The Truth about Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes about Our Children

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The Truth about Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes about Our Children

4.1 of 5 stars 4.10 · rating details · 10 ratings · 5 reviews

Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett are widely acclaimed for their analyses of women, men, and society. In "The Truth About Girls and Boys," they tackle a new, troubling trend in the theorizing of gender: that the learning styles, brain development, motivation, cognitive and spatial abilities, and "natural" inclinations of girls and boys are so fundamentally different, th...more

Hardcover, 227 pages

Published September 27th 2011 by Columbia University Press (first published September 8th 2011)

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Aug 15, 2011 Lis Carey rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: children, non-fiction

Are girls and boys really that different? Are their brains wired differently in important ways, leading to very different abilities and needs? Rivers & Barnett take a hard look at claims that the brains, and therefore the abilities, of boys and girls differ in major ways, making it necessary to teach them in very different ways. First they look at the claims, the proposals based on them, and the studies claimed to support them.

These claims include the idea that boys are innately less verbal...more Are girls and boys really that different? Are their brains wired differently in important ways, leading to very different abilities and needs? Rivers & Barnett take a hard look at claims that the brains, and therefore the abilities, of boys and girls differ in major ways, making it necessary to teach them in very different ways. First they look at the claims, the proposals based on them, and the studies claimed to support them.

These claims include the idea that boys are innately less verbal than girls, because of their brain structure and wiring, and that they are thereby disadvantaged in the "verbally drenched" curricula of most schools and that this problem is compounded by the fact that most teachers are women. The corresponding claim, about girls, is that they are not equipped to do as well at math and science as boys, and really shouldn't be expected to even try to learn math in the same classrooms as boys. Girls need to be taught science through things that relate to girls' lives, such as using cosmetics to teach chemistry. Also, boys need to be spoken to loudly and forcefully, while girls need to be spoken to softly. Really, the proponents of this view say, the best thing for both boys and girls is to be educated in single-sex classrooms geared to each gender's natural strengths and weaknesses.

Rivers and Barnett take this position apart in great detail, analyzing and explaining the flaws and the limited scope of the studies claimed to support it, as well as presenting the substantial body of well-constructed studies that collectively present a much different picture, of girls and boys substantially equal in abilities and potential. These studies, precisely because their results are not as flashy and exciting, simply do not get the same media attention. What they show, however, is for more hopeful for both girls and boys.

Girls arrive at school with somewhat better verbal abilities, and boys with somewhat greater spatial, mechanical, and visualization abilities, because of the different ways that parents and other adults relate to young children. Even at very young ages, parents speak to their daughters more, and in ways that are more helpful for developing both verbal and interpersonal skills. Boys, meanwhile, are treated to more games of catch and other physical activities that develop their spatial, mechanical, and visualization skills. Because the human brain, especially in growing children, is extremely plastic, these differences in adult interactions with girls and boys actually cause their brains to wire themselves differently. Despite this, girls and boys rapidly catch up with each other in school--until, on the verge of high school, girls start to get messages that they don't really need calculus and advanced math, and shouldn't expect to do well in them. The most tragic part of this is that teachers perceive boys as doing much better in math that girls, even when their best students are in fact girls, and girls as doing much better in English, even when boys are their best students.

Rivers and Barnett's message is that what both girls and boys need is not to be separated into single-sex classrooms that play to their perceived strengths and downplay the areas where they are perceived to be weak, but rather to be challenged to learn from each other and develop all their talents.

For me, the saddest section of this book was the discussion of the startling re-segregation of toys. In the 1950s and 1960s, my parents, and aunts and uncles, put a fair degree of care in preventing all us cousins from getting the idea that there were "girls' toys' and "boys' toys." I had a cap gun, baby dolls, a Fort Apache set, a tea set, dress-up dolls, a chemistry set. . . When kids outside our normal social circles told us about this weird concept "girls' toys" and "boys' toys", we didn't believe them.

