“Our genomes are 99.9% identical from one person to the next as long as the two individuals being compared are two men or two women. But if we compare a woman and a man, the genetic differences are 15 times greater than the genetic differences for two males or two females.”
–David C. Page, M.D., Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“Everywhere we look, the two sexes are startlingly and unexpectedly different, not only in their internal function but in the ways that they experience illness. To care for them, we must see them for who they are: female and male.”
–Marianne J. Legato, M.D., in Eve’s Rib: The New Science of Gender-Specific Medicine
Over the last few years, there has been an uptick in media attention to the concept that male and female don’t exist. A few people use their degrees in science to peddle junk science to the media, and a “debate” arises, when there really is no debate at all. The field of neuroscience has proven what Drs. Page, Legato, and hundreds of other scientists already know–sex and gender differences exist in male/female brains, brain chemistry, and brain function. The sum of hundreds of differences shown in thousands of studies also matches our common sense.
Yet…the “debate” continues in the media and in some of your schools.
About once a month or so, someone will say in the press, “There is little or no difference between males and females,” or “Even if there are differences, they don’t matter.”
In Saving Our Sons and The Minds of Girls I’ve joined with colleagues in calling these people “ideologues.” Pushing an ideology rather than science, they have some sway in academics and the media, positing that the female and male brains are basically the same and hoping the public will remain ignorant of real science, facts, and data. Since many people working daily in our schools and homes do not have time to dig into all the scientific studies, I believe the ideologues assume school leaders, teachers, and parents will just go ahead and believe the false statements.
The problem for those of us in the trenches is that helpful and vital gender-specific educational programs get shut down. Recently at a school, one complaint by one teacher about “gender stereotypes” got a promising program nixed immediately, with the ACLU sending an attack letter based on one person’s negative opinion of one small part of a local educator’s presentation!
Where does the anti-science ideology come from? How does it get its power? I believe it came as a byproduct of academic movements that argued we must have sex-sameness if we are going to have gender equality. “If men and women are proven to be different,” this ideology posits, “men will dominate women and girls will lose out to boys. If we can negate ‘female’ and ‘male’ from social systems, we’ll have no more oppression.
That concept was wrong in the last century and wrong now. Twenty years of success data for Boys and Girls Learn Differently educational programming have shown that the sex- or gender-sameness idea is unnecessary—gender equality comes from understanding diversity of brain difference, not by trying to erase sex- and gender-diversity from our social systems. For success data, please see https://gurianinstitute.com/success/.
And contrary to what the ideologues tell us, vulnerable populations like transgender students are best supported when people understand the actual science of male/female brains, including the science of brains in transition. Here’s an example of a recent study and report in this vein: https://bigthink.com/mike-colagrossi/transgender-brains-more-closely-resemble-brains-of-the-sex-they-align-with-rather-than-what-they-were-born-with.
Many of you have asked me to provide rebuttal to the ideologues. I’ve provided it in my books, mentioned above, and here, in this blog post, I want to update that rebuttal for you so that, if you are attacked, you will have a tool available to you with which to fight back. When you hear ideologues trying to shut down good social programs for their own ideological reasons, let them know, the reality is: few things work more effectively to protect girls, boys, and everyone across the gender spectrum than gender-specific social programs, whether they are clubs like Boys and Girls Clubs, athletic programs, neighborhood programs, faith community programs, rites of passage programs, or school-based educational programs.
What Leaders, Teachers, and Parents Are Saying
To put this in context, here are examples of the emails, Facebook posts, tweets, or phone calls from school administrators, teachers, other professionals, and parents I receive frequently.
A head of school wrote: “Why isn’t male/female difference taught in teacher certification and masters of education programs? If we all learned how boys and girls learn differently before we entered classrooms as teachers, we would save a lot of kids from failing or falling behind.”
A teacher wrote: “Why is a child’s life so completely politicized and polarized today? If we try to meet the needs of boys and girls, we’re accused of ‘gender stereotyping’ when we are doing just the opposite: we are accepting the full diversity of learners.”
Here is a composite email from various school principals/teachers at coed schools.
