At yesterday's "Thinking Like a Girl?" forum, part of Brown University's commencement activities, participants debate gender and the brain.

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, May 29, 2005

BY RICHARD C. DUJARDIN
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- Did the real issues get lost in the firestorm that erupted when Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers suggested in January that women's brains aren't wired to excel in math and science?

The answer is yes, according to a New York Times science writer and a Brown University professor of biology who were featured speakers at 1 of the 20 forums held on the Brown campus yesterday as part of the school's commencement weekend.

Cornelia Dean, a Brown alumna who started her journalistic career at The Providence Journal before going to The New York Times, and Prof. Anne Fausto-Sterling, a biologist involved in gender studies, told an audience at W. Duncan MacMillan Hall that the Harvard president may have done the cause of women in science a favor by drawing attention to an issue that had been largely ignored.

But, they said, what could have been a fruitful public discussion was largely eclipsed by a media more willing to view the controversy through the lens of free speech and academic freedom.

"Some portrayed it as someone daring to speak the truth and being stifled by the forces of political correctness," Dean told participants at the forum entitled "Thinking Like a Girl?"

"Well, it is possible to be politically incorrect. It is also possible to be incorrect."

Reviewing some of the statistics, Fausto-Sterling noted that by the time students reach high school, boys generally do 35 to 40 points better on math SAT scores than girls (out of a possible 800).

But is it because girls have different genes, or is it because of the way they've been raised?

Fausto-Sterling thinks it's not one or the other, but a "dynamic interaction" of both.

"We know there are tiny differences in the nervous system at birth. Boys are a tiny bit heavier at birth and have a slightly stronger grip. Baby girls will engage someone's gaze five or six seconds longer," she observed.

While such differences are slight, she believes they can lead to differences in the way children and parents interact, allowing some portions of the brain to develop more quickly.

For example, she said, a baby girl who can keep her gaze a bit longer is more likely to prompt more talking and noises from her parents. In the ensuing months and years, the child's brain responds to those parental overtures, helping her to develop verbal skills a bit more quickly than her male counterpart.

"So you have this huge amount of development going on in the brain before birth and continuing into adulthood," she said.

Dean, who served as The New York Times science editor from 1997 to 2003, reflected on some of her own experiences, including the astonishment that some leading scientists displayed when they learned that the position of science editor had been given to a woman.

She said she's been surprised that much of the new research on gender and brain has not grabbed the public imagination, then added that it's really not so surprising, particularly since many do not want to hear anything that challenges the status quo.

As she put it: "Something that undermines the status quo makes people uneasy."

As to why there's a dearth of women in the upper echelons of American business, Dean pointed to a series of conversations that Elizabeth Spelke, codirector of the Mind, Brain and Behavior Initiative, had with some of the nation's business leaders. Women, they told her, simply did not have the competitive drive to make it to the top.

Dean said the psychologist then went to Asia and asked the same question to Japanese business leaders. There, the leaders told her that women were "too competitive" and did not have the cooperative spirit so crucial to a successful enterprise.

There's an emerging body of research, Dean said, that suggests girls' performance on exams is greatly influenced by societal expectations.

She pointed to a study by Joshua Aronson, who found that when Asian-American girls were reminded that they were Asian just before a math test, they did as well or better than the boys -- apparently because they wanted to live up to the stereotype that Asians are good at math.

However, if the females were reminded that they were girls, by something as simple as a gender box at the top of the test sheet, they did worse.

A woman asked yesterday what, if anything, she could do as a parent to encourage her young daughter's budding interest in math, in a household where everyone who is good at math is male.

Males can be perfectly good role models and mentors, and there's nothing like that father-daughter relationship, Fausto-Sterling responded.