'Boys and girls are different' - how to respond?

[Lottapianos]

I'm a feminist and I believe that perceived gender differences are down to social conditioning, including in very young children. I'm also an Early Years professional and I work with children aged 0-4 years old.

I have a colleague who often makes comments about 'innate' gender differences: 'boys and girls really are different', 'boys need access to outdoor play more than girls do', 'boys find listening more difficult', 'boys are less likely to be interested in books than girls are'. The listening and books theories I tend to agree with, not because of innate differences, but because adults' expectations of boys and girls are so hugely different, and young children pick up on this and behave accordingly.

All of this bothers me a lot. She's a very experienced and brilliant colleague and I have a lot of respect for her, but I am very anti-biological essentialism as I feel it restricts the development of all children (and adults) by putting people into boxes. I would like to be able to challenge what she says but I don't feel confident enough at the moment.

Anyone got any thoughts on this or any counter-arguments that I could use? I'm tempted to just throw Cordelia Fine's 'Delusions of Gender' at her!

I only read your OP.

I have a boy and i have a girl. Boys and girls are different, however much you may not want this to be the case.

I didn't say it wasn't BS, I just posted it as an example of what you can find if you search, rather than just taking other MNers word for it. While the author of the articles own ideas may have been BS, they still had to site other research and reading to back up some of the assumptions made, that could lead you to other articles, which could eventually lead to you reliable research.

That is all.

'Boys and girls are different, however much you may not want this to be the case'

Please tell us more FlameProof

I also have a boy and a girl. They are different from each other but not along gender lines.

And, "with all due respect", stuff written on MN is often rubbish too. You seemed to be after opinions, rather than facts.

I guess I am overmydeadbody, opinions and experiences from other MNers. I'm finding it all really interesting.

Flameproofnightie, I have a boy and I have a girl too. I haven't seen much evidence of this yet. I don't think that really works as an argument.

I have seen some very different behaviours in them which are because they are different children.

This is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

'There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise.'

You can read an explanation of why scientists in general don't accept evolutionary psychology on the site:

plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolutionary-psychology/

I think on MN people generally like a mix of fact and opinions; a lot of the personal stuff is really interesting.

they are different biologically. men have more tesosterone which traditionally made them want to go to war etc. does it matter if they are?

Wow this thread has moved on while I was actually doing some work for a change rather than MNing

Lotta thanks for your thoughtful response to my post. I've also now downloaded Cordelia Fine's book and look forward to reading it.

IME if my GIRLS do not get enough playing-outdoor-running-around-messing-about-just-being-kids time, they are in awful moods and much more difficult to deal with.

Lotta I agree with you that there is a strong link between gender stereotyping of children and gender stereotyping of adults, but I also agree with overmydeadbody that there are fundamental "nature" differences.

I expect that "nature" differences actually account for less than "nurture".

Wasn't there an interesting case recently of a couple from Canada raising their child completely gender-neutrally?

Here it is

I guess that is another thread entirely! certain it must have been done on MN before

margo - my DD is almost 14 and my son is 5. No matter how much i might tell myself it is because they are different children [ which obviously is the case ] , there are gender differences.

Not trying to present an argument as it'd just be ridiculed... but from where i'm standing I am entirely correct

SeaHouses your post sums up beautifully what I was trying to say inside my head.

DS has just done a history project on WW2 by interviewing my Great Uncle. The general impression I get from my own family and from the literature of the wars is that most of the men did not want to go to war at all. Most men find war to be a hideous, inhumane and tragic experience, don't they?

men have more testosterone which traditionally made them want to go to war etc.

Actually, more recent research on the action of testosterone on men (particularly in relation to male aggression) contradicts this.

SeaHouses I meant your post of 17.04 but your other one with the link to the Stanford article was interesting too. Kind of made my eyes bleed though trying to understand it

FlameProof unless you brought up your DC in a culture vacuum, there are bound to be gender-related differences. But it doesn't really argue for or against how much of the difference is because they have different genitalia/muscle mass/hormone levels and how much if from socialisation.

....even though I know it wasn't being offered as an argument as such!