“I’ve raised boys and girls. Each of them is an individual, just like every child in our schools are individuals. But, they’re also boys and girls. For twenty years I did not understand why test scores and grades were consistently lower for our boys than girls, then I discovered this is a national and international phenomenon, both in public and independent schools. Once I dug deeper, I started seeing what had to be done—we had to focus on boys and girls as gender-specific learners.
“So, over a two-year period, our school district did exactly that. We received training, classroom observation and feedback, and online courses from the Gurian Institute. We listened to both our parent and student bodies, and we held parent nights to discuss our process. There were some naysayers at first, people who said things like, ‘but I heard there’s no difference between boys and girls,’ or, ‘if you focus on boys, you’ll shortchange girls,’ and vice versa, and we worked through that.
“Our system started to change relatively quickly. Grades and test scores for both girls and boys went up and student behavior improved. Teacher effectiveness improved as teachers understood students’ needs better, especially the needs of our boys, who had been misunderstood at many levels. STEM learning among our girls improved. Because we use a science-based approach to LGBTQ students, we have seen more parent and student buy-in to the needs of vulnerable students. Our new school culture would not have happened if we had listened to the people who say ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ don’t matter.”
Here is a similar composite email from principals/teachers at schools that decided to try single-sex classes.
“Because boys and girls learn differently, we have separated our girls and boys for core classes—language arts, math, and science. This move has helped our girls develop better leadership skills and it has helped our boys flex more of their literary muscles in ways they would not do with girls around. We have also seen grades and test scores improve, as well as behavioral adjustment by both teachers and students.
“Whenever someone says, ‘But you’re just perpetuating gender stereotypes by doing this,’ or ‘this is sex segregation like racial segregation,’ I say, ‘No. Sex-on-the-brain is a crucial learning tool. What you call gender stereotypes for your own political reasons we in the trenches know to be very real male/female differences.
“About the ‘segregation’ accusation, I respond: ‘There are no proven differences between the brains of white men and black men or white women and black women, but there are proven differences between the male and female brain. Calling what we do ‘segregation’ just to try to connect it with racism is abhorrent.”
Indeed, the use of ‘segregation’ as an ideological tool is a triumph without a victory. Same-sex classes and academies, especially in inner city and disadvantaged communities, are the real victors, for all races; among African-American and Latino communities, for instance, we are seeing a powerful and successful uptick of single-sex innovations and classes (see www.gurianinstitute.com/helpingchildrenofcolor.
The Main Perpetrators of the Attacks on Schools
Among the ideologues, two agencies stand out, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), and the ACCS (American Council for Coeducational Schools). First, to get a glimpse of the skewed logic that both group use, go to the ACLU’s website and read, “Teach Kids, Not Stereotypes.” This document is a co-production of the two groups. It employs a primary ruse that ideologues use to attack schools: the claim that referring to kids as male or female brain learners is “gender stereotyping.”
This is sleight of hand, a kind of magic trick, especially as some of these ideologues have degrees in neuroscience: They know that male/female brain difference is factual. But they don’t want it used in schools, homes, or public policy, so they constantly repeat the idea that discussion of boy and girl traits is “gender stereotyping.” In this way they are like climate change deniers who loudly and constantly posit that the science of climate change and global warming is not real, a hoax, fake, junk science. Through this tack, the gender ideologues can gradually try to erase the science of ‘male’ and ‘female’, and thus there will be no need any more for gender-specific programming, training, and systems protection, they believe.
Here are examples of what you may have heard these folks call “gender stereotypes.” After providing the example, I’ll provide the fact so that you can share this exercise with your own constituents.
Example: the ideologues claim that altering classrooms so that boys move around more during class is a stereotype. “Girls need to move around, too,” they’ll say, “don’t stereotype!”
Fact: while everyone may need to move around during learning, PET and SPECT scans show the cerebellum (a “doing/movement” center of the brain) to be more active in boys’ brains than girls’, which is just one of the reasons all of us have noticed boys fidget/move around more.
