I've noticed the difference in my grandchildren. But, of course, that's just anecdotal.

For the interested, here's a Language Log post on the 20,000 vs 7,000 word statistic (short version: it's totally fabricated). http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4488

Well it might be gender specific but some people definitely talk too much...

There has been a fair amount of research in the field of linguistics on childhood socialization differences. Adults seem to speak more to female children than to male children, so poverty of input has been implicated as the reason for the relatively delayed speech in male children.

It's such a popular bit of misinformation (women talk more than men), presumably because it confirms that women are shallow chatterers that run roughshod over suffering-in-silence men. Susan Herring, author of "The Multilingual Internet: Language, Culture, and Communication Online," did research on who talks more online, perceptions of who talks more, and differences in ways of talking. Herring found that men perceive women as talking more than men in situations where women are actually speaking less than one-third of the time. This phenomenon is not limited to academic seminars or computer-based communication but was found to be a feature of mixed-sex conversation in general public settings.

In public contexts, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that women are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender, an Australian linguistics
researcher, explains this as follows: "The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women."

Actual recordings of groups of men and women conversing repeatedly show that men talk more than women. They interrupt more, and women are more likely to give way to a man in conversation. This of course will have cultural biases too. Biological advantages of females in language acquisition are nothing compared to the social pressure to conform to gender expectations - the 'mouthy' woman is visibly punished time and time again.

Below is a presentation by Eastern College Christian and Gender Scholar
psychology professor Dr.Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen which talks about how much abundant consistent psychological research studies find few gender
differences,and much more overlap similarities between them.I don't have a link to this article because I can't find it online anymore.

Trinity 2007

Opposite Sexes or Neighboring Sexes?
C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers,
andthe Psychology of Gender

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

Gender and Modern Social Science

C. S. Lewis was no fan of the emerging social sciences. He saw
practitioners of the social sciences mainly as lackeys of technologically-minded natural scientists, bent on reducing individual freedom and moral accountability to mere epiphenomena of natural processes (See Lewis 1943 and 1970 b). And not surprisingly (given his passion for gender-essentialist archetypes), aside from a qualified appreciation of some aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis (See Lewis 1952 (Book III, Chapter 4) and 1969). “Carl Jung was the only philosopher [sic] of the Viennese school for whose work [Lewis] had much respect” (Sayer 102).

But the social sciences concerned with the psychology of gender have since
shown that Sayers was right, and Lewis and Jung were wrong: women and men are not opposite sexes but neighboring sexes—and very close neighbors indeed. There are, it turns out, virtually no large, consistent sex differences in any psychological traits and behaviors, even when we consider the usual stereotypical suspects: that men are more aggressive, or just, or rational than women, and women are more empathic, verbal, or nurturing than men.

When differences are found, they are always average—not
absolute—differences. And in virtually all cases the small, average—and often decreasing—difference between the sexes is greatly exceeded by the amount of variability on that trait within members of each sex. Most of the “bell curves” for women and men (showing the distribution of a given psychological trait or behavior) overlap almost completely. So it is naïve at best (and deceptive at worst) to make even average—let alone absolute—pronouncements about essential archetypes in either sex when there is much more variability within than between the sexes on all the trait and behavior measures for which we have abundant data.

This criticism applies as much to C. S. Lewis and Carl Jung as it does
to their currently most visible descendent, John Gray, who continues to claim
(with no systematic empirical warrant) that men are from Mars and women are from Venus (Gray 1992).

And what about Lewis’s claims about the overriding masculinity of God?
Even the late Carl Henry (a theologian with impeccable credentials as a
conservative evangelical) noted a quarter of a century ago that:Masculine and feminine elements are excluded from both the Old Testament and New Testament doctrine of deity. The God of the Bible is a sexless God. When Scripture speaks of God as “he” the pronoun is primarily personal (generic) rather than masculine (specific); it emphasizes God’s personal nature—and, in turn, that of the Father, Son and Spirit as Trinitarian distinctions in contrast to impersonal entities... Biblical religion is quite uninterested in any discussion of God’s masculinity or femininity... Scripture does not depict God either as ontologically masculine or feminine. (Henry 1982, 159–60)

However well-intentioned, attempts to read a kind of mystical gendering
into God—whether stereotypically masculine, feminine, or both—reflect not so much careful biblical theology as “the long arm of Paganism” (Martin 11). For it is pagan worldviews, the Jewish commentator Nahum Sarna reminds us, that are “unable to conceive of any primal creative force other than in terms of sex... [In Paganism] the sex element existed before the cosmos came into being and all the gods themselves were creatures of sex. On the other hand, the Creator in Genesis is uniquely without any female counterpart, and the very association of sex with God is utterly alien to the religion of the Bible” (Sarna 76).

