't think so. Back then, most experts believed that differences in how girls and boys behave are mainly due to differences in how they were treated by their parents, teachers, and friends. It's hard to cling to that belief today. An avalanche of research over the past twenty years has shown that sex differences are more significant and profound than anybody guessed. Sex differences are real, biologically programmed, and important to how children are raised, disciplined, and educated. In Why Gender Matters, psychologist and family physician Dr. Leonard Sax leads parents through the mystifying world of gender differences by explaining the biologically different ways in which children think, feel, and act. He addresses a host of issues, including discipline, learning, risk taking, aggression, sex, and drugs, and shows how boys and girls react in predictable ways to different situations. For example, girls are born with more sensitive hearing than boys, and those differences increase as kids grow up. So when a grown man speaks to a girl in what he thinks is a normal voice, she may hear it as yelling. Conversely, boys who appear to be inattentive in class may just be sitting too far away to hear the teacher--especially if the teacher is female. Likewise, negative emotions are seated in an ancient structure of the brain called the amygdala.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
6mentions
5people
2008–2024years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
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Edit for formatting
- An excellent read is Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about The Emerging Science of Sex Differences.
- Looks like they _might_ have been in the study set, but weren't separated out and focused on? At any rate, the author is hoping for the same:
"In the first edition of my book Why Gender Matters, published by Doubleday in 2005, I devoted a chapter to kids who are psychologically “gender-atypical.” I suggested that these kids are somewhere in between male and female. But the Stanford study provides little support for that claim. I am hopeful that the researchers will do follow-up studies specifically looking at individuals who are gender-nonconforming, gender-atypical, and who have gender dysphoria, to see whether and how those characteristics influence these findings."
- Last paragraph of TFA:
> But “different” doesn’t necessarily imply “better.” As I stressed in the second edition of my book Why Gender Matters, apples and oranges are different. That doesn’t mean apples are better than oranges. Men and women are turning out to be different, more different than we may have imagined. That doesn’t mean that women are better than men, or vice versa. But it does suggest that if we ignore the differences, we may disadvantage both women and men.
In my experience, men and women have different ways of approaching problems. Given all of the other things that go along for the ride in male vs female bodies, it's not at all surprising to me that brains would be different between the two genders as well.
Why is it such a problem to acknowledge difference? People are different from each other and have strengths and weaknesses that don't overlap. vive la différence!
- Interesting stuff. I wonder, though:
> 62. In Why Gender Matters, Dr. Sax explains that "anomalous males" -- boys who like to read, who don't enjoy competitive sports or rough-and-tumble play, and who don't have a lot of close male friends -- should be firmly disciplined, should spend as much time as possible with "normal males," and should be made to play competitive sports.
Source: http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/womensrights/20060801seldencomplain...
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