Gendered brains

[MissScarletInTheBallroom]

I've read a few interesting posts recently - including just now by @haXXor on the Lib Dems thread - about the concept of "brain sex", making the point that it is impossible to tell whether any observable differences between male and female brains are down to nature or nurture.

In other words, if I am a girly girl, is it because of my DNA, or it is because my mum dressed me in pink frilly dresses and gave me dolls to play with from birth and everyone else treated me accordingly?

I am the mother of two toddlers, a boy and a girl, and I can already see how gender stereotypes are affecting them. And yes, if I'm honest, my daughter does have a lot of pink, flowery clothes. The clothes she wears to nursery are generally the same kind of practical leggings and T-shirts her brother wore, only hers tend to be pink. When she was tiny I often dressed her in her brother's hand me downs and felt irrationally annoyed when people thought she was a boy. Sometimes for special occasions I do like to put a dress on her, because she looks adorable.

Clothes aside, my son is obsessed with trucks and cars, but sometimes at nursery he will pick up and play with a doll. We never had dolls in the house until my daughter was born, and now of course we do because her grandparents were desperate to buy them for her. But she prefers to play with her brother's toys, as well as things which are not toys such as mobile phones, card readers, cables, everything you don't really want your baby to play with. She also has a much more extroverted personality compared to her brother, who is quite shy and sensitive.

Without wanting to be too extreme about it because I do want to put her in cute dresses sometimes, what is the best way to avoid gendered stereotypes in raising my children to encourage their brains to develop in the best way for each of them to reach their full potential, whatever that is, rather than what society thinks they should be doing based on their sex?

Yep that's the one:
Deep learning models reveal replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization
I saw it in the Irish Times, behind a paywall, so thanks for your better human functional brain organisation in finding an available link, fedupandstuck.

I’ve found it’s society, particularly nursery and school that really tries to reinforce gendered stereotypes. Sometimes that reinforcement is subconscious. In addition, your DCs’ peers will be passing on gender stereotypes from their parents. I found that particularly sad.

What I did was:

• ensure I had a wide variety of toys like dolls, Lego, cars, etc for all my DC
• ensure that they saw me playing with and enjoying all the toys so they didn’t see them as boy toys and girl toys
• as they get older, make a point of allowing a totally free choice and offering options that the stereotypes would say were for the opposite gender, eg getting a boy a pink Easter egg if he likes it. Even if he preferred a blue one, I’d still casually offer a wide variety as perfectly acceptable choices
• always correcting gender stereotypes, eg if DS says pink is a girls’ colour, say that all colours are for everyone
• fight against stereotypes that come from peers, eg when DS told me I’d need a male builder because they were better than lady ones (he’d got this from a classmate). I showed him female tradespersons and examples of strong women
• i made a point of choosing stories with both male and female leads; books where girls did brave things; books where boys were caring, etc
• i chose non-fiction books with examples of famous women scientists, athletes, etc, to balance the maleness all around us

I think it’s a constant thing - constantly reiterating things like toys/colours/jobs/hobbies are for everyone - and mainly fighting off crap from friends, family and society in general.

I remember looking at this on my BA Psychology course - the general consensus was that the brain at birth isn’t ‘gendered’ but various parts of it develop over our life time in response to stimuli (experiential, nutritional etc). This is called neuroplasticity. Whilst we don’t do MRI scans on new borns and/or throughout a person’s life to map the changes, certain changes do seem to occur in response to ‘living’.

So, for example, the corpus callosum [CC] is on average generally thicker in natal females than in males - this is the ‘bridge’ that connects the L and R sides of the brain, the thicker it is, the more connections between the two halves of the brain. However, it is also thicker in (professional) musicians than in non-musicians, suggesting that the thickening is a neurological adaptation, as it were, to years of playing an instrument/playing etc.

Of course, unless we happen to have brain scans of individual musicians from prior to learning to play an instrument, ie childhood, to compare to later scans we cannot definitively say that the thicker CC wasn’t already there from birth and that this is why they are talented musicians.

