Getting a tiny bit feminist on the teacher's ass!

[SolidGoldBrass]

I didn't raise my voice. I didn't unshave my legs or anything.
It just so happened that DS and I bumped into his class teacher at the playground this afternoon and we had a pleasant chat; the teacher turns out to have DC of her own, of a similar age to DS. She mentioned something about girls being very different to boys. I very very gently said that this was in fact rubbish and suggested she read Delusions of Gender, and added that I thought every teacher should read it as a lot of the stuff about gender difference you hear these days was not only wrong but dangerous...

I'm going to be 'one of THOSE mothers' forever, aren't I?

Boys and girls are different in some ways and I feel that forcing them to be the same can be equally damaging.
I've looked after a lot of very young children. Although I would say that more boys prefer physical play and girls are more likely to prefer drawing, for example, they aren't restricted or denied in any way.
I look after a very lively, rough and tumble boy who has always loved wearing dresses from the dressing up box and whose favourite colour is still pink. He is much more likely to charge about, playing football than he is to putting the dollies to bed: the essential point is that he has equal access to both, as do all children here, regardless of their gender.
Very interesting that, even though his parents have actively encouraged a pink, glittery, girly interest, he is still a lively, energetic boy who loves football and playing with other boys.

Some is nurture, a lot is down to hormones (that infamous testosterone surge that turns 4 year old boys into wrestlers, for example ).

Also I notice that when I am at school waiting for the nursery gates to open, the boys are permitted to run around and be much more vigorous than the girls ever were (I stood on the same steps with my girl 3 years previously). My natural instinct is to calm my son down at this point because it's an urban school with a narrow pavement and it's dangerous but also because they are going into school and I don't want him to be all over-excited and silly and then have to go in and sit down quietly in assembly.

But I've given up trying because all the parents of boys just let it happen and much as I don't like the social conditioning, I also want my son to be part of a group of friends. Meanwhile the parents of girls are holding onto their hands and waiting patiently for the doors to open.

Some people would say that parents of boys do this to accommodate boys' naturally more physical natures but I have not observed this in my own children. Indeed I observe quite a bit of physicality in girls getting suppressed. What I have observed is that the boys are, very very subtly, given more leeway to be physical.

"My DS (3) went to the dr this morning for his jabs. He got two stickers for bravery which he chose - one car one and one flower one. He loves cars but he doesn't yet know he's not supposed to love flowers."

Well, I am afraid I am at the same stage as your son. I love flowers and plants, my wife has absolutely no interest. I didn't know I wasn't "supposed" to love flowers.

As to my own sons, they are clearly boys in many ways. The way they compete for every little thing, their attention span, the way they need a lot of exercise to behave decently. On the other hand, they are always wanting to try dresses as "dress ups" and love smearing themselves with my wife's make up. My 3.9 year old also loves pretending to be pregnant and is obsessed with babies. I think liking certain colours and certain toys is almost certainly social conditioning, all young children clearly love pink for instance and glittery things, boys are just conditioned away from it. On the other hand, the more important things of how children play and how they learn could well be (and I believe are) more ingrained according to sex. Again these are two bell curves with plenty of overlap, but that does not mean they fit one curve.

I would certainly point out what most girls and boys do but I would also tell them that what they like is what they like and it is personal and not up to anyone to tell them.

We need to treat everyone as individuals but, particularly in education (where boys are struggling at the moment), if teaching has to be done in large classes, and if there are general rules as to how to optimise boys' and girls' learning experiences, I think we would be mad to ignore them inn favour of an agenda.

Interestingly - priming works in terms of race as well as gender - they tested white men playing basketball - they did fine with a white instructor, then they brought in a black instructor and all the white men immediately did worse - they think it is due to the American stereotype that "white men can't jump". The study was repeated with combinations of black/white and they found that once primed with the stereotype of "white men can't jump" performance by white men dropped and the black men went up.
This has led to theorising that the reason blacks in America do better at sports than academic work is that it is expected that black men will be good at sports - not intellectual stuff. Despite there being no reason that a black man can't study at university rather than do sports.

If this works through race then it will work via gender, girls are expected to be quiet and not like maths - so, strangely this happens. - all my reading and studying on the subject has led me to believe that there are far more similarities than differences between men and women and boys and girls - but societies are obsessed with looking at the differences.