And if the God of creation does not privilege maleness or stereotypical
masculinity, neither did the Lord of redemption. Sayers’s response to the
cultural assumption that women were human-not-quite-human has become rightly famous:Perhaps it is no wonder that women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man—there never hasbeen such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as “The women, God help us!” or “The ladies, God bless them!; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for beingfemale; who had no axe to grind or no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious. There is not act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel which borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything “funny” about women’s nature. (Sayers 1975, 46)

It is quite likely that Lewis’s changing views on gender owed something to
the intellectual and Christian ties that he forged with Dorothy L. Sayers. And
indeed, in 1955—two years before her death, Lewis confessed to Sayers that he had only “dimly realised that the old-fashioned way... of talking to all young women was v[ery] like an adult way of talking to young boys. It explains,” he wrote, “not only why some women grew up vapid, but also why others grew up (if we may coin the word) viricidal [i.e., wanting to kill men]” (Lewis 2007, 676; Lewis’s emphasis). The Lewis who in his younger years so adamantly had defended the doctrine of gender essentialism was beginning to acknowledge the extent to which gendered behavior is socially conditioned. In another letter that same year, he expressed a concern to Sayers that some of the first illustrations for the Narnia Chronicles were a bit too effeminate. “I don’t like either the ultra feminine or the ultra masculine,” he added. “I prefer people” (Lewis 2007, 639;
Lewis’s emphasis).

Dorothy Sayers surely must have rejoiced to read this declaration. Many of
Lewis’s later readers, including myself, wish that his shift on this issue had
occurred earlier and found its way into his better-selling apologetic works and
his novels for children and adults. But better late than never. And it would be
better still if those who keep trying to turn C. S. Lewis into an icon for
traditionalist views on gender essentialism and gender hierarchy would stop
mining his earlier works for isolated proof-texts and instead read what he wrote at every stage of his life.

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen is Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at
Eastern University, St. Davids, Pennsylvania.

This essay originally was presented as the Tenth Annual Warren Rubel
Lecture on Christianity and Higher Learning at Valparaiso University on 1
February 2007.

The Cresset

Bibliography

Evans, C. Stephen. Wisdom and Humanness in Psychology: Prospects for a
Christian Approach. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989.
Gray, John. Men Are From Mars,
Women Are From Venus. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
Hannay, Margaret. C. S.
Lewis. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981.
Henry, Carl F. H. God, Revelation,
and Authority. Vol. V. Waco, Texas: Word, 1982.
Lewis, C. S. The Collected
Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. III. Walter Hooper, ed. San
Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 2007.
_____. The Discarded Image: An
Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1964.
_____. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. I:
1905–1931. Walter Hooper, ed. San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco,
2004a.
_____. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. II: 1931–1949.
Walter Hooper, ed. San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 2004b.
_____. “On
Three Ways of Writing for Children,”[1952] Reprinted in Of Other Worlds: Essays
and Stories, ed., Walter Hooper, 22–34. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1975.
_____. “Priestesses in the Church?” [1948]. Reprinted in God in the
Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper, 234–39. Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1970a.
_____. “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,”[1954].
Reprinted in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper,
287–300. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970b.
_____. “Psychoanalysis and Literary
Criticism,”[1942]. Reprinted in Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper,
286–300. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1969.
_____. [N. W. Clerk, pseudo.]
A Grief Observed. London: Faber and Faber, 1961.
_____. The Four Loves.
London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960.
_____. Till We Have Faces. London: Geoffrey
Bles, 1956.
_____. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. London:
Collins, 1955.
_____. Mere Christianity. London: Collins, 1952.
_____.
That Hideous Strength. London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1945.
_____. The
Abolition of Man. Oxford: Oxford University, 1943.
_____. A Preface to
Paradise Lost. Oxford: Oxford University, 1942.
The Cresset
_____.
Perelandra. London: The Bodley Head, 1942.
Martin, Faith. “Mystical
Masculinity: The New Question Facing Women,” Priscilla Papers, Vol. 12, No. 2
(Winter 1998), 6–12.
Reynolds, Barbara. Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul.
New York: St. Martins, 1993.
Sarna, Nahum M. Understanding Genesis: The
Heritage of Biblical Israel. New York: Schocken, 1966.
Sayer, George. Jack:
C. S. Lewis and His Times. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988.
Sayers,
Dorothy L. “The Human-Not-Quite-Human,”[1946]. Reprinted in Dorothy L. Sayers,
Are Women
Human?, 37–47. Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity,
1975.
Sayers, Dorothy L. Gaudy Night. London: Victor Gollancz,
1935.
Sterk, Helen. “Gender and Relations and Narrative in a Reformed Church
Setting.” In After Eden: Facing the Challenge of Gender Reconciliation, ed.,
Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, 184–221. Grand Rapids:

