WASHINGTON, DC — Leading experts on research into brain differences between boys and girls, told a National Press Club luncheon crowd on Friday the 15th that biology — not social construction — explains sex differences. This has significant implications for both education and the workplace.
Speaking at an event sponsored by the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), “The XY Files: The Truth is Out There About the Differences Between Boys and Girls,” the panel of experts noted that both society and boys are being harmed by fashionable, but misguided, feminist notions. Said Lionel Tiger, Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and author of The Decline of Males: “The androgynous commitment to the notion that the sexes are all the same is essentially causing chronic private trauma in countless lives because there is no articulation between the social structure and the real needs of and feelings of people.”
Challenging the gender experts who see male/female differences as created by socialization, Doreen Kimura, Professor of Psychology at Simon Fraser University and author of Sex and Cognition, presented science. “Some of the sex differences in intellectual or cognitive patterns are biologically influenced early in life and a major factor is the different hormonal milieu experienced by males and females before or shortly after birth,” she reported.
Patricia Hausman, a behavioral scientist specializing in the nature and origins of human sex differences, agreed. “Many argue that changes in the social environment could eliminate sex differences in interests,” she said. “To me, this perspective mistakenly assumes that the “social environment” is something that Big People force on Little People. I think it is often the other way around. The Little People send signals to the Big People about what they do and do not like, and the Big People respond accordingly. Parents who buy more dolls for a daughter are probably not forcing them on her. More likely, they are reacting to observations that she did not find a toy truck particularly captivating, but lavished attention on her first doll.”
The refusal of the education system to accept what science says about boys and girls is having devastating effects on children, especially boys, the panelists warned. “The problem with [popular feminist] dogma is that it gives enormous latitude to educators who want to tamper with children?s gender identities,” said Christina Hoff Sommers, W.H. Brady Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The War Against Boys. This dogma has inspired activist-educators to take on the challenge of resocializing little boys to be more like little girls.
Tiger concluded by echoing Sommers. “We’re now trying to solve the problem of young males by saying that they’re essentially young females,” he said. “What is happening though is that boys do less well in school and they don?t go on to college as often. This will have implications for these young men to be seen as acceptable or plausible candidates for marriage.”
Which leads to a warning for all of those so-called gender experts: Don’t mess with Mother Nature.