Computers, Brains, and Gender Equity

 

 

            True story:

A distinguished Harvard professor suggests that women may be innately less capable of scholarship at the highest levels.  He asserts that the pursuit of an academic career will cause a woman’s body to shunt blood away from the uterus toward the brain, rendering that woman “irritable and infertile.”  A flurry of press coverage ensues.

The Harvard professor to whom I refer is Dr. Edward Clarke, who in 1873 published Sex in Education: or, a Fair Chance for the Girls.  The subtitle was misleading, because Dr. Clarke believed that all higher education for girls was unhealthy and “unnatural.”  But Dr. Clarke was not the last esteemed Harvard professor to suggest that when it comes to brains, the mere fact of being female may be an insurmountable obstacle. 

On January 14^th, Dr. Lawrence H. Summers, who is (at least for the moment) still the president of Harvard University, attempted to explain why there are so very few women holding senior academic positions in math, physics, engineering, and technology.   Dr. Summers began by suggesting that women may be less willing to put in the long hours required to achieve top positions in those fields.  That remark might have been sufficient all by itself to start the ball rolling for Dr. Summers’ ouster.  But then he went on to suggest that maybe women just aren’t cut out for the hardest of hard sciences, that maybe there are “innate differences” between male and female brains which render most women incapable of doing really tough math.[i] 

Such remarks would not have been newsworthy had they been made by, say, Jerry Falwell.  But for the president of Harvard University to suggest that women are innately disadvantaged in math and science – well, stop the presses.  “Intellectual tsunami” is one description for what’s happened in the days since Dr. Summers’ remarks became public knowledge.[ii]  And the tsunami rolls in from all directions, left, right, and everywhere.  From the right has come a volley of articles in defense of Dr. Summers’ position, citing tidbits of research which supposedly demonstrate that Dr. Summers was in fact correct.  Conservative columnist Linda Chavez placed great weight on a Johns Hopkins study which showed that among pre-adolescent children gifted in math, boys outnumbered girls by 13-to-1.[iii]  From the left has come a flood of protest, most notably in the form of a letter signed by 50+ Harvard professors denouncing Dr. Summers’ remarks, stopping just short of a call for his resignation.

The biggest loser in this battle may not be Dr. Summers or women’s rights, but brain science itself.  Brain science has become the last refuge of dilettantes, invoked in support of everything from more funding for Head Start to an endless variety of educational reforms, and now as an explanation for the dearth of women in math and science.  Dr. Summer’s invocation of brain science is patently circular.  Summers observes, correctly enough, that despite all efforts to recruit women, there are still very few women professors in higher math, computer science, and physics.  He then cites this fact as evidence that men must have an innate, hardwired advantage in those subjects.  That innate advantage explains why there are so few women at the highest levels of proficiency in those subjects, or so Dr. Summers appears to believe.   The finding which is to be explained is itself cited as evidence to explain the finding.  Q.E.D.

In fact, the evidence does not support Dr. Summers’ belief.  I’ve spent the past four years reading every paper I can find – hundreds of them – about sex differences in the brain and in the ability to learn, in the course of writing a book on the subject.  I’ve also traveled to more than 60 schools around the United States and Canada, to sit in classrooms and watch how girls and boys are taught, and to speak with teachers.  Among adults, cognitive sex differences – sex differences in how adult women and men think – have turned out to be much smaller than previously believed, according to authoritative recent reviews.[iv]  There’s lots of variation within each sex and lots of overlap between the sexes. 

The most important breakthrough, in my judgment, has been the discovery that the various regions of the brain develop in a different sequence in girls compared with boys.  Researchers at Virginia Tech used sophisticated electrophysiologic imaging of the brain to examine brain development in 508 normal children -- 224 girls and 284 boys -- ranging in age from two months to 16 years.  These researchers found that while the areas of the brain involved in language and fine motor skills (such as handwriting) mature about six years earlier in girls than in boys, the areas of the brain involved in math and geometry mature about four years earlier in boys than in girls.  When it comes to learning math, the brain of a 12-year-old girl resembles the brain of an 8-year-old boy.  These researchers concluded that the various areas of the brain develop in “a different order, time, and rate” in girls compared with boys.[v] 

This finding puts much of the previous work on gender disparities in math and science in a different light.  I mentioned above how Linda Chavez cited a study showing that among young children, there are many more boys who are math geniuses than girls.  But if girls had the opportunity to learn math at their own pace, I think the odds are good, or better than good, that we would have many more teenage math geniuses who are girls.  Just as many boys are late bloomers with regard to literature and foreign languages, many girls are – or could be – late bloomers with regard to math and science.

Most girls attend coed schools, in which girls and boys are taught the same subjects in the same sequence.  The result of that kind of gender-blind education is too often that by age 12, the girls think they’re no good at math and that they’ll never be any good at math.  The irony is that many of those girls might be math geniuses, if only they were taught in schools in which the curriculum was tailored to the individual, schools in which they might have the freedom to explore their own potential at their own pace. 

All-girls schools hold great promise for eliminating the gender imbalance in math and science.  A study of graduates of girls’ high schools in the United States found that 13% of those girls went on to major in college in the “hard sciences” and math, compared with only 2% of girls who attended coed schools.[vi]  In other words, girls who attend all-girls schools are more than six times as likely subsequently to earn degrees in the very subjects about which Dr. Summers professes such concern (13% compared with 2%).  By comparison, only about 10% of boys who attend coed schools go on to major in those subjects.  A 2002 study of 370,000 students in the United Kingdom came to a similar conclusion: namely, that girls who attend all-girls schools are far more likely to study advanced math, computer science, and physics, compared to girls of comparable ability attending coed schools.[vii]  Both these studies echo a classic 1986 study by Professor Elizabeth Tidball, in which she found that women who graduated from all-women’s colleges were more than five times as likely to earn doctorates in math, physics, and chemistry, compared with women who graduated from coed colleges.[viii]

Dr. Summers would like to believe that “brain science” accounts for the continuing gender disparity in the hard sciences, because if girls are hardwired to be dumb in math, then the gender disparity isn’t anybody’s fault and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.  That argument is a cop-out.  Girls aren’t hardwired to be dumb in math any more than boys are hardwired to be dumb in art – a subject in which women now monopolize all the highest academic positions.  If you look at the history of Western civilization, you’ll find more than a few men who excelled in art – Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Vermeer, Monet, Renoir, and Picasso, to name just a few – but every one of those men attended all-boys schools.  If they had been born and raised in this time and place, attending coed schools, the odds are good that they never would have picked up a brush.  At coed schools, the boys will tell you that drawing is for girls.

Brain science can and indeed should inform the debate about gender equity and education policy.  But the first requirement is that the “brain science” should be science rather than stereotype.

 

 

Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D., is the founder and director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, and the author of “Why Gender Matters:  what parents and teachers need to know about the emerging science of sex differences,” which will be released February 15^th by Doubleday.  See www.whygendermatters.com for more information about the book.

Copyright 2005, Leonard Sax, MD, PhD

A shortened version of this article was published by the Los Angeles Times on January 23, 2005. You can read the shortened version as it appeared in the LA Times here.