Are boys and girls hardwired differently?

A tenured professor at Brown University recently published a book in which she claims that the division of the human race into two sexes, female and male, is an artificial invention of our culture. "Nature really offers us more than two sexes," she claims, adding, "Our current notions of masculinity and femininity are cultural conceits." The decision to "label" a child as a girl or a boy is "a social decision," according to this expert. We should not label any child as being either a girl or a boy, this professor proclaimed. "There is no either/or. Rather, there are shades of difference." This book received courteous mention in the New York Times and the Washington Post. America's most prestigious medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine, praised the author for her "careful and insightful" approach to gender.

I soon assembled a small library of best-selling books that counsel parents that the best child-rearing is gender-neutral child-rearing. These books tell parents that true virtue is to be found in training your child to play with toys traditionally associated with the opposite sex. You should buy dolls for your son, to teach him how to nurture. You should buy an Erector set for your daughter. The underlying assumptions — that giving dolls to boys will cause boys to become more nurturing, or that giving girls Erector sets will improve girls' spatial relations skills — are never questioned. In fact, no scientific evidence exists to support the claim that gender-neutral child-rearing has any measurable benefit, regardless of which parameter you measure.

On the same bookshelf you can find books that do affirm the existence of innate differences in how girls and boys learn. But what books! Books with titles like The Wonder of Boys and Girls Will Be Girls promote antiquated and inaccurate gender stereotypes. "Girls are more emotional than boys." "Boys have a brain-based advantage when it comes to learning math." As we'll see, those familiar notions turn out to be false.

On one hand, you have books claiming that there are no innate differences between girls and boys, and that anybody who thinks otherwise is a reactionary stuck in the 1950s. On the other, you have books affirming innate differences between girls and boys — but these authors interpret these differences in a manner which reinforces gender stereotypes.

These books have only one thing in common. They are based less on fact, and more on their authors' personal beliefs or political agenda — either to deny innate sex differences, or to use sex differences in child development as a justification for maintaining traditional sex roles.

After waiting a few years for somebody else to write a book about girls and boys based on actual scientific research, I finally decided to write one myself. But I made myself a promise. Every time I make any statement about how girls and boys are different, I will also state the evidence on which my statement is based. Every statement I make about sex differences will be supported by good science published in peer-reviewed journals.

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There is more at stake here than the old question of nature versus nurture. The failure to recognize and respect sex differences in child development has done substantial harm over the past thirty years — such will be my claim throughout this book. Children today face challenges that are substantially different from those you faced as a child or teenager, fifteen or twenty or thirty or forty years ago. Look at the statistics on drugs and alcohol, for starters. Teenage girls today are four times more likely to drink than their mothers were. They're fifteen times more likely to use drugs than their mothers were. Traditionally, alcohol abuse has been more of a problem for teenage boys than for teenage girls. Not anymore. In a report published in 2004, the National Research Council reported that young teenage girls are now more likely than boys to be drinking alcohol regularly — not because boys are drinking less, but because girls are drinking more.

If girls have closed the gender gap with regard to alcohol abuse, boys are still more likely to be getting into trouble with drugs. According to FBI statistics, the number of boys under eighteen arrested for drug abuse offenses has increased by more than 50 percent in the past ten years; boys under eighteen are still five times more likely to be arrested for drug abuse violations than are girls under eighteen. In chapter 7, I'll explore how the cultural and professional neglect of sex differences has compounded the drug problem.

But school, not drugs, is the "new" problem for boys. While today's girl is more likely to have problems with drugs and alcohol than her mother was, today's boy is much more likely to be struggling in school than his father was.

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