The factual nature of the difference is not a stereotype. It is a known fact. And there’s good science behind our knowledge of the fact. You might enjoy looking at the work of Daniel Amen, M.D. (Sex on the Brain) for more brain facts about females and males. His clinical team just completed a 46,000 + SPECT scan study of female and male brains (see https://www.amenclinics.com/blog/women-more-active-brains-than-men/) In the scan Dr. Amen provides there, you will see a female/male cerebellum difference vividly.
Another example: the naysayers claim that if we observe or report girls having more trouble with higher math and physics than boys, on average, we have perpetrated a dangerous gender stereotype. Because we perpetrate this stereotype, the naysayers admonish, men dominate workplaces and careers in coding and mechanical engineering.
Fact: There are many reasons males tend to dominate those careers, but the observation of math difficulty is not a stereotype, as proven by one of the most comprehensive scientific studies in this area: Halpern, D.F., Benbow, C. P., Geary, D.C., Gur, R.C., Shibley Hyde, J., and Gernsbacher, M.A. The Science of Sex Differences in Science and Mathematics; Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Volume 8, No. 1, August 2007).
Here are other sex-specific facts that the naysayers want you to agree are “gender stereotypes” (or just not facts at all).
*Boys, on average, have lower language arts and literacy scores than girls and, on average, use fewer words per day when reading, writing, and speaking are measured in totality (this is true of all industrialized and post-industrial countries). For more on this, go to google and check out the OECD PISA studies.
*Girls tend to excel in more fine motor activity tasks, especially in the early years, and boys tend to excel in more gross motor activities in the early years. To confirm this, open any textbook or other book that deals with early childhood attachment and child growth. To go further into these sorts of differences, check out this Stanford University research: https://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different.html.
*Boys tend to naturally seek out more aggressive, rough-and-tumble, and even physically dangerous play than girls. This brain fact will also be confirmed in any study, textbook, or book you open on birth to five child development. If the fact were not in that resource—if someone tried to argue differently—the book would not get published or not find any audience, since all of us have confirmed this fact no matter our country or culture.
*Girls tend to talk about their feelings more during a given day than boys, i.e. have a higher words-for-feelings ratio; boys do not as easily or quickly access feelings when sitting still, while girls are more able to sit still and immediately access feelings in conversations (see The Male Brain and The Female Brain, by neuroscientist Louann Brizendine)
*Girls tend to move toward empathetic relational strategies more quickly than boys, while boys will often show their empathy through aggressive touch (e.g. pushing and prodding another boy to show love) (see Why Gender Matters, by physician and neurologist Leonard Sax)
*Because males lateralize brain activity more than girls tend to, including moving activity from front to back in one hemisphere of the brain, and girls tend to move more activity between hemispheres, males more quickly apply logic (problem-solving) to emotional issues and girls are more likely to spend more time processing the emotions themselves, before problem-solving (see The Essential Difference, by neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen).
The brain facts that naysayers dub “stereotypes” is far longer than this. In both Saving Our Sons (2017) and The Minds of Girls (2018), I have nearly one hundred pages of Endnotes providing the scientific studies behind these facts. You can also access approximately 1,000 science- and brain-based studies on www.michaelgurian.com (Research). Please also see Dr. David Geary, Evolution of Sex Differences in Trait- and Age-Specific Vulnerabilities, Perspectives in Psychological Science, Vol. 11(6) 2016 for hundreds more confirmation studies.
When you hear the naysayers cry “gender stereotypes!” look carefully at what they are accusing you or your school system of. If you’ve looked at the science, you will likely not be stereotyping; instead, you will be observing brain facts. Because my GI team and I show brain scans when we provide trainings and programs, we help move communities away from gender stereotypes and into factual discussion and debate.
Is the Science Robust?
But all that said, still, you may read ideological documents and media reports asserting that the science of male/female brain difference is not clear nor agreed upon. In fact, the science is robust and clear and nearly every gender-brain scientist agrees that there are male and female brains and that brain difference impacts human growth. As we’ll see in a moment, there are only about a dozen “naysayers” attacking the science.