100-200 years ago it was scientifically "proved" that - women can't learn Greek - their heads would explode. Reading fiction would cause brain fever in women, if a woman was in an orchid house her libido would be so inflamed she would be a danger to herself (!!!!!!) and that women couldn't be doctors because their brains were not big enough to learn all that was necessary. They also were deemed incapable of composing for orchestras - although composing for the piano was ok - why????? Also, 100 years ago girls were all dressed in blue and boys in pink - so that is a totally artificial construct as well.

Nearly all the differences that have been proved turn out to be wrong.
Genes have been shown to contribute only 50% or less of a person's personality - and in the genes only 5% is different for the sexes - so the actual differences your gender genes are making are 5% of 50% - which is not a lot. Family birth order will actually contribute more to personality development than the sex of the child.

BTW - boys struggle in education because the behaviours rewarded/expected in young boys - running, shouting, being physically boisterous - are totally unsuited to sitting learning in a classroom setting.
Whereas all the behaviours rewarded in young girls - being nice, sitting still, being quiet, being obedient - are the perfect skills to learn in classroom setting. So girls start with the massive advantage of having already learned to sit still and pay attention.

When girls were not taught alongside boys it didn't show up. Only boys were educated and they got physically punished for being rowdy - so they learned by coercion. We have now skewed the teaching and education models to work with quiet, obedient children who don't need physical punishment to learn - which ironically, is the girls.

i have two boys and a girl and theyre all just different. I think the actual girly stuff and boysih stuff is just whats pushed onto them. They all go for what society likes them to go for - ie my daughter loves to think shes princessy, but tbh, my boys have all played with dollies too and my daughter gets rough with the boys and is definitely the most coordinated one.

People are different. Boys and girls are different, but no more than two girls are different or two boys are different.
Any difference between the sexes can be seen between two people of the same sex

"Boys and girls are different in some ways and I feel that forcing them to be the same can be equally damaging. " Nobody is suggesting that at all. In fact why do you think that. Children are all different to each other so in fact pushing children down the pink princessy or climbing trees route depending on their sex is damaging.

"he is still a lively, energetic boy who loves football and playing with other boys." Well obviously! Who doesn't at that age? Running about expending energy is what children do. Would he run around with girls playing with balls if only girls were around? Very probably. Would girls be playing football if all their peers were. Very probably.

Boys ARE different to girls, men are different to women. Why oh why does everything and everybody have to be ever so same and equal etc?
Why can't people stop making issues where there are none.
We are all different, some are smarter, some are dumber, some are pretty, some are ugly etc ad nauseam.
SGB, you are BU and one of 'those' mothers.

Surely the fact that boys and girls have different hormones in itself makes them different? You are basing your knowledge on one book and then trying to enforce your opinion (and that's what it is, it's hardly an irrefutable scientific fact) on someone who has a different opinion. Sounds pretty arrogant to me OP.

Yes, a lot of people do like to ignore the role of sex hormones on brain development, both in utero and growing up, when it obviously does play a role.

Well thank God for Larry coming along to the thread to explain it all to us...

I'm actually on the second chapter of "The Gender Delusion" at the moment and finding it fascinating. I would agree that by 5, most children will have been exposed to so many social influences that yes, most of them will conform to gender stereotypes. DD is fairly ungirly (likes many things that she has been told are 'for boys' like Dr Who, trains, science, the colour blue & Lego City, and savagely critiques toy ads that only show boys playing with a toy) but she still likes having long 'princess' hair, dressing up and watching Barbie films .

Mrs TP, is that thing about the fingers actually true? In that case, why am I so shit at sport?? :o

"Boys ARE different to girls"..."We are all different..." Slight conflation of arguments there!

"Surely the fact that boys and girls have different hormones in itself makes them different?" Why would that make them different. Obviously there are sex differences, no-one is denying that. But why would hormones make you like football or princesses?

this really bugs me.