Eerdmans, 1993.
Copyright © 2007 Valparaiso University Press www.valpo.edu/cresset

Sword between the Sexes?, A: C. S. Lewis and the Gender Debates -
Page 188 - Google Books Result

books.google.com/books?isbn=1441212671

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen - 2010 - ReligionC. S. Lewis and the Gender Debates Mary Stewart Van
Leeuwen ... indicates that women and men, boys and girls, are overwhelmingly more alike than different

Dr.Janet Shibley Hyde in this 2005 major meta-analysis of hundreds of
studies by all different psychologists from decades that was written in American
psychologist,the journal of The American Psychological Association,found that
the sexes are more alike than different in almost all personality traits,abilities,etc.

http://www.apa.org/research/action/difference.aspx

In these extensive studies by psychologist Dr. Janet Shibley Hyde and
others that is still on the American Psychological Association's web site since
2006 and that was published in American psychologist the journal of The American Psychological Association,Think Again:Men and women Share Cognitive Skills.

It's reported that Psychologists have gathered solid evidence that boys or
girls or men and women differ in very few significant ways-- differences that
would matter in school or at work--in how,and how well they think.

http://www.apa.org/research/action/share.aspx

I have an excellent book from 1979 written by 2 parent child development
psychologists Dr. Wendy Schemp Matthews and award winning psychologist from
Columbia University, Dr.Jeane Brooks-Gunn, called He & She How Children
Develop Their Sex Role Identity.

They thoroughly demonstrate with tons of great studies and experiments by
parent child psychologists that girl and boy babies are actually born more alike
than different with very few differences but they are still perceived and
treated systematically very different from the moment of birth on by parents and
other adult care givers. They go up to the teen years.

They also show that surveys show that boys are overwhelmingly preferred
over girls,(sadly nothing has changed and sexist woman-hating,girl-hating Tee
shirts that say( I'm Too Pretty For Homework So I Let My Brother Do It For Me)
(and other sexist anti-female ads,pornography,etc do too) like these both
reflect and contribute to this injustice.They also explain that when people
guess if a pregnant woman is having a girl or a boy,and they list a whole bunch
of false unproven sexist, gender myth,gender stereotyped,old wives tales,that
assign all negative characteristics to a woman if they think she's having a
girl,and the imagined girls or given all of the negative characteristics.

For example they say that author Elana Belotti(1977) explained these
examples, The man and woman each take hold of one end of a wishbone and pull it
apart.If the longest part comes away in the man's hand,the baby will be a boy.
If you suddenly ask a pregnant woman what she has in her hand and she looks at
her right hand first ,she will have a boy;if she looks at her left hand it will
be a girl.If the mother's belly is bigger on the right-hand side a boy will be
born,and also if her right breast is bigger than her left,or if her right foot
is more restless.