A lot of what we understand about neurodevelopment is (for obvious reasons) based on scans of deceased individuals’ brain scans that have been catalogued to form a view on what appears the ‘norm’ at birth. At the moment, these show no significant differences between male and female newborns - whereas the brain scans of deceased adults - from newly post-pubertal through to octogenarians - shows distinct differences in some areas of the brain that were once suggested to be indicators of the sexed brain.

The consensus is that this is due to the different lived experiences and stimuli that the brain has been exposed to - and that men and women are, through socialisation and different gendered experiences, offered different experiences which stimulates the brain to change in different ways. Ie male and female brains develop differently because of the way they are socialised.

So… exposing children to the widest rage of stimuli will encourage fullest brain development - but, essentially, it is personality/temperament and how this interacts with the world (do they LIKE music, dance, STEM) that will ultimately trigger neuronal activity, create neural networks and encourage specific development in specific parts of the brain of each individual.

Disclaimer: at least, this was the consensus back in 2015 when I graduated… and is very simplified at undergraduate level!

The main thing I did to address stereotypes was to consciously give big positive feedback when they display typically opposite behaviour (even if they didn't always!)

Eg DD wow you're so strong!
DS you're so crafty I love how you sit and concentrate
DD oh wow look how mucky you are you must have had a lot of fun!!
DS you're looking after the babies really well that's lovely

Etc etc

As DD gets older (she's a 'young' 9 now) I am trying very very hard to NEVER give her any feedback on what she looks like / what she's wearing apart from practical. So if she looks an absolute state, I just say 'will you be warm enough in that' rather than 'oh my God that's a crazy combo please wear xx jumper instead'

And if I comment on eg what the female judges are wearing on Strictly I make a huge point of actively commenting on the men too.

Thanks, BusyMummy001, that was really informative.
London taxidrivers are often quoted as examples of neuroplasticity, aren't they?
Their brains show specialised development from having to memorise the entire Knowledge of London, 'changes in the gray matter density of their hippocampus'.

@MarieDeGournay yes, I remember reading the study done on London cabbies.

There are other remarkable examples, of the brain adapting and creating new pathways - eg when stroke victims with L hemisphere brain damage lose the ability to speak, but scientists discovered they can still sing, so developed rehab programmes that work on singing to retrain the brain. Will attach a link.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/feb/23/stroke-patients-regain-speech-singing

There is also evidence re the corpus callosum that the thicker it is, the more protection you have in old age against dementia (the more pathways between the two halves, the more protection you have), and that you can effect this change even if you take up a musical instrument later in life… ie never to late to take up music!

I can imagine though that puberty would potentially be a time of huge change in the brain too - and of course kids are totally awash in sexed hormones at that stage. To me, that would be a biologically based effect, no differernce than hormone exposure in the womb at an earlier developmental stage.

