What is gender and why does it matter in education?
By Lucinda Powell, Teacher of Psychology, Abingdon School and Assistant Director of Teaching and Learning
The perils of pop psychology
When I was in my late teens, my father raved enthusiastically about a book that explained how all his failings were a result of biology and therefore completely out of his control. Specifically, the book said, his failings were a result of him having XY chromosomes rather than XX. The book also gave him permission to tell me that all my failings arose from me being a female of the species. This was my first experience of popular psychology. The book? Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by John Gray Ph.D. Still popular today, it has sold more than 15 million copies.
It was one of many books published in the late 80s through to, well, now, that stressed the enormous divide between men and women and referred to ‘evidence’ from scientific research as ‘proof’ of the divide. My next read on the subject was Why men don’t listen and women can’t read maps by husband and wife team Allan and Barbara Pease (sales of 10 million and counting). By this time I had earned a degree in psychology, so I could not deny that it seemed to be stuffed with highly credible neuroscientific research, but it still irked me, because I was (and still am) really good at map reading and parallel parking.
While I took what I read with a pinch of salt, both of the books – and many others in the same vein – had become firmly embedded in the public psyche (including, unfortunately, my father’s). These sorts of books are still being written, marketed and read avidly. Their popularity helps reinforce gender stereotypes of both men and women, stressing how far apart the genders are due to biological differences. They also lend the stereotypes an aura of scientific respectability; the differences, it seems, are irrefutable and inevitable.
But just how accurate are these claims and how good is the science that underpins them?
What we know about the extent to which biology ‘matters’
Let’s start with some basic biology – specifically, biological sex. (For the purposes of this article, “sex” refers to biological differences, “gender” to the identity ascribed by society). To simplify massively, biological sex is determined at the level of chromosomes. The 23rd pair of chromosomes (out of 23) in humans determines biological sex: males have XY and females XX. It is once we consider sex and gender past this starting point that the difficulties and complexities begin.
Sex assigned at birth is binary; you are either male or female. This assignment is based on the appearance of genitalia – not chromosomes. The problem is that it is not uncommon for genitalia at birth to be ambiguous, yet ‘not sure’ is not a sex – so midwives or doctors give it their best guess. There is significant debate and controversy around the question of what proportion of a given population are likely to be assigned a sex that does not match their chromosomal sex. While one estimate puts it as high as 1 in 50 people, one of the most highly-cited papers in the field suggests that it is closer to 0.018%1. This is not a simple matter of someone with XY (male) chromosomes being designated as female or vice versa. Rather, there is a plethora of gene combinations that interact to create an ambiguous outward physical appearance. Chromosome combinations can include XO, XYY and XXY, as well as others.
There are also genetic conditions which mean that developing infants do not develop genitalia that are clearly of one sex or the other. For example, individuals with a mutation on the SRY gene may have XY chromosomes, but because they do not respond to testosterone in utero they do not develop a penis and testes so are usually assigned as female at birth; they can then, at puberty, go on to ‘turn into’ men.
For the sake of simplicity with respect to considering the most prevalent gender stereotypes, however, let’s work with the principle of a binary XY/XX paradigm. It is clear that genes code for a wide range of physical differences between males and females. The question is, do they make any difference to our brains – not just the biological structure but also the way we think, emote, process information and generally perceive and respond to our environment? Physically, the brains of males are, on average, larger than females (as men in general are larger than women, perhaps this is not a huge surprise); physical size does not correlate to intelligence – Einstein being the oft cited example of a male whose brain was smaller than average (although there were some interesting structural differences in comparison to other brains). Take a brain out of its human body, however, and there is no reliable way to tell if it is male or female. While there are some structural differences, the variation within sexes is too great to categorically ‘sex’ a brain.
But what if I (being a keen and eager psychologist) decide to look at the brains whilst they are working and pop some willing participants in an fMRI scanner (which tracks blood flow) in order that we can ‘see’ the brain at work. Do we see sex differences between the brains of males and females when they do different tasks – for example, read maps? Well, the answer is yes, we do see differences.
In the 90s and early 2000s, this type of research proliferated. It led to a range of books being published about just how different men and women were. More recently, however, many researchers are sounding a distinct note of caution. It is being pointed out, for example, that these fMRI studies are often based on extremely small sample sizes – often too small to form the basis of robust generalisations. In addition, research that does not show a difference often fails to get published: what’s been called the “file drawer” problem (and apparently there are a lot of fMRI studies consigned to file drawers, never to see the light of day).23
Arguably the biggest problem, however, lies in the interpretation of the data resulting from these studies. The problem is that all we can see is that there are differences between males and females – more or less activity in one area, or simply different types of activity. This alone reveals nothing; the data do not speak for themselves. To make sense of what we’re seeing, we then have to make inferences about what those differences actually mean.
It is possible that, in the past, scientists have been culturally primed to leap to the conclusion that differences in levels of activity mean that one sex is better at a particular task than the other. But this is not necessarily the case. It may be, for example, that the brain is compensating for another difference in order to ensure that outward behaviour is the same. For example, testosterone, which can increase aggression in men, may be countered by brain differences that work to reduce it. As two researchers recently put it: “Despite decades of pursuit, human brain imaging has yet to uncover clear neural correlates of male-female behavioral differences.”4
Where gender fits into all of this
Biology is what gives us our sex. It does not, however, give us our gender. While there are no universally-agreed definitions of “sex” and “gender”, the majority of the scientific literature regard “sex” as a biological construct and “gender” as a social construct. Gender is thus determined by social cues and conditioning, some of them subtle, others overt. It is not simply derived from biological sex, even if it is differences between biological sex that help to shape how individuals are regarded and treated.
