Boys and Girls Are Different

One day I read an article that proclaimed studies showing biological differences between men and women's brains fully and completely are entirely wrong and all differences can be attributed to social constructs, due to the brain's plasticity. I did not save a link to the article and for my life I cannot find it. I wrote a rough draft rebuttal, but it seems silly to rebut an article that no one can read. I've taken the concepts from the rough draft and written about them separately, removing the context of a rebuttal of the article that doesn't exist, using instead new sources and articles that talk about close-enough concepts. (Edit: By the time I got to the very end of writing this, I found an article that discusses very closely what I found in the original article. I will not be editing the first half since I literally just did that, and instead I will declare at the end when the rebut to the newly discovered article begins.)

The first debated concept here is that the mystery article declared there to be no differences between male and female newborn brains. The only reputable evidence I've found in this debate is a study showing that brain scans show no difference between boy and girl brains while doing math, which studied children of various ages, so this is unrelated to infants. Funnily enough, I can find no claims that infant brains have no sex differences, but a lot of research that they do.

According to what I originally wrote, the article attributed all gender differences for children as young as 0 years old to the way their caretakers treated them, establishing immediately their "socially constructed gender". It seems a little self-indulgent to rebut this when I can't find a single study, or even hyper-progressive op-ed, saying this. Instead I suppose I'll focus on the conclusions drawn by the math study.

The brain scan math study summarized shows that all children used the same parts of their brain to process math. Everything from the development of the brain in regards to math skills to the actual application of math skills from those same children doing math tests showed no significant differences in children's ability to do math. Great! I have no issues with that. I'm not a brain scientist and I've never looked at a child's brain scan.

The problem starts when the article starts to conclude that, due to there being no inherent, physically measurable difference between boys and girls in math studies, it means the disparity between men and women who enter the STEM fields must be attributable to some other factor, likely a societal factor.

It rules out the hypothesis that more males end up in STEM-related careers because they're somehow better at the maths required in some of those fields. Something else must be going on: for example, preconceived ideas about the jobs men and women should go into.

What I'm sick to death of is the incessant demanding that women are not as represented in traditionally male dominated fields simply because of "social constructs" and discrimination. I'll regale everyone with a quick personal anecdote: I was very much into biology, zoology, and science in general when I was young. My class choices reflected this as I progressed through high school - I took two science classes every year, even up to chemistry and physics. I, however, hated math, and slowly realized that I'd have to do a lot of math to be a scientist. I got turned off from the concept of becoming some kind of scientist and eventually lost interest in schooling altogether.

At no point did I feel discriminated against and pushed against in my interests by any of my friends, family, or teachers. Everyone was quite psyched I wanted to be a scientist. My loss of passion and interest was my own doing. I didn't like math. It doesn't matter if my brain does everything the same as men's brains because there is a factor without a physically measurable number - what people want to do. The conclusion that, perhaps, women don't want to go into STEM is never mentioned by these types of studies. This was 15-25 years ago, back before Y2K, that I was interested in animals and zoology. My mom got me scientific books. I read nonfiction books about animals as a hobby. I was always considered "smart" and everyone imaginable gave me their enthusiastic support. Everyone was very "progressive" and knew I could "do anything I wanted". If I ever once heard that I couldn't do something because I was a girl, I don't even remember it. My story cannot be attributed to gender based discrimination.

Of course, it's impossible to know if my anecdotal experience is typical or an exception. I just know that I was a poster child for "getting girls into STEM" and boy did I totally not at all get into STEM. I don't like math. Perhaps of interesting note, my mother didn't like math either. She was in college for psychology when I was in high school and studied endlessly to pass her math class with an acceptable grade in order to retain her scholarships. She succeeded and was able to keep her high marks in math to keep her scholarship - but she hated it. It doesn't matter if she could do it, if her brain was the same, she hated it! Personal preferences are real, and could very well be influenced biologically by our sex! Imagine it. But this concept makes progressives froth at the mouth - that there could be gender preference differences, especially ones that can't be measured by brain scans.

The original, missing article focused a good portion on "toy preferences", as many progressives try to do. They attributed the provable fact that girls and boys prefer different toys to that fabled "differing treatment by their caretakers as infants" that I can't find a single study or article claiming. The argument about toy preferences has been quite thoroughly put to rest and there is actually little point in me going on about it. I have found an article showing that monkeys even show gendered toy preferences. It's impossible to attribute this to socialization and it's more clear than ever that it's biological.

So what are the implications of gendered toy preferences being real? It's almost like there are distinct differences between male and female humans, and once again it has to do with preferences. Can we really not, as a supposedly enlightened society, see something like toy choice preference and extrapolate it to job choice preference? Play is how we learn, after all. Funnily enough, I never played with dolls, but not because I didn't choose them. My mother actually explicitly trained me to not play with dolls. They were quite literally forbidden, and if I ever got one from an unknowing school friend who didn't know any better (mostly because I barely had any friends and tended to invite people I realistically barely knew to my parties), it was confiscated. For awhile as a child, I mimicked my mother's severe dislike for these dolls, confidently proclaiming that I hated them - and she would proudly share how much I despised those unrealistic barbies. However, my neighbor who remained my friend for many years had lots of dolls. With well off parents, she had huge collections of barbie doll houses and miniature clothes and furniture and kitchen tools. I always told her I never wanted to play with them, but I was so often tempted by them. I was a decently obedient child and knew I wasn't allowed, so I declined to play with them.