If a woman is placid during pregnancy she will have a boy,but if she is
bad-tempered or cries a lot,she will have a girl.If her complexion is rosy she's
going to have a son;if she is pale a daughter. If her looks improve,she's
expecting a boy;if they worsen,a girl.If the fetal heartbeat is fast,it is a
boy;if it is slow it is a girl.If the fetus has started to move by the fortieth
day it will be a boy and the birth will be easy,but if it doesn't move until the
ninetieth day it will be a girl.( Belotti 1977,pp.22-23)

Dr.Brooks-Gunn and Wendy Schempp Matthews then say, now rate each of the
characteristics above as positive or negative. A woman expecting a girl is
pale,her looks deteriorate,she is cross and ill-tempered,and she gets the short
end of the wishbone,all negative characteristics. They then say,furthermore ,a
girl is symbolized by the left-the left hand,the left side of the belly,the left
foot,the left breast. They say,left connotes evil,a bad omen,or sinister,again
the girls have all of the negative characteristics.

They then say,that sex-role stereotypes about activity also characterize
Belotti's recipes:boys are believed to be active from the very beginning and
girls have slower heartbeats and begin to move around later.They then say,the
message although contradictory(girls cause more trouble even though they are
more passive) is clear in that it reflects the sex-role stereotype that boys
"do" while girls "are" and the belief that boys are more desirable than
girls.

They also say that parents have gender stereotyped reasons for wanting a
girl or a boy,obviously if they didn't it wouldn't matter if it's a girl or
boy.When my first cousin was pregnant with her first of two girls people even
strangers said such false ridiculous things to her,that they were sure she was
going to have a boy because she was carrying low or how stomach looked.

I once spoke with Dr.Brooks-Gunn in 1994 and I asked her how she could
explain all of these great studies that show that girl and boy babies are
actually born more alike with few differences but are still perceived and
treated so differently anyway, and she said that's due to socialization and she
said there is no question, that socialization plays a very big part.

I know that many scientists know that the brain is plastic and can be
shaped and changed by different life experiences and different environments too
and Eastern College gender and Christian psychology professor Dr.Mary Stewart
Van Leewuen told this to me too when I spoke to her 15 years ago. Dr.Van Leeuwen
also said that human beings don't have sex fixed in the brain and she told me
that humans have a unique highly developed cerebral cortex that allows us to
make choices in our behaviors and we can learn things that animals can't.

There was another case in Canada that I read about online some years ago
about another case in which a normal genetic male baby's penis was destroyed
when he was an infant and in this case he was raised as a girl from the much
younger age of only 7 months old,not as late as 21 months as was David
Reimer,and research shows that the core gender identity is learned by as early
as 18 months old.

In this other case,it was reported in 1998 he was still living as a woman
in his 20's but a bisexual woman. With David Reimer they raised him as a girl
too late after he learned most of his gender identity as a boy from the moment
he was born and put into blue clothes, treated totally differently, given gender
stereotyped toys, perceived and treated totally differently than girls are in
every way(in the great book,He and She:How Children Develop Their Sex Role
Identity it explains that a lot of research studies and tests by parent child
psychologists found that they give 3 month old babies gender stereotyped toys
long before they are able to develop these kinds of preferences or ask for these
toys. They also found that when adults interacted with the same exact baby they
didn't know was a girl or boy who was dressed in gender neutral clothes,they
decided if they *believed* it was a girl or boy.

And those adults who thought the baby was a boy,always handed the baby a
toy foot ball,but never a doll and were asked what made them think it was a girl
or boy and they said they used characteristics of the baby to make the judgement
. Those who thought the baby was a boy described characteristics such as
strength,those who thought the baby was a girl described the baby as having
softness and fragility,and as the Dr.Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and Wendy Schempp
Mathews explain,Again remember that the same infant was being characterized as
strong or soft,the actual distinction by sex characteristics being only in the
minds of the adults.

They also explain that in the toy preference studies,girl toddlers often
show an initial interest in the trucks,but eventually abandon them for a more
familiar type of toy. Also check out Kate Bornstein's books,Gender Outlaw and My
Gender Workbook,and recently a co-written book,Gender Outlaws. Kate used to be a
heterosexual married man who fathered a daughter and then had a sex change and
became a lesbian woman who now doesn't indemnity as a man or a woman. I heard
Kate interview in 1998 on a local NPR show and she totally debunks gender
myths,and rejects the "feminine" and "masculine" categories as the mostly
socially constructed categories that they really are.She even said,what does it
mean to feel or think like a woman(or man) she said what does that really
mean.