In fact, I believe the ideologues know that 99.9% of the scientists who focus on male/female brain difference know how robust the science is, but because these folks are ideologues, they appear to act as if these other scientists don’t exist. I believe the ideologues do NOT want you to read the thousands of studies I’ve referred to above. They want you to focus on other things.
Among those other things are schools, teachers, practitioners, students, and consultants in the field who use brain science to help boys and girls. Some members of the ACCS repeat sentences such as, “I’m a scientist and I’m telling you, there is no scientific basis to saying boys and girls learn differently.” Or: “People like Gurian and Sax, who say there are important differences, are just cherry-picking data and using junk science.”
This accusation, given the robust science in the field, is another triumph without a victory. And when you study the writing and the ideological documents these folks create, you’ll see perpetuation of the very wrongs they accuse others, like me, of perpetrating. I believe these ideologues do this so that you will focus on other people, not themselves, or their false claims. Here are four accusations made by the ideologues:
*Supporters of male/female brain science are just cherry-picking data.
*Supporters of male/female brain difference are using junk science.
*Supporters of male/female brain difference are harming students/kids.
*Supporters of male/female brain difference are being unethical (even, perhaps, illegal).
But, when you read their work carefully, you’ll see that:
*It is the ideologues who are cherry-picking studies; in fact, they sometimes cherry-pick specific sentences so that they can take them out of context and build their rhetorical case, as was recently done on Twitter to mis-characterize the Gurian Institute’s position.
*The “junk science” being used is being used by the naysayers, who avoid comprehensive scientific analyses like Amen’s, Brizendine’s, Geary’s, Sax’s, and mine in hopes of pushing their ideology.
*By trying to shut down gender-specific programming in schools, they do great damage to children–robbing schools, parents, and students of innovations that would help improve grades and test scores and combat the school-to-prison pipeline.
*While accusing schools that using brain science violates Title IX, the ideologues do not inform the public that Title IX supports the use of brain science and single sex schools and programs.
To flesh out these points, I will now provide further analysis I hope will help support your gender-specific programs in both coeducational and single sex environments. Before reading this analysis, I hope you will look at Title IX amendments that support single-sex options.
Here is one very good resource: https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/faqs-title-ix-single-sex-201412.pdf. Especially look at #8 – 12 in this very long document.
A Brief Note About the ACLU
I’ve mentioned the ACLU, and you may be a staunch supporter of it. I certainly was for decades. Indeed, when I was growing up, the ACLU was a major protector of freedom. In some areas, it still is, but on sex and gender issues in schools, it seems to have been unduly influenced by ideologues and special interests in the ACCS.
Under this influence, it has tried to shut down gender-specific programs, like the one I mentioned above. While the ACLU’s efforts have been rebutted in court when large school districts have fought it and won, the ACLU stills send attack letters out, targeting people in the trenches who are effectively using single-sex and single-gender innovations.
Supporters of the ACLU attacks have mis-characterized science for about ten years now, and the ACLU does nothing to correct the mistakes. An example: In the second week of August 2018, one of the ideologues in the ACCS tweeted out false facts about what I believed. She so misconstrued what I wrote in a blog that various readers wrote me to disavow me. When I discovered what she had said about me, I could only shake my head at the lengths these folks will go. In my blog, I said the opposite of what she presented as my beliefs! (https://gurianinstitute.com/gurian-institute-training-can-change-your-classroom/)
This kind of maneuvering is unfortunate, and I note it here to warn you. In my humble opinion, after watching this for the last decade, I believe there is little these ideologues say on gender issues that should be taken as fact. If you read something from any of them, read every word and check the sources.
And don’t just read the headlines. These folks are especially good at making headlines that seem to say there is little or no male/female difference, but when you read the actual studies by scientists that are featured in the articles you’ll generally notice the scientists actually say: there is male/female brain difference.
The Coed vs. Single Sex Debate
All this argumentation about science might stay academic if not for the fact that it was brought into our school systems when single sex public schools began to grow in number in the early 2000s. I believe the ideologues have a contempt for and anxiety about single sex classrooms and schools that is so profound, they have created an intellectual war between coeducation and single sex education that truly should not exist.
