When you Learn, Do NOT Care the Gender

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When you Learn, Do NOT Care the Gender

The 2003 PISA study is only one of the latest to reveal gender-related learning and educational achievement differences. Far more questionable are the works which have appeared over recent years claiming to be inspired by scientific findings apparently to show that men and women think differently due to a different brain development.

Titles like "Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps" have become popular reading. How much is this founded on sound research? Is there a “feminine brain” and a “masculine brain”? Should teaching styles be shaped according to gender?

There are functional and morphological differences between the male and female brain. The male brain is larger, for instance, and when it comes to language, the relevant areas of the brain are more strongly activated in females. But determining what these differences mean is extremely difficult.

No study to date has shown gender-specific processes involved in building up neuronal networks during learning; this is another candidate for additional research.

The terms “feminine brain” and “masculine brain” refer to “ways of being” described in cognitive terms rather than to any biological reality. Baron-Cohen, who uses these expressions to describe autism and related disorders (2003), believes that men tend to be more “methodical” (ability to understand mechanical systems) and women better communicators (ability to communicate and understand others), and he suggests that autism can be understood as an extreme form of the “masculine brain”. But he does not propose that men and women have radically different brains nor that autistic women have a masculine brain. He employs the terms “masculine and feminine brain” to refer to particular cognitive profiles, which is an unfortunate choice of terminology if it contributes to distorted ideas concerning the workings of the brain.

Even if it were established that, on average, a girl’s brain makes her less capable of learning mathematics, would this be grounds to propose education specialised to these differences? If the goal of education were to produce intensely specialised human beings, then the question may be worth at least considering but so long as its most important role continues to be to create citizens with a basic culture, such a question loses its relevance for educational policy. Where differences can be shown to exist, they will be small and based on averages.

The much more important individual variations are such as to rule out being able to know if a young girl, taken at random, will be less capable of learning a particular subject than a young boy taken at random, etc.

"Understanding the Brain", The Birth of a Learning Science, 2007, pages 117 - 118

Developing Difference: Sex/Gender (2)

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Developing Difference: Sex/Gender (2)

What differences do such normal or abnormal patterns make to brain development? As I have said, on average, males tend to have slightly heavier brains than females. On the other hand, female babies tend to be "more advanced" in terms of behaviour and functional capacity at birth than do males.

During post-natal development other tiny differences in brain structure appear. Although the two cerebral hemispheres appear identical in size and shape, there are small asymmetries, and male brains tend to be more asymmetric than female.

There are also claimed to be differences in structure and size in regions of the hypothalamus and corpus callosum. This is not surprisingly, a fiercely disputed area, because of the way in which both similarities and differences can be appropriated (or misappropriated) to claim explanatory power in explaining the persistence of the domination of men in a patriarchal society and I will return to in later chapters.

It is well known that certain traits, such as colour-blindness and haemophilia, can be carried through the female but are only expressed in the male, a consequence statement is that all human brains begin as female, and that some "become masculinised" during foetal development, a "masculinisation" for which a chromosomal difference is necessary but not sufficient.

A key to this "masculinisation" is the hormone testosterone. Popularly, testosterone is the "male" hormone, oestrogen the female.

However, in reality testosterone and oestrogen are produced and responded to by both males and females; it is only the proportions that differ, testosterone being on average present in higher concentration in males. Neither hormone is actually made in the brain, but both can enter through the blood stream, and there are receptors on neuronal membranes in the hypothalamus and other brain regions that recognise the hormones.

What "masculinises" the otherwise female brain is a surge of testosterone production occurring between eight and twenty-for weeks into pregnancy. This is part of the process of differentiation between male and female brains, with characteristic average differences appearing in the distribution of neuronal receptors for the hormones. The existence of receptors in the brain for testosterone and oestrogen produced in other regions also illustrates the importance of the multiple brain-body interactions mentioned earlier on this chapter.

The sex hormones are not the only steroids that affect brain processes and they are also closely chemically related to the brain’s own equivalent of steroid hormones, the neuroesteroids, which act a bit like BDNF (Brain-derived neurotrophic factor) and other growth factors, but which are present prior to birth in different concentrations in male an female brains.

