Customer Reviews

Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This book has some interesting data on sex differences in the brain and some good practical advice for dealing with these differences in the context of schooling and raising children. But toward the end of the book, the evidence supporting Sax's advice shifts to the anecdotal and the advice gets weird. For example, regarding discipline, Sax advocates limiting the amount a 4-month-old may nurse in order to teach it the valuable lesson of "who's boss." This advice shows a lack of understading the importance of nursing on demand to insure adequate milk supply for an infant. Also, Sax advocates spanking boys, but not girls -- try explaining that one to your kids.

We have a whole library shelf of pregnancy, baby, and now parenting books that my wife has bought over the past few years. I've had a hard time getting the enthusiasm to delve into many of these. However, as the father of a 4 year old daughter and now new twin boys, this particular book looked intriguing. Well, I couldn't put it down. Not only is it well written with engaging anecdotes, but it presents the latest scientific findings in gender research (with lots of footnotes so you can read the studies yourself if you are so inclined) and relates it to the job of parenting. It helps that the author is a family doctor who has seen his share of dysfunctional situations that in hindsight might easily have been prevented with a little knowledge.

The book is more than just informative about gender differences in children - he relates this information to such parenting topics as disciplining your child, gender specific education strategies, dealing with problem children, kids and drugs (both the legal and non-legal kind), and teenage sex.

Even if you don't agree with everything the author says, I think you'll learn a lot by reading this book.

An outstanding book on the differences in how boys and girls learn and develop, appropriate parenting techniques, and how to help them live up to their potential and become happy/productive adults.

I had a few specific disagreements, despite my overall appreciation for this work.

First, his overall view of the differences in the sexes. Sax says "Here are some examples of false beliefs about gender differences:

* Boys are "naturally" better at math and science than girls are.
* Girls are "naturally" more emotional than boys are.
* Girls are "naturally" collaborative, while boys are competitive."

I don't like this phrasing of gender differences. These statements might in fact be literally false as claimed, but certainly give a misleading impression of the typical differerences between males and females. I like the argument made by Baron-Cohen in his book, The Essential Difference, that on average male brains are optimized for systems, and female brains are optimized for empathy. Baron-Cohen's explanation fits the observed facts and research better than anything else I've seen, and would be a better overview than putting up some straw men to knock down like this, while ignoring the overall reality.

With regard to competition, all of the studies I've seen show that competition is a significant incentive for boys but has no effect for girls. Ironically, both of the best-practives examples he cites from master classes for boys involve competition :-)

Second, Sax echoes the educationist's mantra that "Almost every child is a gifted child." This seems ludicrous to me. The definition of gifted is top 3-5% on some dimension of human ability. There just aren't enough independent dimensions here for almost everyone to be gifted in some way. I would argue that the main three dimension are athleticism, cognition, and empathy. Most other dimesions have a fair amount of correlation with one or more of these, with musically gifted people typically also cognitively gifted, etc. You might come up with a few more (memory ability doesn't seem to be correlated with cognitive ability, for example), but "almost everyone"? I wouldn't think that more that 20-25% of the population would be gifted regardless of the number of dimensions you chose to measure, and that most of these "gifts" would not be related to academic ability in any way.

The harm from this belief that "all children are gifted" comes when you then say that because everyone is gifted, everyone can be treated the same way. To his credit, Sax doesn't draw this conclusion, but is all too common -- my son went to Stuart Hall, one of the schools used by Sax as an example of best-practices teaching for boys, and I heard both of these statements from them (e.g. "everyone is gifted" and "we have the same program for everyone" and "even though your son has an IQ in the top 1% that doesn't mean he is more gifted intellectually than anyone else or could use any special help academically"). Particularly for children who are cognitively gifted, not having an appreciation for their learning differences in a classroom setting can often have long-term detrimental effects. (I see cognitively gifted chilren in a typical classroom as an unfortunate minority. They are not getting what they need to thrive.)

Sax also echoes the desire to have more scientific career paths open to women, that there might still be social/teaching/peer pressures that contribute to the career choices made by women when more of them might actually prefer traditionally male professions. Could be, but there is no scientific evidence that supports this in any way, and there is a fair body of evidence that refutes it. There is also the fact of the difference in the tails of the male/female cognitive distributions: men have a higher standard deviation than women, so there are many more very bright men that women at the extreme high end of the tail, just as there are many more dull men at the low end of the scale.

I also am not so convinced that single-sex schools are a good thing. My son went to Stuart Hall, an all-boys school in San Francisco, and the kids do band together against the teachers. This opposition can be quite intense. On the one hand, I suppose this is good for socialization, and my son is quite capable socially. On the other hand, it is not a good atmosphere for academics, learning appropriate behavior, or in terms of learning to relate with adults. I'm sure a lot of our issues had to do with the quality of the school overall and their standard of discipline, and I've never had a son go through the early years in a coed school, but I'm still concerned based on my experience.

The rest of the book is all good, and highly recommended!