Regardless of the fact that my mother trained me to hate dolls and disallowed me from owning any, I wanted to play with them. Even now, while obviously I don't buy dolls for myself, I look at things like Calico Critters and think that it sure would be fun to have a little girl. I would get her so many tiny little dollhouse toys. They are absolutely precious and my innate female biological differences overrode my mother's intense social training that she began when I was a baby. I am but one person, but I cannot imagine I'm the only one with a story like this.

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By the time I nearly finished this entire post, I found an article that supposes exactly the same concept as the original article I couldn't find. If you read the "edit" at the very beginning of this post, you'll know what's up. This post is far more charitable than the original article I had found, and I will now discuss it at length.

This article focuses a lot on physical development and tries to prove that girls doing things like maintaining eye contact and walking later than boys is due to caretaker treatment. This article is clearly biased, and while that's not explicitly wrong, I want to ensure we are all aware. The article contains this excerpt after the introduction:

Seeing my son’s rambunctiousness as God’s plan and buying a “Tough like Daddy” T-shirt sounded much more pleasant than scrutinizing my own behavior and engaging in hard conversations about gender. But I couldn’t gulp down the pink and blue Kool-Aid just yet. After all, my sample size of two clearly lacked scientific rigor. So I started reading.

What we have here is someone who is allowing the truth they want to influence their research into what is the truth. This person explicitly searched for research that supported their conclusion. While it doesn't mean their research is automatically disqualified, it means that this person found research supporting the conclusion they didn't want - twice! - and disregarded it until they found research that concluded what they did want. Indeed, the author presents both sides as "theories" in the article and then ends their article clearly showing their favor for the theory they liked the most. This is a common behavior of people and it is important to take note of it. We should try to accept when research comes into view that casts doubt upon our desired conclusions, which is exactly why I now believe in biological gender differences, because I used to be on board with the author of this linked post. Surely no one should be surprised that a mother who explicitly banned me from playing with dolls also socialized me with the idea that "girls can (and should) do anything boys can do". She was, in fact, a modern feminist, and I believed what she taught me until well into my 20s.

The article goes on to say, in slightly more charitable terms than the mystery article I originally wrote about, that it's "not easy" to tell whether eventual gendered differences in adults are due to biological sex or due to the treatment we endure as children due to our sex. This article postulates the same idea that there are "no differences" between infant boys and girls and that the differences that appear are due to biased treatment based on biological sex as soon as they are born, though it correctly refers to this concept as a theory.

I am not a scientist, though maybe I thought I would be one day, but I have an important piece of scientific information that I never see mentioned by these "no differences in infants" articles. Baby girls and boys both have intense amounts of their mother's hormones in their bodies when they are in the womb and soon after birth. In fact, this quick explanation says that it may take over two months for the mother's hormones to stop affecting the baby. Lo and behold, the "no differences in newborns" article denotes differences beginning to start around four months old, after these infants start reliably regulating their own hormones. Is this the end all be all to this discussion? No, of course not. But I personally feel like it's a little important and I find it odd that it is not considered by these studies. The best we get is that the scientists who want "all differences are social" to be true have "questioned how much these hormonal differences matter". How convincing.

Of course, there is a lot deeper of a rabbit hole to go into over hormones, like how transsexual brains start to scan as the gender they are assuming after so long on hormone treatment, let alone the fact that those hormones alter their physical appearance. We don't know everything there is to know, surely, but I find it difficult to dismiss the mother's pregnancy hormones entirely in light of all of the other things we know about how strongly hormones can change our bodies and behaviors. Hormones seem to matter or not when it's convenient, which is something anyone interested in the pursuit of genuine truth absent of ideological opinions should care about.

Very interestingly to me, I had mentioned that the original article I found "mentioned no studies or sources to back up their claim". This article, however, does! What a joy. The mere mention of the articles is helpful, but unfortunately none of them are sourced. We can't know the manner in which these studies were conducted that claim that, for example, mothers interact less with their male infants. I question this profusely, as I can't see a reality in which they could get away with that. Infants need constant attention, how are they interacting less with them? Are mothers really just tossing their male infants aside and ignoring them because they are boys? Who can know without a link to the study.