Rivers and Barnett describe toy departments where most toys, even such seemingly "neutral" toys as Legos or balls, are gender-typed with colors and patterns that relentlessly make them "girls' toys" or "boys' toys"--and mostly boys' toys, with little but the most stereotypically "female" toys left in the much-contracted girls' toy sections. Yet experiments show that a tea set in combat cammo pattern is perceived as a toy for boys by both girls and boys, while a toy gun in purple and silver is perceived as a toy for girls. It's not the toys themselves; it's what children of both genders have learned from adults around them about what signals girls' or boys' items.

This is an excellent and important book, clearly written yet also packed with documentation.

Highly recommended.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley.(less)

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Oct 22, 2011 Ann Douglas rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, read-in-2011, reviewed, parenting, favorites

This book challenges popular (but scientifically inaccurate) stereotypes about boys and girls -- stereotypes that make it difficult for both boys and girls to realize their full potential.

The authors also describe how mistaken assumptions about what's good for girls and what's good for boys are guiding educational policymaking.

This book should serve as a wakeup call to parents and concerned citizens everywhere.

Highly recommended.

See this article that I wrote after interviewing one of the artic...more

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Mar 27, 2013 Anne rated it 3 of 5 stars

Important points but there are better books written for the lay person illustrating the same points- pink brain, blue brain by lise eliot

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Aug 30, 2011 Anna added it

Shelves: children-and-youth, education, feminism, psychology, science, sociology

http://annajcook.blogspot.com/2011/08...

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Jan 27, 2012 Gabrielle rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, psychology

Interesting, but very repetitive.

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About Caryl Rivers

Caryl Rivers has been called “one of the brightest voices in contemporary fiction.” Her novel VIRGINS was an international critical success, published in the US, UK, Sweden, Germany and Japan. It was on many best seller lists and in paperback (Pocket Books) sold more than a million copies. Her novels deal with American women trying to find a foothold in a rapidly changing world.

She is a nationally...more Caryl Rivers has been called “one of the brightest voices in contemporary fiction.” Her novel VIRGINS was an international critical success, published in the US, UK, Sweden, Germany and Japan. It was on many best seller lists and in paperback (Pocket Books) sold more than a million copies. Her novels deal with American women trying to find a foothold in a rapidly changing world.

She is a nationally known author, journalist, media critic and professor of Journalism at Boston University. In 2007 She was awarded the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for distinguished journalism. She is the author of four novels and four works of non-fiction, all critically acclaimed. Her books have been selections of the Book of the Month Club, Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club and Troll Book club. With her late husband, Boston Globe columnist Alan Lupo, she penned a funny account of modern parenting, “For Better, For Worse.”

“Reading this book is like multiplying Woody Allen by two. Marriage isn’t supposed to be this funny.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer, on “For Better, For Worse”

Her articles have appeared in the New York Times magazine, Daily Beast, Huffington post, Salon, The Nation, Saturday Review, Ms., Mother Jones, Dissent, McCalls, Glamour, Redbook, Rolling Stone, Ladies Home Journal and many others. She writes frequent commentary for the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and Womensenews. Of Her book “Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women” Gloria Steinem says it “will save the sanity of media watchers enraged or bewildered by the distance between image and reality.”

She has co-authored four books with Dr. Rosalind Barnett, senior scientist at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis—the latest (2011) being “The Truth About Girls and Boys: Confronting Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children.” Articles based on the book won a Casey medal for distinguished journalism about children and families and a special citation from the National Education Writers association. The Editorial Board of the Boston Globe voted their book “Same Difference” one of the best books of the year in 2004. The New York Times called their book “She Works, He Works” a bold new framing of the story of the American family, and praised its lucid prose. The Sloan Foundation cited their book “Lifeprints” as a “classic book” from the work-family canon that has made “a significant contribution and stood the test of time.”

Caryl Rivers also wrote THE CHEATS, an ABC afterschool special about the lives of high school seniors embroiled in a cheating scandal. It won the AFTRA American scene award for its treatment of minority characters. She also wrote A MATTER OF PRINCIPAL, syndicated by Hearst television, a drama about an urban school principal starring Loretta Swit. The drama won the prestigious GABRIEL award in l990 as the best locally produced television program in the U.S. Ms. Rivers was creative consultant for JENNY’S SONG, the first made for television drama to be syndicated nationally by Westinghouse television, starring Ben Vereen and Jessica Walter.
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