(I looked at the one previous review before I wrote this, which had a number of complaints about Sax's parenting technique recommendations, and I don't agree with these criticisms. A careful reading of what Sax actually says refutes all of these concerns, as far as I can see.)

I really liked this book when I started reading it. The author made a bold statement that he would back up his statements with evidence, and the early chapters are full of information with footnotes if one is inclined to research more about any facts (such as: the highschool dropout rate in the US is now close to 30%. That figure was startling to me, but he lists several places where I could do further reading on that topic.)

The problems start later in the book. Once the facts are presented, I found myself disagreeing with the conclusions he drew from those facts quite often. He believes that parents who "consult" with their children, "inform" them about available choices, and "make suggestions" are equivalent to "overly permissive" parenting. He cites an example of parents who allow their children to "choose" soda and chips to eat every day. No doubt, that's no way to allow your child to grow up, but he makes no mention of allowing your child a choice of acceptable options. What about allowing him to choose between broccoli or a spinach salad with dinner? There's lots of evidence to support that listening to your child and allowing him freedom within limits that you set is beneficial to self esteem.

There's a lot of grey area between the authoritarian style of parenting he advocates and being a pushover to your child due to fear of not being liked by him. He's dismissed the idea of working out a plan with a child due to some very poor compromises some parents have made. (A heavy 8 year-old girl is allowed to spend a month with grandparents who let her eat nonstop junk food. Then she's hard to deal with when she returns home. Girl doesn't want to go to a no-junk-food camp instead of Gramma's, so mom doesn't do anything different.) Because of examples like this where the mom didn't push the issue, he concludes that any consulting with a child is inadvisable. This is very unfortunate. Teaching a child the art of compromise and working to reach a solution that both parties can agree on is a great gift.

The fact that this book was written in 2005 means that it's full of recent information, and it may be worth reading just to see the compilation of the latest studies. He makes an interesting case about the benefits of singe-sex education, and for the benefits of single-gender, cross-generational activities for young people. It is his personal opinions on discipline which primarily tained this book in a negative way for me, and dragged the whole work down to two stars.

The book's main premise is that on average boys and girls are significantly different. To support this thesis, Sax mentions a number of recent studies on the differences of male and female brains. Teenage girls, for example, handle negative emotions within prefrontal cortex: the same area of the brain that is responsible for the language. Teenage boys, on the other hand, use amygdala, a separate area of the brain. Sax concludes that for this reason a teenage girl finds it much easier to talk about how she feels than a teenage boy does. The same is true about math: girls process it in the prefrontal cortex and boys in a separate part, hippocampus. So, the book says, boys would find it easier to understand math if it were explained to them as pure science, and girls would learn the same material more quickly if it was presented in connection with real life.

The science is explained on a very basic level, no prior knowledge necessary. Although, sometimes the thoughts are not extended to a logical conclusion. For example, throughout the book Sax assumes that the closer parts of the brain are the better communication among them. Even though this seems reasonable, some supportive evidence would have been useful. And what if girls' math processing in prefrontal cortex simply means that talking about math comes easier to them than to boys?

Still, that male and female brains are different on average and react differently to the same stimuli seems fairly commonsensical. In this context, Sax's argument for single-sex education sounds convincing. Indeed, if language and fine motor skills mature on average 6 years later in boys, but spatial and targeting - 4 years earlier, then it would make sense to teach boys languages later than girls and geometry earlier (it would be interesting to see how it agrees with another widely shared perception that the earlier a child, girl or boy, is exposed to a language the better). In addition, peer pressure makes it more difficult for a boy to take a theater class, and for a girl to take physics, but in single-sex schools they are twice as likely to do that.

Beyond education, Sax argues that boys and girls differ in how aggressive and confident they are and that they react differently to corporal punishment and to stress. When they take drugs they seem to do that for different reasons: boys to get a high, girls to calm down.

Even though the book leaves some questions on the table, it does present a convincing case that boys and girls significantly differ and that gender is an important factor in their upbringing and education.

We have a whole library shelf of parenting books that my wife has bought over the past few years. I've had a hard time getting the enthusiasm to delve into many of these. However, as the father of a 4 year old daughter and now new twin boys, this particular book looked intriguing. Well, I couldn't put it down. Not only is it well written with engaging anecdotes, but it presents the latest scientific findings in gender research (with lots of footnotes so you can read the studies yourself if you are so inclined) and relates it to the job of parenting. It helps that the author is a family doctor who has seen his share of dysfunctional situations that in hindsight might easily have been prevented with a little knowledge. The book is more than just informative about gender differences in children - he relates this information to such parenting topics as disciplining your child, gender specific education strategies, dealing with problem children, kids and drugs (both the legal and non-legal kind), and teenage sex.

The Good

Why Gender Matters does an excellent job of presenting taboo subject mater with well laid out arguments backed by evidence. The premise of the book is summed up well in this passage from one of the appendages: "A central argument for this book is that for the past three decades, the influence of social and cognitive factors on gender traits has been systematically overestimated while the innate factors have been neglected."