Interestingly, though, it is mainly the small group of people feeding the war—mainly the few people who work for the ACLU and the few people who belong to the ACCS. This cadre has received significant funding and exposure by keeping the war going. Their work is then used by other groups to repeat the same flawed logic and research created by these two groups. Here is an example of the repetition: http://feminist.org/education/pdfs/SexSegReport2018.pdf.
A Tool You Can Use to Measure and Respond
Following now is a tool you can use in your conversations in your communities: points to consider and, as needed, promulgate, so that you can measure and respond to the “research” of the naysayers.
First, although the ideologues and the ACLU specifically go after school districts with scare tactics, it is difficult to see them winning a case unless a school FORCES an educational option such as single sex learning on students and families. Fortunately, the schools that I and our team work with normally offer single sex classes and programs as an option for both girls and boys, which fits the law (see the Department of Education document above).
Second, there is yet to emerge proof of harm to single sex classes or schools any more than one could find proof of harm in coeducational classrooms. There are more than 500 public schools using single sex options as well as thousands of coeducational schools to use as controls, but the ideologues don’t study these thousands of schools. Instead, they rely on one or two “meta-studies” that they themselves write (more on this in a moment).
If you study Teach Kids, Not Stereotypes and other ACLU/ACCS documents closely, you’ll notice 1) a lack of quantification of students harmed, and 2) a lack of proof of harm to begin with. Instead of either quantification or proof, “gender stereotypes!” is bellowed loudly. As we’ve already noted, a brain fact is not a gender stereotype, even if these ideologues want you to think so. People claiming that schools are being ruined by single sex education should show some proof of harm, shouldn’t they?
Just a few reports and articles you might use as a counter balance to the slim research from the ideologues are these:
https://classroom.synonym.com/same-sex-schools-vs-coed-schools-statistics-17266.html
http://www.singlesexschools.org/research-singlesexvscoed.htm
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2011/02/coed.aspx
http://www.singlesexschools.org/
http://www.ourkids.net/school/together-or-apart
https://classroom.synonym.com/same-sex-schools-vs-coed-schools-statistics-17266.html
In few of the hundreds of reports available will you find experts claiming that single sex education is better than coeducation, or vice versa. The claims you will find proven are that for some students, coeducation may work better and for some students, single sex may work better. Because there is so much good data on single sex options, why wouldn’t proponents argue for choice and options for any school that is looking to innovate.
Third, as these articles will show, the only way for the ideologues to make their case is to cherry-pick and manipulate “meta-studies” that are mainly done by ACCS members themselves. Take a moment to study the few science professors who write the negative “research” on single sex classrooms and male/female brain difference: it’s mainly ACCS members. In this way, the “proof” of problems with single sex education comes from the very organization that wants to bring about the end of single sex education! These folks hope you won’t notice the conflict of interest.
This was the case when the ACCS published their views in Science and the Psychological Bulletin online, e.g. The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling (Science, 23 Sep 2011: Vol. 333, Issue 6050, pp. 1706-1707). Once the special interest group published this “research,” the ACLU quoted it as THE scientific account of harm in gender-specific programs and single sex innovations.
So: one advocacy organization, the ACLU, is using the cherry-picked “research” of another like-minded advocacy organization, the ACCS to “prove” its case. Yet there are thousands of studies available in a five minute google search that would say just the opposite of the “pseudoscience” tract. The lack of academic rigor in the ACCS/ACLU approach is, to me, somewhat frightening, especially because children’s lives and education are at stake.
Fourth, let’s look at the demerit of single-sex options that the ideologues offer, that “single sex classrooms are no better than coed classrooms.” This is not a proof of harm unless we should also condemn all coed classrooms for not being better than single-sex classrooms. Obviously, condemning either classroom for being equal to the other is ludicrous. And, if you are a supporter of single sex classrooms, you could probably thank the ACCS for proving single sex classrooms are as good as (though not better than) coed classrooms.