These complex hormonal interactions, occurring even pre-natally, are but one of many reasons why it is not possible simply to "read off" average differences between boys and girls, men and women as "causes by genetic and chromosomal sex differences, and why the relationship between understanding gender has been so tricky.

Such differences are indeed average, and there is considerable variation, which is just part of the problem of attempting to reduce human differences in sex and gender (and still more in sexual orientation) to simple statements about chromosomes, hormones, or any other unilinear "biological" measure.

"THE 21st-Century BRAIN", Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind, Steven Rose, 2005, pages 81 - 83

Developing Difference: Sex/Gender (1)

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Developing Difference: Sex/Gender (1)

Despite the opening paragraphs of this chapter which talked of both similarities and differences, the story so far has been a universalistic one, of generic "normal" brain development. But brains develop differently from one another even in the womb. Each is unique, genetically and environmentally, even prior to birth as the foetus begins the task of self-construction.

The general pattern of neuronal wiring, of synaptic connections, of cortical sulci and gyri, of modular neuronal columns is universal, but the specificities are individual, the constructs of every about-to-be-human foetus’s developing lifeline.

The complexities of interpreting such differences are of course the stuff of controversy, none greater than that surrounding sex and gender, insofar as these can be disentangled. After all, "boy or girl?" is likely to be the second question asked by the parents of any newborn baby, although the answer isn’t necessarily as straight forward as it sometimes seems.

Sex (as opposed to gender) begins at conception. Of the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes containing the DNA we inherit, one pair differs from the start. In normal development, females have a pair of X chromosomes, males one X and one Y.

So the patterns of genetic inheritance also vary between the sexes from the outset. (There are also some abnormal patterns of inheritance such as Turner’s Syndrome, where a female inherits only one X chromosome, and XYY, in which males inherit an extra Y.)

"THE 21st-Century BRAIN", Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind, Steven Rose, 2005, pages 81 - 83

The Female Brain

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The Female Brain

The following summarises the main points derived from the chapter Perception and Cognition of the Book THE FEMALE BRAIN:

There are 3 categories of cognition and perceptual tasks: female advantage tasks, male advantage tasks, and neutral tasks. The male advantage tasks are those requiring analysis and manipulation of spatial stimuli (e.g. Rod and Frame, Mental Rotation). The female advantage tasks are those requiring the analysis and manipulation of verbal and visual materials (e.g. Synonyms, Hidden Objects).

Performance on male advantage task improves during the menstrual phase, when female performance becomes more like male performance. Performance on female advantage tasks is better in the mildluteal phase.

The female-male differences on spatial tasks are related primarily to reaction time, while accuracy is usually equal. Females can perform the tasks as accurately as male, but it may take more trials to acquire the skill initially.

There is a female advantage for recognizing and remembering specific rather global information.

There are differences in perceptual and sensory system sensitively across the menstrual cycle. Prior to (or on) ovulation visual acuity is greatest, sensitivity to musk is increases and tactile sensivity is heightened. This makes good sense since the system most useful for finding a mate are most sensitive when the female need them most (Ivery unpublished observation).

"The Female Brain", Second Edition, Cynthia Darlington, 2002, pages 102 - 103

Gender Differences Between Teenaged Brains

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Gender Differences Between Teenaged Brains

Gender differences in cognitive development during adolescence have also been studied in terms of speech development and lateralisation of language in the human brain (Blanton et al., 2004).

This showed significant age-related increases in both white and grey matters in left inferior frontal gyrus in boys aged 11 years compared with girls of the same age, and this overall area was observed as larger in boys.

Both boys and girls showed asymmetry in development with the right side growing faster, but each in slightly different areas of the prefrontal cortex.

Adolescence is a time of profound mental change, which affects the emotional constitution – social awareness, character, and tendencies towards the development of mental illness. It is a period when the individual is especially open to learning and to social developments, and it is also a time when anti-social behaviour can emerge.

Adolescence is a crucial period in terms of emotional development partly due to a surge of hormones in the brain. Sex hormones play an important part in intense teenage emotions and have recently been found to be active in the emotional centre of the brain (i.e., the limbic system).

These hormones directly influence serotonin and other neurochemicals which regulate mood, and contribute to the known thrill-seeking behaviour of teenagers.