I have 2 dds, and one ds (a baby still).

dd2, as a toddler/young child was loud, demanding, loved racing around, favourite colour red, and everything bright/noisy. none of this pastel malarkey, or sitting still doing puzzles for her. she did wear dresses out of preference (have you any idea how hard it is to find bright red dresses? pink was hated, as were flowers) - this was a sensory issue as she didn't like the feel of trousers around her waist.

then she went to preschool.

and was repeatedly told her clothes were 'too pretty' to spoil painting/playing outside; was told by the girls she must be a boy (she had shortish hair, and liked doing 'boys games'). told by the boys she couldn't be a girl because she didn't like pink/didn't play with dolls etc.

she was really quite unhppy for a while - she couldn't understand why she was being told she wasn't a girl, when she knew she was. she had me telling her everyday that I didn't care what happened to her clothes (in terms of paint spills etc), but was told differently by the person in charge at school. she got the message she was meant to take more care if she was wearing something 'pretty' than if she was wearing a t shirt and jeans.

she started liking pink to fit in ith her peers - she still prefers red and brighter colours when she is being honest with herself, and I hope that one day she will be strong enough to be honest with her friends too.

all this came from school, and other people's expectations of her. she had no notion that she was not 'supposed' to like boys games before she started school. if anything, she probably had rather more 'boys toys' than 'girls toys' at home. she certainly had never been told not to run about/climb trees/paint/glue/whatever because she was wearing a dress

I have repeatedly had words with her teachers. there is only so much they can do, of course, since a lot of the attitude is also coming from the other children.

but it has been truly eye opening as to how much pressure and expectations are put upon very small children.

now I have ds too. people repeatedly ask me if being a mum to a boy is any different from being a mum to girls - ds is 7 motnhs old! so far, he has slept not a lot (like most small babies), drunk a lot of milk (like all small babies), babbled a bit (like all small babies), and weed and pooed a lot (like all small babies) - where exactly is this difference supposed to come into play? and yet there are people at every turn desperate to put any slight (perceived) difference down to the fact that he is a boy.

he is at the lovely piercing shriek stage - I have lost count of the number of times people have said he is being loud because he is a boy - if that is the case, how come both my girls also had the same loud piercing shriek phase (along with most babies I have come across)?

I do not understand this desperate need to fit everythign into neat little boxes, especially since the labels for those boxes are social contructions in the first place.

YABU. Have had a girl and a boy myself and they are indeed both different, even though they are both outgoing and confident. It's something that goes right down to their cells. Definitely nature not nurture.

"n trying to enforce your opinion (and that's what it is, it's hardly an irrefutable scientific fact) on someone who has a different opinion. Sounds pretty arrogant to me OP."

How unfeminine of her..........!

I am just starting to read Delusions of Gender and am already getting depressed for DD(3). She will almost certainly be going to a mixed junior school and I can see her being subject to the sort of educational stereotyping reflected on here and elsewhere in society. I was at an all girls school throughout my education and there simply was no suggestion, at school at least, that girls were naturally good or bad at anything. As a result, some of us excelled in maths and sciences - others veered more towards the arts. But I have no recollection of any implication that, as a girl, I should be avoiding maths or the hard sciences.

I worry about DD though because even at nursery she is getting "Boys do this - girls do that" messages which she is bringing home with her and I can only see this getting worse when she goes to school and the kind of prejudice about boy/girl differences which is demonstrated on this thread and elsewhere starts to affect what she thinks she SHOULD be interested in rather than what she maybe actually is interested in.

However, I do realise that as parents DH and I can try to reinforce the message that she can do anyhting she wants to and sets her mind to. I do think that reading books like Delusions of Gender at least opens your eyes to the conditioning children are receiving all around them and helps you to think about how you might start to counteract that.

A long way round of saying good on you OP and I hope I have the confidence to take a similar line in the future - I am planning to speak to DD's nursery about what they do to counteract boy/girl stereotypes (or at least to avoid reinforcing them).

But why would hormones make you like football or princesses? That's just gender-stereotyping. That has noting to do with the many complex differences in emotional and personal development that differ between the sexes!