Below is an email I wrote to Oxford University Gender
communication professor Deborah Cameron author of the great important book,The
Myth Of Mars and Venus Do Men and women Really Speak Different Languages?.

Dear Deborah,

I recently read your great important book, The
Myth Of Mars & Venus. I read a bad review of the book, The Female Brain on
Amazon.com US by psychologist David H.Perterzell he called it junk
science.

I also thought you would want to know that John Gray got his
"Ph.D" from Columbia Pacific University which was closed down in March 2001 by
the California Attorney General's Office because he called it a diploma mill and
a phony operation offering totally worthless degrees!

Also there is a
Christian gender and psychology scholar and author psychology professor Dr. Mary
Stewart Van Leewuen who teaches the psychology and Philosophy of Gender at the
Christian College Eastern College in Pa. She has several online presentations
that were done at different colleges from 2005- the present debunking the Mars
& Venus myth.

One is called , Opposite Sexes Or Neighboring Sexes and sometimes
adds, Beyond The Mars/Venus Rhetoric in which she explains that all of the large
amount of research evidence from the social and behavorial sciences shows that
the sexes are very close neighbors and that there are only small average
differences between them many of which have gotten even smaller over the last
several decades and in her great even longer article that isn't online anymore
called,What Do We Mean By "Male-Female Complentarity"? A Review Of Ronald
W.Pierce,Rebecca M.Groothuis,and Gordon D.Fee,eds Discovering Biblical
Equality:Complentarity Without Hierarchy, which she says happened after 1973
when gender roles were less rigid and that genetic differences can't shrink like
this and in such a short period of time, and that most large differences that
are found are between individual people and that for almost every trait and
behavior there is a large overlap between them and she said so it is naive at
best and deceptive at worst to make claims about natural sex differences.
etc.

She says he claims Men are From Mars & Women are From Venus with no
emperical warrant and that his claim gets virtually no support from the large
amount of psychological and behavioral sciences and that in keeping in line with
the Christian Ethic and with what a bumper sticker she saw said and evidence
from the behavioral and social sciences is , Men Are From,Earth ,Women Are From
Earth Get Used To It. Comedian George Carlin said this too.

She also said that such dichotomous views of the sexes are
apparently popular because people like simple answers to complex issues
including relationships between men and women. She should have said especially
relationships between them.She also said when I spoke wit her in 1998 and 1999
that human beings don't have sex fixed in the brain,she said human beings adapt
to their environments,and they develop certain characteristics in response to
those environments but they are not fixed and unchangeable. Dr.Van Leeuwen also
said that I'm correct that the human female and male brain is more alike than
different and she said the brain is plastic and easily molded and shaped
throughout life by different life experiences and environments.She said humans
have a unique highly developed cerebal cortex which animals don't and this
enables people to learn things and make choices that animals can't.

Sociologist Dr.Michael Kimmel writes and talks about this also
including in his Media Education Foundation educational video. And he explains
that all of the evidence from the psychological and behavioral sciences
indicates that women and men are far more alike than different. He also
demonstrated with a lot of research studies and evidence from the behavioral and
social sciences that the sexes are more alike than different in his very good
2000 book,The Gendered Society which he updated several times in more extensive
academic volumes called,The Gendered Society Reader.

Dr.Mary
Stewart Van Leewuen says that there are no consistent large psychological sex
differences found.

I have an excellent book from 1979 written by 2 parent child
development psychologists Dr. Wendy Schemp Matthews and award winning
psychologist from Columbia University, Dr.Jeane Brooks-Gunn, called He & She
How Children Develop Their Sex Role Idenity.

They thoroughly demonstrate with tons of great studies and
experiments by parent child psychologists that girl and boy babies are actually
born more alike than different with very few differences but they are still
perceived and treated systematically very different from the moment of birth on
by parents and other adult care givers. They go up to the teen years.

