Lise Eliot interview

© Bill Frost

When you ask parents about gender differences in their children, you usually get one of two reactions. The evolutionary-biologist types insist that boys and girls are just different, because they certainly didn't encourage Jane to wear all pink or Jack to play with guns, and yet there they are, doing so. Meanwhile, the social constructivists ascribe girly-girl behavior and boyish aggression to all sorts of subliminal influences, from the media and grandparents to classmates and their own unconscious reinforcement—anything but biology. Lise Eliot, a Chicago-based professor of neuroscience as well as a mom, has her own point of view. Her new book, Pink Brain, Blue Brain, posits that the gender divide is really more of a Venn diagram, with an overlapping middle ground. Time Out Kids chatted with the author about boy-girl social politics.

What’s the biggest myth you hear about “how boys are” and "how girls are"?
The most dangerous is that boys lack empathy. Parents and teachers shouldn't let boys’ tendency to talk less about their feelings convince them that they actually feel less, or that they fail to understand others’ emotions. Think of Thomas the Tank Engine—a toy that appeals to boys but has great emotional content.

The ability to read others' emotions is crucial in any social species, and hardly something males could have made it through evolution without. The actual size of the sex difference in empathy is small in children, and the ability to read emotions in others is clearly teachable; indeed, this is the core of most successful therapies for autism. Babies, both male and female, are riveted by social stimuli, and parents should make every effort to engage both their sons and their daughters in shared eye contact and emotional expression.
Another myth is that girls are not aggressive. It's true that they hit their friends, siblings, etc., less than boys do, but "relational aggression" is a serious matter among middle- and high-school girls. And it's so much harder to stamp out than physical aggression, which is the focus of most anti-bullying campaigns. Similarly, girls are plenty competitive, but it’s usually over appearance and thinness. (That’s why we have anorexia and bulimia epidemics.) Girls should be taught that competition can be a good thing but should be channeled into athletic, academic or other achievement, rather than beauty or social climbing.

Which genuine difference surprised you the most?
The writing gap is much larger than I appreciated, especially when you consider all the great male writers through history. Boys clearly need more attention in this area, and I’ve outlined several ideas for this in the book.

I was also surprised that the sex difference in spatial navigation is as large as it is. I love maps and always orient myself in terms of North-South-East-West, so to learn that women really are much poorer at this than men was eye-opening, and makes me all the more resolved to use such "direction-speak" when I'm driving my kids around town—daughter and sons.

On the other hand, I was surprised at how weak the evidence is for hormonal effects on our mood and thinking abilities. While prenatal testosterone has some pretty dramatic effects on play behavior and, probably, later sexual orientation, the sex hormones that rise at puberty and remain elevated in adults have surprisingly modest effects on our thinking—except for the increased sex drive that testosterone produces in both men and women.

We liberal New York parents like to believe we don’t reinforce sex stereotypes. Are we kidding ourselves?
Yes, but we all are. Unfortunately, gender is impossible to ignore. While we bend over backward to counter the stereotypes, the kids know better, because they so strongly want to gender conform. If anything is "hardwired," it is children's desire to pick a gender, early on, and then assiduously follow its rules.

But in spite of what we overtly preach, parents implicitly treat boys and girls differently, just as we treat adult males and females differently—and are unconsciously biased about race, age and every other group characteristic.

Your introduction mentions that these are "politically sensitive" issues. Have you witnessed anyone become upset by your research findings?
Another journalist told me that people start arguing with her whenever she describes my book to them. I think we have become enamored of the Mars/Venus dichotomy. Somehow, it empowers women—about their communicative superiority—while reinforcing men in their comfortable notions of masculinity: beer and sports. And to suggest that such differences are actually learned in large measure, instead of evolutionarily programmed, is just no fun. It also puts unquestionably greater pressure on parents to change our ways, which is hard. No one wants to accept that they may stereotype their children, and bucking the trend (by dressing your son in pink or forcing your daughter to play basketball) is just too hard most of the time.

On the other hand, some people still get upset when you posit any kind of innate behavioral or ability differences between boys and girls, arguing that such claims are inevitably used to discriminate, or stereotype, and end up limiting children's opportunities. The same argument, when applied to racial differences, is especially persuasive.

You have two sons and a daughter. Do you think either girls or boys are harder to raise in a gender-balanced way?
Absolutely. With boys, it's harder, because our society is still very homophobic and believes that sending a boy to ballet class will make him gay. You can get away with raising your daughter anywhere along the gender spectrum, but boys are being painted into an ever-tinier corner as both they and society yield ground to girls. It takes a community-wide effort to make a difference. In my town, we happen to have a great choral teacher who gets considerable numbers of middle-school boys singing and dancing. But this is just one lucky happenstance of local culture. Most other activities are distressingly gender-segregated.

Girls can do anything these days. Although they often restrict themselves to certain activities—because they see a computer programming camp as unfeminine—their parents are less often feeding them such ideas. And you definitely see girls moving into areas they didn't broach before, like playing the trombone, or running for student council president.

When was the last time you caught yourself making a stereotypical assumption about your own kids?
All the time! But then, these are mostly accurate, because my kids are old enough that they are heavily invested in their own gender identity. So I know, almost before I say it, that my daughter will refuse my suggestion to sign up for the woodworking class at her high school and my son will never volunteer to edit his school's literary magazine. However, I am hoping that my husband and my role-modeling will seep in later, when they are a little more eager to express their individuality.

What is the main thing you hope readers take away from your book?
That boy-girl differences are not as "hard-wired" as many parents today, imbued with the Mars/Venus philosophy, believe. Yes, there are innate differences, but we should be aware of how they become magnified through our own parenting, marketing and, especially, kids' own culture. Also, I would like readers to come away with a sense of how fantastically plastic the human brain is. Whatever you do is what your brain will be “wired” for; so anytime we see an obvious difference between men and women, or boys and girls, you have to ask yourself, how did they spend their time over the past three or 30 years to make their brains so good—or bad—at certain skills.

You went to grad school at Columbia but now work in Chicago. What do you miss about New York City?
The intensity of the people. Midwesterners are notoriously nice, which makes for happy neighborhoods, but at the cost of a certain edgy excitement that I still miss. Also, I loved living in the city and not needing a car! My daughter recently started driver's ed, and I'm of course dreading the day when she's driving on her own. I know how desperately teens want the freedom, but I would much rather they get it with a subway card than a minivan.

Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps—and What We Can Do about It (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is out Sept 14.

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