All-Nighter Ho! -- Culture Wars: David Brooks on Gender Differences

I must admit that in general I like David Brooks. He seems to lack the stridency of many pundits, and I don't generally like people who shout. He also tends -- like Walter Bagehot -- not to think that people who disagree with him are evil, just that they disagree with him.

But on this piece I think he may have gone a little off. (Incidentally I would read this excellent review by Language Log, which is where I found out about it. They go into it in considerably more detail than I plan to.)

Here's Brooks:

Over the past two decades, there has been a steady accumulation of evidence that male and female brains work differently. Women use both sides of their brain more symmetrically than men. Men and women hear and smell differently (women are much more sensitive). Boys and girls process colors differently (young girls enjoy an array of red, green and orange crayons whereas young boys generally stick to black, gray and blue). Men and women experience risk differently (men enjoy it more).

It could be, in short, that biological factors influence reading tastes, even after accounting for culture. Women who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which leads to high male hormone secretions, are more likely to choose violent stories than other women.

This wouldn't be a problem if we all understood these biological factors and if teachers devised different curriculums to instill an equal love of reading in both boys and girls.

The problem is that even after the recent flurry of attention about why boys are falling behind, there is still intense social pressure not to talk about biological differences between boys and girls (ask Larry Summers). There is still resistance, especially in the educational world, to the findings of brain researchers. Despite some innovations here and there, in most classrooms boys and girls are taught the same books in the same ways.

I don't particularly like Brooks' evidence because it glosses over all the complexity, but the crux of his argument is that men and women have different brains and hence different learning styles. The failure to respect that difference is the cause of why boys are falling behind in schools.

I agree that there is evidence than men and women's brains are on average different and on average they process infromation differently, but saying that two groups are different on average doesn't mean a whole lot unless you also know the spread between the two averages. There are no psychological traits that I am aware for which men and women do not have highly overlapping bell curves -- meaning that if you were to select an individual at random on the street, knowing whether they were a man or woman would not help you particularly in judging their method of thinking.

This is the whole problem with the debate about gender differences in cognition. Somewhere in the transmission into the public sphere, the media forgot to add the important caveat of statistics. I also think this is where Larry Summers got into trouble. (I will reprint a long essay I wrote on that business some other time.) A lot of people criticizing Larry Summers were being a bit touchy; I read that speech and didn't find it particularly offensive. However, he did commit a major logical, ethical, and political sin by suggesting differences without acknowledging the statistics that blur those differences.

Considering Brooks premise in the context of statistics brings his whole argument into question. Can a difference on average account for the disparity between boys and girls in education? My instinct is no. I imagine it has something to do with it, but the girls now exceeding boys grew up in a learning environment that was largely ignorant of their learning styles as well. There is a cultural component to all of this, but I don't think that it is nearly as simple as he is making it.