Brains of men and women only part of story in science
By Joan Ryan
It is one of those controversies that make you wonder how far feminism has really come.
Harvard President Lawrence Summers suggested recently that the difference in men's and women's brains could be one explanation for the dearth of women in tenured positions in science and engineering at the country's top universities. He has apologized repeatedly ever since, though the drums continue to beat for his removal.
Granted, Summers was probably not the right guy to be tackling the topic with this particular crowd of female academics, given his dismal record of hiring women at Harvard. But really, how can any person who has ever been married, or who has ever raised a child, deny that men's and women's brains function differently? Who among us hasn't wondered -- during a skirmish over the remote control, say -- whether our paths might have diverged somewhere along the evolutionary process?
I called Louann Brizendine, a psychiatry professor at UC San Francisco, to get her perspective. She seemed uniquely qualified to shed some light on the Summers brouhaha. She is a scientist at a top university, so she knows first-hand that the number of women in tenured positions in the sciences is abysmally low. But she's also in the midst of writing about the differences between men and women in a forthcoming book called "The Female Brain."
I wanted to know if she bought into the argument that "intrinsic aptitude" -- Summers' phrase -- keeps women out of the top tiers of science and engineering. Yes, she said, but not in the simple way Summers suggests.
It has nothing to do with the aptitude of men and women. It's all about the aptitude of boys and girls, she said. The differences are real, and they are the key to creating schools that will produce more female scientists.
If you cracked open a random human skull, you couldn't tell if the brain inside was male or female. The difference is in the circuitry and the time line on which it develops. Different abilities emerge at different ages for boys and girls.
Girls, Brizendine explained, develop language skills earlier than boys do; boys develop visual and spatial skills earlier than girls. By 2 1/2, many girls are actively choosing not to play with boys, not for any cultural or sociological reason but because boys have not yet grasped the concept of verbal give-and-take.
Boys, with their faster-developing spatial skills, are more likely to gravitate to building blocks and train sets and physical activities that require minimal verbal interaction. (And they are more likely to find themselves in altercations because they have poor external language to hammer out a solution and poorer internal language to mediate their impulses.)
These cognitive gaps between boys and girls close during high school, Brizendine said. Their brains catch up to each other. But here's the problem. By high school, boys have spent years reinforcing and strengthening their skills in math and science, and girls in language arts. They have been forming images of themselves as good in one thing, bad in the other.
Thus many girls avoid chemistry and calculus in high school, never giving themselves the chance to discover that their visual/spatial capabilities have caught up to the boys'. Many boys limit themselves to technical fields, unaware that their verbal aptitude has improved by their mid-teens.
"High school is the critical time for teaching science and math to girls if we want to attract more women into the science fields," Brizendine said. "It's critical to keep girls from getting demoralized in junior high and the first year or two of high school. We need teachers who have the ability and the knowledge to teach girls mathematics and science that best suits their style of learning."
The same, of course, is true for boys in the language arts.
"There is not someone there telling boys and girls that they have some different circuitry and they're not on the same developmental track," she said. "There is no one telling them that they are likely to catch up."
In other words, teachers and parents need to reintroduce subject matter at various times during a child's development: something that makes no sense this year, or even this semester, might make perfect sense the next. They need, perhaps most of all, to find ways to keep girls from giving up on math and science before their brains have developed the skills to excel.
Brizendine says girls also would do better on the math portion of the SAT if the test had no time constraints. Research shows that boys consistently register the highest scores on the math portion of the SAT because their brains process math problems -- what the researcher called "mental rotation problems" -- faster and more efficiently than female brains. When the test was untimed, the gender discrepancy in SAT math scores disappeared.
The dearth of women at the highest levels of math and science is, yes, about an ossified academic culture that doesn't recognize that female professors don't have wives to take care of the home and kids -- and thus can't work 80-hour workweeks and fly all over the country to present papers at conferences. It's also about male professors who tend to take male students under their wings to nurture and guide. And it's about discrimination, too, conscious or unconscious. Studies show that identical resumes are assessed differently depending on whether the name at the top is male or female.
But as Brizendine knows, it is also about the intricacies of the human brain. Instead of swooning at the very idea, as one female scientist in Summers' audience did, we need to acknowledge -- indeed, embrace -- our differences. How else will we ever be able to reshape the way we educate girls and thus change their futures?
"This isn't about wanting female brains in the maths and sciences," Brizendine said. "It's about needing them. One of the big issues about globalization is we need every piece of brain power to contribute to the intellectual output of this country."
The differences of the male and female brains are what they are: biological facts devoid of social or political judgment. But what we do about those differences is completely about social and political judgment. We can ignore the research and cling to our ideology that gender equality means gender sameness. Or we can use the information to bring us closer to real equality, the kind that doesn't mistake difference for inferiority, and one that values all those striving toward the mountain top, no matter their route or the speed by which they travel.
Oh, man i loled at this one hard.
Though seriously, you oughta take a better look at my profile, accepting you were not purposefuly making a joke there - in which case 