Conditioning and cues start early on. Gender reveal parties aside, as soon as a mother knows the gender of the child she is expecting, the language she uses to speak about her unborn baby becomes gendered. Parents then have to negotiate the minefield of pink and blue plastic – we live in a world where Lego blocks have to be either for ‘girls’ or ‘boys’ (yes, I am a child of the early 80s where Lego was just Lego). Research reliably shows that adults play with babies in gender stereotypical ways – possibly enhancing different skills in different genders.5 Ruth Whippman’s BoyMum includes some other, often startling examples of how parents and society unconsciously but powerfully “gender” children.6 A few brave parents have attempted to bring their children up in a “gender neutral” environment, but the effort required to do this takes parenting to a whole new level – pronouns, clothing, toys, books…7 When my three boys were toddlers, I could barely string a sentence together, let alone ‘doctor’ books to avoid stereotyped job roles (we were a house full of Fireman Sam and Bob the Builder).
Where does this lead us to in schools and education? One important concept is stereotype threat, where an individual fears they may confirm negative stereotypes about their social group – in this context, gender. This fear can negatively affect their performance and, in so doing, reinforce the stereotype, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Psychologists have got very good at drawing attention to someone’s gender in subtle ways and then measuring the impact on performance. Amongst the plethora of ways psychologists can deliberately (and others can inadvertently), induce individuals to pay attention to their gender are: asking participants to state their sex at the beginning of a test; exposing them to commercials featuring stereotypical characters; exposing participants to sexist views of peers or tutors; getting them to write their name at the top of a test; and many more. Research shows that these sorts of cues detrimentally impact scores on maths tests for girls and language tasks for boys.
We also tend to label behaviour in gendered ways: for example, boys are said to be more aggressive, risk taking and promiscuous; girls, in contrast, are more sensitive, caring and homely. In reality this dichotomous split of behaviour into male and female is a fiction. If we think about every behavioural trait sitting on a spectrum both males and females sit all along the spectrum for every behaviour, and no individual is at the same ‘male/female’ point for every behaviour.8 For example, just because a man might sit at the ‘male’ end of the spectrum for competitiveness does not mean he will sit at the ‘male’ end for compassion.
Equally, a girl may be both a great map reader (according to my dad, a skill only men have) and very gentle in behavioural terms (the opposite to “male” aggression). In addition, how we view and measure these traits may be biased: for example ‘risk taking’ is viewed as a stereotypical male behaviour, and studies seem to support this view, but what constitutes risk for a girl and a boy is different, and thus risk taking behaviour by a girl is not seen as such in comparison to a boy’s. Hundreds of traits sit along this male-female spectrum, and the research shows that across all these traits there is more variation within genders than between genders.
In the course of the three months while I have been researching and thinking about this article, I have lost count of the times I have heard people say, ‘boys are like…’, ‘of course, girls…’, ‘boys will be boys’, and so on. As adults, we might be tempted to regard such comments as “common sense”, or unimportant even if untrue. The problem is that young people, male and female, constantly hear these messages, drip fed, day by day, which often leads to them becoming part of the internal narrative that shapes thinking and behaviour: ‘girls don’t do STEM’; ‘boys have to earn money to be successful’. When we pigeon-hole an individual as male or female, we help to unnecessarily and unhelpfully limit their options.
Conclusion
The belief that gender is both immutable and binary, thanks to being deeply rooted in biology (or even identical with it), seems set to endure, at least for now. It is, however, just that: a belief, with no basis in reality. In reality, gender is bound up with a massively complex interaction of biological, social, cultural, environmental and economic factors (and probably more). Just by looking at the students here at Abingdon (or perhaps our own children) we can see the enormous differences between them. Just because they play rugby, it does not mean they are insensitive or don’t read books; equally, just because they enjoy cooking, it does not mean they are bad at maths. The more we can do to recognise and respect the complexities of the young people in our care, the more we can help them recognise, appreciate, and make the most of the enormous range of opportunities open to all of them, regardless of any label that might be slapped on them.
Now I just need to persuade my father that I can read maps…
1 Sax, L. (2002). How common is lntersex? A response to Anne Fausto‐Sterling. Journal of sex research, 39(3), 174-178.
2 Ritchie, S. (2020). Science fictions: Exposing fraud, bias, negligence and hype in science. Random House.
3 Kragel, P. A., Han, X., Kraynak, T. E., Gianaros, P. J., & Wager, T. D. (2021). Functional MRI can be highly reliable, but it depends on what you measure: A commentary on Elliott et al.(2020). Psychological Science, 32(4), 622-626.
4 Rauch, J. M., & Eliot, L. (2022). Breaking the binary: gender versus sex analysis in human brain imaging. Neuroimage, 264, 119732.
5 For an accessible overview, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWu44AqF0iI
6 Whippman, R. (2024). BoyMum. Quercus Books.
7 For example, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4o87MOY5R4
8 Jäncke, L. (2018). Sex/gender differences in cognition, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy. F1000Research, 7.
