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

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.

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.

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.)

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