I once spoke with Dr.Brooks-Gunn in 1994 and I asked her how she
could explain all of these great studies that show that girl and boy babies are
actually born more alike with few differences but are still perceived and
treated so differently anyway, and she said that's due to socialization and she
said there is no question, that socialization plays a very big part.

I know that many scientists(the good responsible ones) know that
the brain is plastic and can be shaped and changed by different life experiences
and different

Also there are 2 great online rebuttals of the Mars & Venus
myth by Susan Hamson called, The Rebuttal From Uranus and Out Of The Cave:
Exploring Gray's Anatomy by Kathleen Trigiani.

Also have you read the excellent book by social psychologist
Dr.Gary Wood at The University of Birmingham called, Sex Lies &
Stereotypes:Challenging Views Of Women, Men & Relationships? He clearly
demonstrates with all of the research studies from psychology what Dr.Mary
Stewart Van Leewuen does, and he debunks The Mars & Venus myth and shows
that the sexes are biologically and psychologically more alike than different
and how gender roles and differences are mostly socially created and how they
are very limiting and emptionally damaging to both sexes mental and physical
health and don't only allow are encourage them to become more than only a half
of a person instead of a whole human person with all of our shared *human*
qualities!

Anyway, if you could write back when you have a chance I would
really appreciate it.

Thank
You

Below is an email I wrote to Oxford University Gender communication professor Deborah Cameron author of the great important book,The Myth Of Mars and Venus Do Men and women Really Speak Different Languages?.

Dear Deborah,

I recently read your great important book, The Myth Of Mars & Venus. I read a bad review of the book, The Female Brain on Amazon.com US by psychologist David H.Perterzell he called it junk

science.

I also thought you would want to know that John Gray got his

"Ph.D" from Columbia Pacific University which was closed down in March 2001 by the California Attorney General's Office because he called it a diploma mill and a phony operation offering totally worthless degrees!

Also there is a Christian gender and psychology scholar and author psychology professor Dr. Mary Stewart Van Leewuen who teaches the psychology and Philosophy of Gender at the Christian College Eastern College in Pa. She has several online presentations that were done at different colleges from 2005- the present debunking the Mars & Venus myth.

One is called , Opposite Sexes Or Neighboring Sexes and sometimes

adds, Beyond The Mars/Venus Rhetoric in which she explains that all of the large amount of research evidence from the social and behavorial sciences shows that the sexes are very close neighbors and that there are only small average differences between them many of which have gotten even smaller over the last several decades and in her great even longer article that isn't online anymore called,What Do We Mean By "Male-Female Complentarity"? A Review Of Ronald W.Pierce,Rebecca M.Groothuis,and Gordon D.Fee,eds Discovering Biblical Equality:Complentarity Without Hierarchy, which she says happened after 1973 when gender roles were less rigid and that genetic differences can't shrink like this and in such a short period of time, and that most large differences that are found are between individual people and that for almost every trait and behavior there is a large overlap between them and she said so it is naive at best and deceptive at worst to make claims about natural sex differences. etc.

She says he claims Men are From Mars & Women are From Venus with no

emperical warrant and that his claim gets virtually no support from the large

amount of psychological and behavioral sciences and that in keeping in line with the Christian Ethic and with what a bumper sticker she saw said and evidence from the behavioral and social sciences is , Men Are From,Earth ,Women Are From Earth Get Used To It. Comedian George Carlin said this too.

She also said that such dichotomous views of the sexes are

apparently popular because people like simple answers to complex issues

including relationships between men and women. She should have said especially relationships between them.She also said when I spoke wit her in 1998 and 1999 that human beings don't have sex fixed in the brain,she said human beings adapt to their environments,and they develop certain characteristics in response to those environments but they are not fixed and unchangeable. Dr.Van Leeuwen also said that I'm correct that the human female and male brain is more alike than different and she said the brain is plastic and easily molded and shaped throughout life by different life experiences and environments.She said humans have a unique highly developed cerebal cortex which animals don't and this enables people to learn things and make choices that animals can't.

Sociologist Dr.Michael Kimmel writes and talks about this also

including in his Media Education Foundation educational video. And he explains that all of the evidence from the psychological and behavioral sciences indicates that women and men are far more alike than different. He also demonstrated with a lot of research studies and evidence from the behavioral and social sciences that the sexes are more alike than different in his very good 2000 book,The Gendered Society which he updated several times in more extensive academic volumes called,The Gendered Society Reader.

