The Myth of
Pink
If educators hope to close gender gaps, they must
abandon the notion of a male and female brain.
Lise Eliot
Gender differences are a hot topic. But much of the recent discussion about boys’ and girls’ learning has generated
more heat than light. As a neuroscientist
who has studied children’s cognitive and
emotional abilities and, in particular,
analyzed gender differences in children’s
brains, I hope to help set the record
straight on this incendiary subject.
Boys and girls differ in many ways—
in physical activity level; self-control;
and performance levels in reading,
writing, and math. Above all, they
differ in interests. But most of these differences are nowhere near as large as
popular ideas about a “Mars-Venus” gulf
imply, nor are they as “hardwired” as
current discourse portrays. The truth is
that neuroscientists have identified very
few reliable differences between boys’ and girls’ brains. Boys’
brains are about 10 percent larger than those of girls, and
boys’ brains finish growing a year or two later during puberty
(Lenroot et al., 2007). But these global differences reflect
physical maturation more than mental development.
© L WA/Getty ImAGes
Few other clear-cut differences between boys’ and girls’
neural structures, brain activity, or neurochemistry have thus
far emerged, even for something as obviously different as self-regulation. Boys and girls, on average, differ in self-regulatory
behavior, with girls showing better ability to sit still, pay
attention, delay gratification, and organize a take-home folder,
for instance. We know that self-regulatory abilities depend
on the prefrontal cortex of the brain, but neuroscientists have
thus far been unable to show that this area develops earlier or
is more active in girls (Barry et al., 2004).
The same is true of gender differences in the adult brain. In
spite of what you may have read, women do not have a larger
corpus callosum, 1 process language in a more symmetrical
fashion, or have higher circulating levels of serotonin compared with men. The latest high-resolution MRI studies reveal
small differences in brain lateralization or “sidedness” (Liu,
Stufflebeam, Sepulcre, Hedden, & Buckner, 2009) and functional connectivity (Biswal et al., 2010), on the order of three-tenths of a standard deviation, meaning there is more overlap
between average males’ and females’ brains than differences
between the average brain of each gender. These studies,
based on thousands of subjects around the world, give us a
better picture of the true size of neurologic sex differences
than do the cherry-picked, single studies of a few dozen men
and women that are often cited as proof of evolutionarily