I have four children, a mix of boys and girls and they are all different. I also happen to believe that perceived so-called differences between children and perceived similarities between children of the same gender, is largely the result of people seeing what they want to see in infinitely complex beings. I think the end result of these crackpot theories is to keep women in the domestic sphere and men out there "doing stuff".

I have one of each, DD (3) and DS (1), they are different in some ways ? for example, DD is much more of a sit down quietly child than DS who is much more of a fidget so would conform to the 'typical' boy/girl behaviour but I couldn't tell you if it is because they are different sexes or just different children. My friend's DD is a run around and shout child!

In other ways they are very similar, they both love books, neither particularly likes drawing, they are both quite gentle and kind.

My gut instinct (not backed up by any science) is that there are subtle differences between the sexes but that these are accentuated by the way we (as a society) tend to treat them and that it's a sliding scale with a lot of crossover in the middle, not a black and white issue.

I also hate the 'boys will be boys' attitude that lets boys get away with things from a very young age. I've witnessed a few friends doing this but there is no way my DS will get away with anything that DD would get told off for.

People see what they want to see and that's how gender differences get perpetuated. They see a kid act according to gender, throw their hands up and say "see, boys and girls are different, it's nature", but then if that child does something "unusual" - then they're an "exception".

I don't think you can overestimate the effect these messages have on children's psyches, and by the time they grow up the messages have been internalized and it's very difficult to undo.

Read a paper in Nature (the most prestigious science journal going) that said in a room full of babies dressed in pink or blue babygrows, non-parent adults played more roughly with blue babies than pink ones. Regardless of actual gender of the baby (no one can tell with a nappy on). Just tried to find it to post a link but couldn't - for any geeks out there I know it was late 2007-mid 2008 as it was when I was pregnant for the first time.

It IS social conditioning, BUT from such an early stage that there may well be measurable statstical differences in adulthood (though see Cordelia Fine for a thorough debunking of many of them). My DD will be wearing her brother's hand-me-downs until an age when she's old enough to want her own stuff. If she then chooses pink shit then I'll have to deal with it while muttering "it's all social conditioning" under my breath. I feel just as annoyed at the pirate/skull/camo motif for boys.

Interestingly I've read some recent research that says similar stuff about race.

Yes ziptoes, it starts really early!
Another study mentioned by Lise Eliot had mothers putting crawling boy and girl infants on slopes which the mothers then manipulated to make steeper according to how steeply they thought their babies could manage to crawl. They almost all overestimated their boys' crawling strength/courage and similarly underestimated their girls' crawling strength/courage. (For the record, both sexes were roughly capable of the same gradients).

Even the most enlightened of us find it hard not to instil some sort of gender conditioning in our offspring. (Unless you're Professor Bim, whose gender-neutral child-raising was referred to in a previous post).

I remember a tv programme probably 10 years ago (I haven't had a tv in a long time) - Was it perhaps the one about children born in 2000 or something similar where they follow them at regular intervals?

They interviewed the parents on camera about whether they thought there were innate differences between boys and girls. Most insisted there were and that it was nothing to do with social conditioning. Where they had more than one child of different sexes, they'd treated them the same, but inevitably, they'd displayed different characteristics related to their gender from very early on.

Then, they dressed up the children (probably about 18 months old?) of some of the families in clothing associated with the opposite sex and gave them to different parents to play with for about 20 minutes, filming them in a room with different toys and things to play with.

Not surprisingly, there was a noticeable difference in how they played with what they thought were girls and what they thought were boys - the way they held them, how they communicated with them, the toys they presented to them and the language they used (e.g. pretty for the girl, clever for the boy.)

Then, they played back the films and revealed that the children were the opposite sex they'd thought. The shock on the parents faces was noticeable. Some of the fathers actually appeared angry and said it had been "wrong" to do this to them, and to the babies (as if half an hour in a flowered dress would mean lasting damage for a baby.)

I have four boys. I'd say the not listening thing is true.[hoarse]

I had forgotten about the experiments where the researchers but babies randomly in blue or pink babygros and watched how adults treated them so thanks for reminding me! I remember reading about a similar experiment where the adults actually fed the 'boy' babies more regularly and gave them more food on account of them being 'boys' and therefore 'hungrier' All the babies were the same age and roughly the same weight but the 'boy' babies were fed more responsively and for longer. Sad and worrying.