Time September 16, 20196 Questions‘
EXPERIENCES
DRIVE BRAIN
ARCHITECTURE.
IT’S A BIT LIKE
TREES THAT GROW
ON WINDY PLAINS
’
A lot of parents work hard to raise
their kids without strict gender differ-
ences. Can that compete with the gen-
der messages in the culture at large?
Children are tiny social sponges, and it
starts early. Little boys quickly pick up
the fact that they shouldn’t cry—that
if they want to be on the football team,
then, in British terms, stiff upper lip. Is
that what you’d call it in America?“Suck it up” is what we’d say. It’s a little
more vulgar. Yeah, but telling, actually.If we can’t lay gender differences off
on brain structure, surely hormones
play a role, don’t they? They’re ob-
viously powerful, yes, but they’re re-
sponsive to the social environment.
Testosterone, for example, is not the
one- directional driver people say it is.
The father of a newborn baby who is the
primary caregiver of the baby will have
a much lower testosterone level than the
father who is not the primary caregiver.Rightly or wrongly, much has been
written about women’s empathy and
collegiality and how the world would
be more peaceful if there were more
female heads of state. Do you agree?
I think the best way forward would be
gender irrelevance. If good leaders need
to be empathic, networking, collegial,
then let’s encourage that. If good lead-
ers need to be assertive, thick-skinned,
able to make rapid decisions, let’s en-
courage that too.You spend little time in your book on
transgender people. How come?
I don’t do research in that area, and I
think you need to be a genuine au-
thority. I’ve been contacted by trans-
gender males or females who ask,
“Can you put me in a scanner and
prove my brain is male or female?”
I say, I’m sorry, there isn’t any such
thing. I can’t say your brain is all
pinks or blues. In fact, I wanted to
call my book Fifty Shades of Gray
Matter. —Jeffrey KlugerA
popular notion has it that a
human being’s most impor-
tant sex organ is the brain.
You say it’s our behavior that’s dif-
ferent; our brains are strikingly simi-
lar. Why? This goes all the way back to
Charles Darwin, who said that women
are inferior because they have inferior
brains and therefore they do not have
the right to assume a powerful role in
society. But the bottom line is there
is no consistent pattern or structure
which reliably characterizes the brain so
that we could say, “O.K., that’s a female
brain and that’s a male brain.”But we don’t have to be talking about
inferior or superior brains—just dif-
ferent brains. Absolutely. Some crit-
ics have called people like myself sex-
difference deniers, like climate deniers.
There are sex differences that we should
pay attention to, but the power that’s at-
tributed to biology is what needs chal-
lenging. We have to pay more attention
to how our experiences drive our brain
architecture. It’s a bit like trees that
grow on windy plains. Their biologi-
cal drivers make them grow upward,
but the winds make them twist or grow
branches on only one side.Is this what you mean by the “pink
and blue tsunami” you write about
in your book? Yes, and it starts early.
There was a BBC program called No
More Boys and Girls, and they
showed a classroom with a blue
cupboard for the boys’ coats and
a pink cupboard for the girls’, and
no one knew why. It suggests that
there’s something so important
about your sex that you have to
hang your coat somewhere else.You’re open about the fact that
you hate gender- reveal parties.
I’ve called them jaw-droppingly
awful. Twenty weeks before chil-
dren even arrive, people are already
stressing about how important it is
to be a boy or a girl.Gina Rippon The British cognitive researcher
on why male and female brains aren’t so different,
explored in her book Gender and Our Brains