Ms. Eliot seems to be stating common effects of social conditioning rather than differences in gender genetics. Expose both genders equally to sports and spacial awareness, and I believe you will find differing results.

I would tend to agree, I work with female engineers whom have spacial awareness/reasoning far beyond mine..and I spent many hours playing with trucks. The human mind is far more adaptive than to be restricted by gender.

I am not a scientist, but I disagree with some of her assertions. There is evidence that girls process spacial information differently from boys. It has been said that while boys excel at reading traditional maps, girls will excel at reading a pictographic map. In other wordsmaps are drawn by boys for boys.

Rather than try and get girls to think like boys, why not let girls develop mathematics that is aligned with their thinking? Not all math is spatially based. Discreet mathematics, the basis of computer science, is all about states. There are many ways up the mountain...

The other assertion I disagree with is the"Boys don't play with dolls" thing. She belies her statement when she says how the 3 year old boys go for the Power Rangers. Go into any toy department and yo will find all kinds of dolls for boys. Granted they are monsters and super heroes, but they are dolls. At least that is what my dad said when I asked hi for a GI Joe when I was 8. He stated that there was no way that his biy was going to play with dolls.

"GI Joe is not a doll," I said, "He is an action figure..."

it's all in the hormones, they add agenda. things like pride and vanity change the focus of the brain.

I'm one of those guys who spent a good deal of time working with children professionally and as the stay at home parent so I start from the nonstandard perspective. But I'm afraid that this is full of strawmen and bad assumptions. For starters, neuroscience is extremely limited in both scope and knowledge and simply cannot explain by itself what she wants to explain. We see the brain as the center of our development but that is not necessarily the case. It's part of a whole system. I think any explanation for the differential norms between the sexes would require much more interdisciplinary work particularly biologists who specialize in evolutionary development and psychologists. I have always seen the "biology vs sociology" argument or gender differences to be ludicrous to begin with. Its both and more not one or the other. This argument is really more idealogical than scientific. Generally you have one side full of "traditionalists" who want to prove that separate gender roles or natural and necessary butting up against people who want to prove that there are no normative differences just to prove them wrong. But the fact remains that there are differences but they are norms not solid rules. For example anybody who has worked at a day care has run across a little boy who wants to wear pink and play with babies no matter how much his parents try to socialize him to make different choices. Just how does one explain this sort of thing by either the standard? You see the same sorts of thing with girls but ,of course, the reality is that in most of the modern west boys not girls have the more socially narrow role. A "tomboy" is going to find a lot more support, acceptance, and encouragement to pursue their interests than a "sissy". There seem to be many different social and biological factors at play here.

My wife believed fervently that differences were mostly socialization until she had two boys after her daughter was already 8. She has aghast to find that despite her best efforts at "neutrality" and my acquiescence as long as they got to pursue their own interests rather than being forced into gender neutral roles the eldest son's first spoken word was truck. Neither watched tv other than the very gentle PBS stuff and went to play groups with similarly minded parents. But somehow or another by the time he was sitting up and playing on his own our youngest was making loud exploding noises as block buildings collapsed and various toy vehicles ran into each other. As for the dolls, as somebody above mentions boys have just as many if not more dolls than girls and in this day and age may even play with them longer. Its just that they are "action figures". This is not just a point of male pride thought that certainly figures into it in many cases. The actual question is why do girls play socially sophisticated games with their dolls while boys mostly have their dolls fight. My wife was terribly smug when the youngest wanted a Barbie at the age of 6 and made a big production out of getting it for him. I laughed at her and warned her that she would be disappointed because bad things would happen to Barbie. Sure enough with in a week Barbie appeared to have been tortured and mutilated. The wife freaked out and wanted to send the kid to a shrink but I pointed out that Barbie was being treated like an "action figure" and was essentially in the same sort of condition as all of the other action figures. He wasn't a serial killer misogynist in training but failing to differentiate between the sexes in his play just like she wanted. Everything got beaten up on blown up the same way. He wanted Barbie to to more interesting experiments with the hair and clothing than he could do with the "action figures". (The same kid at twelve is threatening to be a vegetarian while his older brother talks about hunting rabbits with his 22). When she was 3 to 6 the girl's favorite activity was doing arts and crafts projects while socializing with mom while the boys preferred being lifted into the air and thrown on the couch for hours on end. The girl was regularly taking responsibility for her chores by the time she was seven and was fairly socially astute. She assumed she'd be able to get the same results from the boys but, well, it didn't work out that way. All three kids are well above average intelligence and none have ADD or anything like that but you hand the boys a list and come back ten minutes later to find that its crumpled up and serving as a ball to be hit by the broom bat. My wife was undaunted until they were seven and nine and she was trying to lead a group of 6 neighborhood kids in the same age range through a quick clean up in their playing field in the back yard. Only one of them was a girl and ironically enough was the one of the group that actually has ADHD. Yet, the girl was the only one who could follow her directions and stay on task. The boys were all over the place. Eventually she came in exasperated and asked me how I ever managed to get them to do anything. So I went out and demonstrated the "voice of authority/drill Sargent" technique with the explanation that you don't explain what to do to a group of little boys you tell them what to do and bark at them whenever the drift off task.

I was always a bit of and odd kid myself and had no interests in making the boys be "manly men" but given the ability to pursue their own interests both of these boys excel in more traditionally male stuff. I have had to develop new hobbies I never cared about before like guns and sports to facilitate their development. I spent several years accustomed to being one of the very few men around while I was doing various sorts of childcare. When I developed an interest in computers and went back to school I noticed the same sorts of trends that I had always noticed to be the norm. There were far more women at the community college than men. As such in some of my computer classes there would be more women than men. Yet despite the difference in numbers other computer classes had very few to no women at all. The difference tended to be whether the subject was computers facilitating some other activity or if the class was pure computers. I noticed this most markedly in the Cisco networking program. This particular study is notoriously difficult and specialized computerese and high attrition is expected. It is so difficult because the subject lacks a human element to the degree that it seems to have been designed by people with some degree of autisism. My class started out with 24 people and 4 of them were women. By the third week 2 women were left and only 1 came for the second semester. She just barely made it through by the skin of her teeth and hated the subject matter. But now the place I work has a grad school program for web development. These programs tend to have more women than men. There are a variety of reasons why but I suspect that one big one is simply that these programs focus on using the computers for highly organized activities that include other people. You see the very same thing when it comes to video games. In a nutshell, females tend to like things like "The Sims" which similulate social activity while males prefer games that are all about blowing things up. So my observation has always been that females tend to have more of a natural inclination for subjects that invole people and society while males have more of a natural inclination for things that involve ,well, things. These are not "rules" because you certianly have millions of examples that defy the rules but they do seem to be norms. If we look at human development historically with evolution in mind just like any other creature these norms make sense. Women as the child bearers were more often responsible for "hearth and home" and men were more oftne focused on purely physical tasks. What doesn't make the slightest bit of sense is the notion that obvious biological differences and thousands of years of evolutionary development would not make for some different norms in which things human males and females excelled at.

we are talking about this for some reason. the fact that some one is talking about this is evidence that there is a difference.

but I must ask, what conclusions have you made about male and female? is there a theme? a main point? people shy from a determination on the difference between male and female, you sound quite reasonable, any unifying theme?

Absolutely. The instances are out there in the society.