Wingdingding - I feel like you and I must have read entirely different versions of Pink Brain, Blue Brain. As I read it, the central thesis was that there were differences -small ones with very low d-values (difference in means divided by standard deviation - otherwise known as broad bell curves which mostly overlap). And because gender stereotyping kicks in so early (Elliot references studies with parents treating babies quite differently - e.g. the "how steep a ramp do you think your baby can tackle, compared to what it can tackle when supervised by a nursery nurse who doesn't know his/her gender?" experiment) and the brain is very plastic early on, it's impossible to work out how much of the small differences are down to nurture and how many down to nature. But because the brain is plastic, parents and teachers can choose either to massively enhance gender differences, or to compensate for them. Most of Elliot's "treat them differently" suggestions are actually suggestions as to how to compensate for socially conditioned differences in experience - for instance, if little boys tend to arrive in school with lower fine motor skills than their
female peers, because the little girls have been encouraged to spend hours drawing and stringing beads while the boys were being encouraged to kick a football around, the boys will be disadvanted. But you can compensate for this by encouraging them in activities which emphasise fine motor skills. Likewise, if the only way you can get your little girl to play with lego (which will develop spatial ability) is by buying her a set of pink lego, then do it (even if you hate pink). Now, while I'm aware of postmodern literary theory which says there is no such thing as authorial intentions or a single interpretation of a text, I think that this is hogwash in this instance, and that you've simply wildly misunderstood the book. I suggest
you might want to re-read it.

Larry - the tick box test has been replicated loads of times and in loads of different contexts. It applies to any group socially perceived as being inferior. You can mess up a very able group of black students' performance by getting them to fill in an ethnicity questionnaire first, it's even been done by simply having the teacher tell a group of primary children that blue eyed children are better at maths than brown eyed children - then giving them a maths test - hey presto, the brown-eyed children under perform.

And yes, I do take this stuff very personally. I was the little girl who went through school liking climbing trees and being good at maths, and having to struggle against the system to be allowed to choose the academic subjects I wanted (biology was compulsory because I was a girl). And if there's anything that's like a red rag to a bull, it's the suggestion that this might be down to me having been exposed to too many foetal androgens - as if my personality isn't my own, but is some sort of biological freak of nature. Nope, I'm only part of a wide spectrum of women from the very girly to the very tomboy-ish, and there's nothing wrong with where I am on that spectrum, thank you very much.

Do people on here also object to fact our Western culture teaches and conditions us to be different to other cultures?

Is this also dangerous? How should we address this?

YABU
I used to spout the 'boys and girls are the same nonsense', it is all environmental (pink toys etc)...in my twenties.
My sister-in-law put me right and I was amazed she thought differently as would otherwise agree on most things.
Life in the male-dominated workplace and now in middle-age having two boys, having been brought up in a family of girls myself....makes me ashamed to have ever held that view.
It is so naive...of course men and women; and boys and girls are different. A lot of what happens is genetic (even down to health), environmental conditioning does play a role but it is not the whole picture by any means.

I was also amazed at the 'maternal instinct' which overwhelmed me after the birth of my first child - admittedly later in life - I agree men need to be involved in their children's care but I am not convinced that they get a hormonal rush making them want to do it regardless...there's a reason women get the maternity leave as it were.
It is not unfeminist to concede that genetics do make a difference, just realistic.

Poor teacher was probably just making polite conversation...

"But why would hormones make you like football or princesses? That's just gender-stereotyping." Yes it is isn't it!

Angel - well for a start it's not a good analogy, because there are no biological differences underpinning that sort of cultural difference. And (for what it's worth) I would challenge both an old-school imperialist "western culture is inherently better" and an extreme relativist "look it's just what their culture does, not our place to comment (over, say, FGM)" viewpoint for the crap they were.

I'd be interested to know the backgrounds of the posters on this thread. My guess is the women who're happy to accept that "there really are differences, it's obvious, innit?" are those whose interests, career paths, and so forth happen to fit rather neatly with social expectations about what count as acceptable gender roles, where as those women questioning the idea that it's innate and pushing the position that social conditioning (whether by parents, teachers, other children, adverts..) plays a massive role are those who've had to struggle against gender expectation to be allowed to do what we wanted to in life.

This is a very interesting topic and i agree with SGB.

I have 3 dcs, 2 dds and a ds.

I have witnessed first hand how differently the sexes are treated.
Myself and dh have been in the unfortunate position of hearing parents tell young boys to stop crying on the sports pitch and "If I see you get upset I will hit you and give you something to cry about." There is noway that the same parent (father) would have spoken to his young daughter that way.
I have also heard parents tell boys to stand up to their opponent and hit/kick them! Again I doubt if they would be telling a daughter to do the same.

All my 3 children are different. However regarding clothes, dd1 loves it as she can now wear ds' clothes.
They both tend to wear cross gender items such as chinos, vans, converse, sweaters, all in bright burgandy, green, red, blue, purple type colours.