In support of what @BusyMummy001 said, here's a short article from New Scientist (Feb 2024)
"FOR most of recorded history, men and women tended to have different societal roles, interests and occupations. Perhaps it was natural to assume these stemmed from innate differences in their brains, as well as the more obvious ones in their bodies. That idea has long been contentious, but now, with ideas about gender changing faster than ever, the question of whether there are differences between the brains of men and women has taken a keener edge. It remains a divisive issue, even among neuroscientists. Nevertheless, they are finally cutting through the historical discrimination and gender politics to get at the truth.
Early measurements of skull capacity showed that the brains of men are, on average, somewhat bigger and heavier than those of women. Some commentators posited that this “missing 5 ounces” was the key to men’s supposedly superior abilities. In fact, the simple explanation is that bigger bodies require more brain tissue to run them – a relationship seen across animal species.
Things got more complicated with the advent of brain-scanning technology in the 1990s, which suggested sex differences in the size of specific brain regions and structures. These findings were often turned into compelling tales about why, for instance, women are more empathic on average, or why men are more likely to be engineers. However, studies from the early decades of brain-scanning research should be taken with a pinch of salt, says Lise Eliot at Rosalind Franklin University in Illinois. “When you control for brain size, all of the claims about volume differences of individual structures between men and women either disappear or become extremely small.”
In fact, brain-scanning research has recently had something of an existential crisis. A major analysis from 2022 found that, to be trustworthy, studies need to scan a few thousand people, whereas sex difference research tends to look at just a few dozen. Participant numbers have also been very low in the few studies that have so far explored the brains of transgender people. To cap it all, in a 2021 review of all past studies of sex differences, Eliot’s team found telltale signs of publication bias: scientists who found sex differences have been more likely to publish their work than those who found none.
So should we give up on answering this question? Maybe not. In the past few years, brain-scanning studies have improved. Shortly after Eliot’s damning review, the most definitive dataset of sex differences yet emerged from a massive research project called UK Biobank, which has scanned the brains of 40,000 people in the UK. It did reveal sex differences in the size of certain brain structures, even when controlling for total brain size: about a third of regions were larger in men and about a third were larger in women. But these differences were small – generally just a few per cent. “And there wasn’t one region that really stood out that might lead to a hypothesis,” says Camille Williams at The University of Texas at Austin, who was involved in the study.
What’s more, these small differences might not be innate but could instead be caused by the brain responding to life experiences, a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity. We know this happens in other contexts. For instance, if someone becomes blind in adulthood, some of the parts of their brain that deal with vision switch over to processing sounds. So, even if men tend to have a slightly larger part of the brain responsible for, say, spatial skills, that could be because they are more likely to take jobs that involve those activities. In other words, any brain differences between sexes could be a consequence of different gender roles, not their cause.
Neuroscientists are only at the start of their journey of understanding sex differences in the brain. “There are small differences, but we don’t know if they’re meaningful or not,” says Williams. “This is where research should be heading next – trying to understand: ‘What do these differences mean?'”

My toddlers have fewer tantrums than trans activists.

What you have shown is that, even if socialization played no part, liking textiles does not make you a girl ( as some boys liked it), liking electronics does not make you a boy, as some girls do it.

There may be trends of preferences across populations but subscribing to that trend is not what makes you make or female, as there are always visible exceptions.

The only thing with 100% correlation to being a woman is being an adult human female. The only thing with 100% correlation to being a man is being an adult human male.

I think you have also shown that socialization does play a part, as you seem to be saying higher proportions of girls took electronics ( trade up to be a boy) than boys took textiles ( trade down to be a girl).

I personally think that there are differences between males and females that are not just socialization. Hormones do affect mood and behaviour and I think the widely disproportionate levels of male violence to female violence is not just because of socialisation ( though that undoubtedly contributes to varying levels of violence between countries). . But that does not mean being violent makes you male. There are men who hate violence and women who are violent. Trends at a population level cannot define individuals.

My children will certainly understand that what makes them a boy or a girl is their biological sex.

When they unwrapped the anatomically correct dolls at Christmas I said, "Good, by the time they start school they'll both understand that there is no such thing as non binary."

Yes, I should have added ‘hormonal’ along with experiential and nutritional. 🤦🏽‍♀️

I've got a couple of friends with boys who are the polar opposites of each other.

The first son of one liked his long hair with curls and was very gentle and wanted to be close to his mama all the time. The second was obsessed with trucks from the moment he could reach a toy one and was just 'raaahhhh,' from the get-go.

In the other case, the first boy was football obsessed from a very young age, while his younger brother just wanted to dance!

Meanwhile, I tried to give my daughter all the options, she had fairy dresses and dolls, toy tool kits and drills, and wore a mix of 'girls' and 'boys' clothes until she sussed it out and refused to go in that section of the store. She loved all things pink and unicorns and kittens and was just the girliest girl until she hit prepubescence.

In short, give them all the options and let them be themselves.