Sex Is Binary, Gender Is Fluid

Almost daily, I receive an email or other correspondence asking about the influences of nature, nurture, and culture on girls and STEM training or women and STEM gaps in the workplace. Most recently, I’ve been asked: "Can you respond to this headline: Boys and girls have an equal aptitude for math—so why are there are so few women in higher-paying STEM jobs?"

This and similar recent articles note a brain scan study done on 104 children between 3 and 10 years old who watched educational videos about mathematics and then did simple math. From these few scans of children doing these simple tasks, the researchers assert that the nature/nurture question is now resolved in favor of social constructivism. Male/female brains have nothing to do with lopsided female/male participation in engineering and computer coding jobs in adulthood, the researchers conclude.

They are wrong on both counts—not just wrong but perpetrating a myth that negatively affects girls and women who want to pursue technology and engineering careers.

Nature, nurture, and culture all play significant roles in the relative paucity of women in engineering and coding, with male/female brain differences playing a very large part. Even though gender, a social construct, can be discussed as fluid, sex is binary, including sex on the brain.

In our 25 years of implementation research, the Gurian Institute has found that brain-based educational strategies from birth onward, especially in homes and schools, are key to closing gender STEM gaps. Rather than trying to prove that brains don’t matter, these implementation tools work because they take head on (pun intended) the sexual dimorphism in the male and female brain.

Beware of Flawed Conclusions

In the 104 scans study, the authors found that while doing simple math there was "no evidence of gender differences in neural responses to mathematics content, neural responses during educational video viewing, or rates of neural development for mathematical processing in early childhood, and in fact we found statistical equivalence between boys and girls throughout the brain.” The researchers note that diversity exists between individual brains.

The researchers are correct, of course, that 1) every brain is somewhat different from every other, and 2) all brains exist on a spectrum of natural development, but it is not true that 104 scans disprove the existence of male/female brain differences. In fact, sexual dimorphism exists across races and cultures because of X and Y chromosomes.

This chromosome pair (in all cultures, on all continents) directs hormonal surges in utero to format male and female brains; thus, our brains come out "human," yes, and "on a spectrum," yes, but also female and male. Gender can be discussed as fluid depending on culture, but the X/Y chromosomes result in different impacts on the brain. Even transgender people's brains show this. A female-to-male feels absolutely that he has a “male brain” in his female body, and a male-to-female feels she has a “female brain” in her male body. Both sex and gender must be discussed in the same conversation rather than pitting them against one another.

For the thousands of studies that show sex differences, please check the resources I’ve provided at the end of this post. Neuroscientist Camilla Benbow, for instance, has studied data from nearly 2,000,000 children, including adolescents, and seen clear brain differences relevant to future math performance. She and other researchers utilize large sample sizes, study tens of thousands of brain scans, and study the brain longitudinally (over a long period of time).

Strategies and Science That Can Help Women Close STEM Gaps

Here are a few of the strategies that can foster systemic change in schools and homes toward better STEM learning for girls.

Raise Awareness of the Power of the Brain. When my team and I speak at schools, we show scans of male and female brains doing verbal, spatial, and other tasks. Eyes of both teachers and students’ eyes light up when they see these scans. “No one showed us this before,” they say. Now they understand why more guys gravitate towards complex video games (visual-spatial) and why more girls gravitate toward complex social media (word-oriented and social-emotional). Just this consciousness-raising is a crucial first step to systemic change.

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Giving Permission to Focus Girls’ Brains in Certain Areas. Teachers now start searching for tools to teach girls (and boys) from the brain-based perspective. Specifically, teachers see on brain scans that girls use more "brain time" and "brain space" for social-emotional contact and less for key gray matter area development in the inferior parietal lobule and the temporal-parietal junction, which are crucial for engineering jobs later in life. Understanding this means having an in-school and in-community discussion to accept the real science of male/female brain differences and give teachers permission to inculcate the science. The community realizes: if our social goal is to have more women engineers, then we have to start girls very young in realizing how these fields work, and how to help their own brains play up spatial-mechanical, gray matter tasking.

Altering Focus in a Multi-Tasking Brain. Teachers help girls understand that bonding chemistry (higher oxytocin than testosterone) and white matter activity (female brains tend to use more white matter activity than males for the same intellectual task) spreads out brain function and leads to not just more social-emotional time but also more multi-tasking. To succeed in coding or engineering, the brain needs to multi-task less. Classrooms are set up to keep all but spatial multi-tasking down to a minimum (e.g. no Smart Phones/social media during spatial learning time), so that the brain can stay focused on single-tasking.

Practice New Strategies for Spatial Emphasis. Teachers alter their classrooms to include discussion/writing (word use) during spatial learning (blocks, spatial play, Legos, building, lab work) and making sure girls do not use words for a period of time while problem-solving and building. This helps girls develop spatial/building gray matter areas that boys tend to develop earlier because of Y chromosome markers and testosterone’s effect on the right side of the male brain. This also helps girls de-emphasize verbal functioning on the right side of the brain, helping to allow for spatial development on that side.

Utilize Single-Sex Groupings. Teachers allow and encourage girls to play and work, at various time, in separate sex groups, e.g. "girls only day in the block corner," which makes spatial play, spatial learning, and higher sequencing-learning more girl-friendly, especially early in life, by keeping the boys in another part of the room. The result of this strategy is that spatial/sequencing dominant boys do not interrupt girls' development of crucial spatial and other gray matter areas of the brain.

Teach Girls to Love Failure and Competition and Stop Taking Things Personally. One of the most interesting patterns my team and other researchers have noted gets expressed by teachers this way: "Boys just don't take as many things personally as girls do." Simultaneously, when I work in Fortune 500 companies to train their managers and teams, executives say, "We need women to not take as much personally as they do if they are going to fully compete." It is not politically correct to say this, and so it is generally said in private, but it is said, mainly, by women. "I wish I got tougher when I was young, competed more, failed more,” they say. A girl who wants to sustain a career in engineering, high tech, fire-fighting, law enforcement, corporate finance, and nearly any STEM field will not compete well—whether in performance or promotion—if she takes too much personally, does not like to compete, and does not come to respect failure.

Become a Citizen Scientist

Studying male/female brain differences in the use of the temporal-parietal junction, inferior parietal lobule, gray/white matter activity, testosterone/oxytocin, or any of the other hundreds of brain differences does not negate that nurture and culture matter; rather, this citizen science uses nurture and culture to discover what strategies can influence systemic change for girls in the first decade and a half of brain development. You can be a citizen scientist and study all this in your community and bring it to your school.

When you do, you may find, as I have, that social constructivism can work well for some deliverables, like helping get more STEM programs built and getting more girls into college math/science classes, but it can't explain or grapple with brain differences that are a real and likely reason why fewer women enter and stay in coding and engineering jobs.