Sex Versus Gender

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Everyone has heard of the battle of the sexes, how men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Is this seemingly profound difference present from birth, or is it something that children catch on to when they are watching adults interact? The difference between men and women, or in this case boys and girls, has a heavy influence on how they are treated, and how they respond to their environment. What might be the most important environment that boys and girls are exposed to is their school. How children are treated in school has a significant effect on their attitudes towards school and furthering their education (Zullig, 2011). The idea that children are treated unequally throughout their school years based on their gender is not a new one, but one that needs to be examined. Unfortunately, no matter what people think about the issue, boys are going to have a significantly different learning experience from girls, and vise versa simply because of their genetics and the stereotypes that adults are led to believe.

From the moment of conception, a fetus’ sex has been decided by the father’s genetic material, but there is no discernible difference between a male or female fetus until the fifth week of pregnancy. Until that point, they are identical to each other. It is not until six weeks into a woman’s pregnancy that the fetus begins to develop its genitals, when the sex genes are activated by a piece of DNA called the SRY (sex differentiation region of the Y chromosome) (Eliot, 2009, p. 25-7). In fact, in children’s brains, there are only two significant differences found consistently across data. The first difference is that boys do have a larger brain than girls do. This has less to do with cognitive abilities and more ...

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... H. W. (1990). Gender differences in beliefs and achievement: A cross-cultural study. Developmental Psychology, 26(2), 254-263.

Michael Gurian: About. (2011). Retrieved from http://www.michaelgurian.com/about.html

NASSPE: About Leonard Sax MD PhD. (2011). Retrieved from http://www.singlesexschools.org/home-leonardsax.htm

Parker-Pope, T. (2010, April 5). Surprisingly, family time has grown. Retrieved from http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/surprisingly-family-time-has-grown/

Sadker, D., Sadker, M., & Zittleman, K. R. (2009). Still failing at fairness: How gender bias cheats girls and boys in school and what we can do about it. New York, NY: Scribner.

Zullig, Keith J.; Huebner, E. Scott; Patton, Jon M. Relationships among school climate domains and school satisfaction. Psychology in the Schools, Vol 48(2), Feb 2011, 133-145. doi: 10.1002/pits.20532

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