I have two personal anecdotes this time. My father, overall a good man with faults like any other human, treated me and my brother quite the same. When I say this, I mean that even in spite of me being four years younger than my brother, he still did something like take both of us on top of the garage roof to sit and watch the stars at night - when I was a toddler. What comes next may surprise you, because it's the opposite of the first two anecdotes - I was a very reckless, active child and still love getting dirty and "playing" outside today, though I try to do so constructively. In fact, without even knowing that I went on top of the garage roof as a toddler, I spent many of my childhood years finding things to use to climb up onto the garage roof in order to jump off of it over and over, for fun. I climbed trees and trounced through the woods, dug holes and collected bugs in buckets. I was always a "tomboy" in fact, and along with everything else revealed here, I followed behind my brother in a lot of hobbies, one of which was video games. I had few female friends as a child and was teased for these "boy activities" - though being interested in zoology wasn't one of them. Perhaps since I had so many easier attributes to target than being a science nerd, no one bothered to try very hard when they teased me. Who knows.

This seems to go against my overall theme, here, you might be wondering. Clearly I'm advocating for societal treatment influencing physical development and interest in physical activity with this anecdote, you say. Before we get into that, my second anecdote. The second has to do with this excerpt in particular:

In other words, when we tell little girls to “be careful” but comment, “What a boy!” when our sons attempt the same feat, the stereotype becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I actually have two boys, you see, and they were very early physical developers. I don't have a daughter to compare them to, but bear with me. My eldest rolled over for the first time at two months old, both of them began crawling by four months, and the eldest began walking at nine months, while the youngest at one year. The first born son, here, clearly developed physically much faster than his brother. Now, let me assure you, when my children do things like jump off the couch or try to climb up the shelves on their wall, the first thing out of my mouth is not "haha how funny you crazy boys" but "for the love of all that is good and righteous in this world be CAREFUL!" I have never encouraged reckless physical activity because I am actually scared to death of "freak accidents" where my children are inexplicably killed dead on the spot by breaking their neck, for example.

The eldest boy, with much sooner physical development accomplishments, is much more cautious than his younger brother. The baby boy will dash headlong into danger and enthusiastically agree to any sort of adventure. I have treated both with the same emphasis on taking care when existing actively in the world, including not running on asphalt and being slow while walking up stairs. I am more strict with the youngest child, as he wants to do everything his older brother does and I intentionally hold him back or force him to let me help him because I naturally think he's not as capable, being younger. Intentionally held back and not as physically advanced as his brother, the youngest one is still the most reckless and wild. This clear and distinct difference between two children close in age who were raised in the same house by the same parents and in the same manner seems to hint that socialization may not be as powerful a tool as we believe.

What these examples shows, I will admit firstly, is that gender differences can obviously not account for everything. Not every boy is reckless (my eldest son is quite careful) and not every girl is afraid of bugs (I collected them by hand in a bucket). Many of our individual differences can be attributed to the fact that we are all individuals and not all of us will fit into the box. The problem exists when you try to remove the boxes entirely, as if they have no validity. Clearly a gendered propensity toward certain choices exists. It does not need to apply with 100% accuracy to be acknowledged, but it also does not need to be disposed of entirely just because it's not 100% accurate. Why is it important at all, you may ask, if at the end of the day, people's choices are going to be affected by who they are and what they prefer?

It matters for a very simple reason - we cannot keep fighting an imaginary enemy. There is nothing within society or law that is "keeping women out of STEM" and there is no gross violation of women's rights by the fact that by and large, women are happier when they raise families. Countries with more freedom - not necessarily as dictated by law, but affected by things like financial security (removing the need to be employed) or plenty of job options - by and large find fewer women in STEM jobs. The article provides its own conclusions, but I won't be taking the time to get into them here because I've gone on long enough. Suffice to say, absent of various types of pressure to get well paying jobs, women who get to choose what they want to do tend to not choose STEM. When you attempt to legislate that this difference shouldn't exist by disproportionately coercing, propagandizing, or incentivizing women into jobs they would ultimately not choose without such measures, what do you gain? People who are ultimately less happy.

Indeed, in light of the government interference in our economy and societal structures due to the coronavirus, we are seeing articles proclaim that we're "setting gender equality back by decades" because women are being forced by government interference to stay home with their kids to educate them due to school shutdowns. Women are "being forced" out of the workforce to care for their children. This is inexplicably considered a bad thing, that more women being home with their kids is innately bad, and that gender equality is being ruined by it. While there's a whole wasp's nest of things to talk about within this concept, the point I'd like to focus on is that op-ed writers and progressive thinktanks see women staying home with their children as bad. Talk about "social constructs" - how many women angry about caring for their own children are just as much victims of social conditioning as a girl who thinks she is genderly-disadvantaged at math? Can we not see how vehement denial of naturally occurring happenstance can "condition" just as much as anything else? Can we not see how someone may be hit over the head with the idea that something is bad for so long that they go along with it, afraid to ever admit that maybe they feel differently deep inside?

These "boxes" are important because progressive policy and culture has inadvertently forced the boxes to become relevant by trying to force the boxes to go away. How ironic, really. Let people sit in the box if they want and stop trying to guilt girls into thinking they're letting all of humanity down because they wanted to stay home with their kids. We shouldn't tell them they can't be scientists, either, but we can't immediately blame that boogieman sexism each time a girl decides otherwise. If you tried to force me into STEM now, I'd physically fight you to avoid it, and that's my choice.