Fortunate for both coed and single sex classrooms, proof of effectiveness of both is available. The Success links on www.gurianinstitute.com show success data for both modalities, if professional development has occurred in which teachers are well trained in how boys and girls learn differently.
And despite the related knock on single sex classes that “if you separate boys and girls, they won’t learn how to co-exist or work together well in the future,” there is no proof of this. Kids in coed classrooms can also grow up unable to work together with other people or other sexes; they become sexual harassers, they don’t stay married, etc. In other words, once we look at the trumped-up charges against single sex education, they just don’t hold up.
Fifth, when all else fails, the naysayers compare single sex classes to racial segregation, but while scholars and responsible citizens can quantify the dangers of racism to children, neither the ACLU nor ACCS can quantify the danger of a single sex classroom to children (and we must remember, it’s not enough to claim harm from using gender stereotypes that are, in fact, actual facts).
As all of us know who work with single sex schools and classrooms, they are not comparable to racist environments. From reading behind the lines of ACCS rhetoric, I believe the ACCS knows this. I believe they also know that they can’t find proof of actual harm or danger to kids in single sex classrooms any more than they would want to do so in coeducational classrooms, so they play the racism card. This allows them to distract us.
The number of people of all races positively affected by single sex classrooms and schools is most likely in the millions by now, and so, too, have coed school helped millions of students. There is no need for a gender war between these good modes of education, and the racism card is a cop out by people who have not done enough research to justify calling a positive mode of education dangerous.
Sixth, as you look at this information and study the gender war perpetrated by these people, I hope you will become a “citizen scientist”—a person who explores the available science and uses it in your community. As you enjoy your role, hold naysayers to high standards of rigorous discourse.
*Make these people show actual harm to the children, including more harm than occurs in coeducational classrooms, when they claim they are protecting children against gender-specific programs.
*Don’t allow ideological opinion as fact–require actual, quantifiable, significant, and confirmed data from around the world, not just one or two anecdotal examples of things that happened in one school somewhere.
*Make the naysayers prove causation between what they claim to be the inherent harm in differentiating between boys and girls (“dangerous gender stereotypes”) and actual harm to boys, girls, and trans children. It is not enough to say “may harm”—they must prove actual harm.
*Make sure they (and we) don’t perpetrate polarizing conflicts just for the sake of an ideological war. An ideological presupposition, i.e. “single sex classrooms are like racism” is not a truth; it’s just an unprovable piece of rhetoric used by people seeking their own ends.
*Make sure every person publishing “meta-studies” is doing more than an advocacy opinion piece. Meta-studies as a research modality are useful for some areas of discourse, especially medical research, but online releases of cherry-picked “meta-studies” by advocates that are then used by other advocates are opinion pieces disguised as research. For research to be useful in the child development field researchers need to study tens of thousands of female and male brains and/or study tens of thousands of children, hands on, longitudinally, and with devotion.
Seventh, as you support teachers and others utilizing gender-specific programs, training, and classrooms, let’s all admit up front and together that somewhere, sometime, some teachers in a single sex classroom have not done their jobs well; somewhere, sometime, some school has promulgated ideas about gender that naysayers don’t like. That is a given–education is not perfect, and teachers are doing their best.
But let’s also admit: the same can be said of coed classrooms and teachers whose who carefully avoid providing gender-specific programs and education. They, too, can be flawed. Gender- and sex-specific classrooms and training are the not the enemy of education. Unnecessary polarization and costly political conflicts are our enemy now. They sap our schools of needed resources and innovations.
As we advocate for children in our communities, let’s feel heartened by the amazing scientific work being done in tens of thousands of laboratories and communities around the world. The science of boys and girls and women and men is growing constantly. As you need science-based research and programs, please learn more about what we do at www.gurianinstitute.com and reach out to us at info@gurianinstitute.com.
The science adapts in every generation to fit ever changing social forces, but one thing will never change because human nature–while evolving–is also based in the X and Y chromosomes: the minds of boys and girls are not the same, and so, while there is wonderful overlap in learning and behavioral styles, boys and girls do learn differently.
–Michael Gurian
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