This is a difficult subject to tackle without coming across as a sexist and a bigot. But I was consistently impressed with Sax's ability to approach these topics delicately but unambiguously. His careful phrasing effectively disarmed the knee-jerk defensive reaction, and unapologetically delivered his points in the most reasonable tone.

The writing was pleasant to read, and the content thought-provoking, enlightening and challenging.

The Bad

Sax mixes in a lot of his personal views on morality and proper child rearing. There are whole pages which hardly reference gender at all, which instead serve as a soapbox for Sax to rant about the need for discipline or rail against mushy liberal parenting approaches.

I have little basis on which to judge his parenting advice, being a topic I have little knowledge of or interest in. Even so, it came off as prudish and overbearing, and I think the book suffered for it.

The Unforgivable

In the chapter six, titled "Sex", a sensationalist and thoroughly debunked myth, "Rainbow Parties" (wikipedia it) is cited as evidence for the moral decline of our society and the outrageous activities that kids these days engage in. This glaring factual error lends serious doubt to the credibility of the author as an unbiased man of evidence.

In Summary

The book begins with the claim that this book is the only one of its kind. The very idea of innate gender differences is too taboo to be discussed by any except those promoting antiquated and inaccurate gender stereotypes. Why Gender Matters is valuable to the extent that this is true. This is a subject that desperately needs the attention of rigorous study, but instead receives only politically fueled proclamations on both sides.

If you are a creature of modern sensibilities, reading this book will most likely make you extremely uncomfortable. For some of us, that special kind of discomfort a clue that there's some truth to be found, and moreover a truth that demands seeking out with the aid of brutal self-analysis.

I hope that this does not remain the only book of its kind.

There is an inherent problem in reacting to a book like this one: everyone has deeply rooted experiences of gender, making him or her an expert. So anything that Dr. Sax has to say that doesn't map exactly to personal experience automatically "proves" him wrong. I felt some of my friends that read this completely over-reacted to and, in places, completely mischaraterized some of his conclusions. And, even though I thought he was off base in a couple places, I found this book to be very interesting. (By the way, this is coming from someone who would have been categorized by Dr. Sax as "an anomalous male"--somewhat insulting in its way but I'm long past worrying about how other people categorize me.)

The fact is, there are differences between the genders, many of which cannot be written off as products of environment. Dr. Sax describes a number of them from weaker hearing in boys to more advanced development of the emotion areas of the brain in girls. This helps explain why some girls feel they are "yelled at" by boys (boys automatically talk louder to compensate for poor hearing) and why boys have trouble talking about "feelings" (those areas of the brain are not sufficiently developed yet), to give a couple examples.

Of course, Dr. Sax also recognizes that there are exceptions to the rules and he points out the very important fact that, as men and women reach their 20's, these brain differences tend to go away as both boys and girls mature. However, he's got a lot of advice for how to deal with issues parents and teachers face with children when they are still developmentally so different. When he sticks close to the research, his conclusions can be very powerful. On the other hand, when he moves to speculation, his conclusions are more apt to provoke a response; particularly if your experience was different. (No amount of placing me in sports as a young boy did anything to change my tendencies.)

Still, there is a lot of useful information to be gleaned from Dr. Sax's book. As a parent and someone who has worked in education his entire life, you can never have too much information to help you understand a child. When a kid acts out, there are a myriad of possible reasons for it. Dr. Sax gives us some possibilities worth exploring.

An interesting read, but with some foundational problems in methods and logic which call into question how thorough and useful is Sax's research. For example, in his analysis of aggression, the author relies on analogy, that because certain species of young male primates are more active and physical, this is an analogous behavior in humans. However, a more detailed genetic and developmental biological analysis would have accounted for the enormous variation in habitat, behavior, diet, and a host of other factors which impact primate behavior, even between genetically similar species.

And this is an important weakness in Sax's argument: that he does not sufficiently account for non-biological factors in affecting student participation. The fact is that scientists have not been able to identify the specific genetic (and non-environmentally impacted) differences between males and females that lead to species-wide behavioral differences.

Given this caveat, though, Sax's points about classroom attention and physicality are interesting, but readers should be aware of a much larger body of literature that is much more complex, but also gives a more comprehensive and accurate picture of gender differences from the interplay of genetic, environmental, and social dimensions. Joshua S. Goldstein's War and Gender is an exceptional work in that regard.

Overall this is an interesting book. He has many practical suggestions and it will definately influence the way in which I view my children's development. I also appreciate how seriously he takes youngsters social lives!

One section of the book concerned me. In a section on discipline he refers to discipline beginning in the nursery and he recommends limiting the amount of time a breastfed baby nurses. His information about how breastfeeding works is wrong, and the restricted nursing that he recommends can lead to an insufficient milk supply. This is only a small detail in the book, but it is a good reminder that although his introduction focuses on how he alone of all authors on gender will focus on what the science really says, he does go beyond what science says and throw in his own opinions too.