Dr.Mary Stewart Van Leewuen says that there are no consistent large psychological sex differences found.

I have an excellent book from 1979 written by 2 parent child

development psychologists Dr. Wendy Schemp Matthews and award winning

psychologist from Columbia University, Dr.Jeane Brooks-Gunn, called He & She How Children Develop Their Sex Role Idenity.

They thoroughly demonstrate with tons of great studies and

experiments by parent child psychologists that girl and boy babies are actually born more alike than different with very few differences but they are still perceived and treated systematically very different from the moment of birth on by parents and other adult care givers. They go up to the teen years.

I once spoke with Dr.Brooks-Gunn in 1994 and I asked her how she

could explain all of these great studies that show that girl and boy babies are

actually born more alike with few differences but are still perceived and

treated so differently anyway, and she said that's due to socialization and she

said there is no question, that socialization plays a very big part.

I know that many scientists(the good responsible ones) know that

the brain is plastic and can be shaped and changed by different life experiences and different life time environments

Also there are 2 great online rebuttals of the Mars & Venus

myth by Susan Hamson called, The Rebuttal From Uranus and Out Of The Cave:

Exploring Gray's Anatomy by Kathleen Trigiani.

Also have you read the excellent book by social psychologist

Dr.Gary Wood at The University of Birmingham called, Sex Lies &

Stereotypes:Challenging Views Of Women, Men & Relationships? He clearly

demonstrates with all of the research studies from psychology what Dr.Mary

Stewart Van Leewuen does, and he debunks The Mars & Venus myth and shows

that the sexes are biologically and psychologically more alike than different

and how gender roles and differences are mostly socially created and how they

are very limiting and emptionally damaging to both sexes mental and physical

health and don't only allow are encourage them to become more than only a half

of a person instead of a whole human person with all of our shared *human*

qualities!

Anyway, if you could write back when you have a chance I would

really appreciate it.

Thank

You

http://www.newsweek.com/id/214834
Pink Brain, Blue Brain

Claims of sex differences fall apart.

By *Sharon Begley http://www.newsweek.com/id/183003 |
NEWSWEEK

Published Sep 3, 2009

From the magazine issue
dated Sep 14, 2009

Among certain parents, it is an article of faith not only that they should treat their sons and daughters alike, but also that they do. If Jack gets Lincoln Logs and Tetris, and joins the soccer team and the math club, so does Jill. Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, doesn't think these parents are lying, exactly. But she would like to bring some studies to their attention.

In one, scientists dressed newborns in gender-neutral clothes and misled adults about their sex. The adults described the "boys" (actually girls) as angry or distressed more often than did adults who thought they were observing girls, and described the "girls" (actually boys) as happy and socially engaged more than adults who knew the babies were boys. Dozens of such disguised-gender experiments have shown that adults perceive baby boys and girls differently, seeing identical behavior through a gender-tinted lens. In another study, mothers estimated how steep a slope their 11-month-olds could crawl down. Moms of boys got it right to within one degree; moms of girls underestimated what their daughters could do by nine degrees, even though there are no differences in the motor skills of infant boys and girls.

But that prejudice may cause parents to unconsciously limit their daughter's
physical activity. How we perceive children—sociable or remote, physically bold or reticent—shapes how we treat them and therefore what experiences we give them. Since life leaves footprints on the very structure and function of the brain, these various experiences produce sex differences in adult behavior and brains—the result not of innate and inborn nature but of nurture.

For her new book, *Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow
Into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It,* Eliot immersed herself in hundreds of scientific papers (her bibliography runs 46 pages). Marching through the claims like Sherman through Georgia, she explains that assertions of innate sex differences in the brain are either "blatantly false," "cherry-picked from single studies," or "extrapolated from rodent research" without being confirmed in people. For instance, the idea that the
band of fibers connecting the right and left brain is larger in women,supposedly supporting their more "holistic" thinking, is based on a single 1982 study of only 14 brains. Fifty other studies, taken together, found no such sex difference—not in adults, not in newborns. Other baseless claims:that women are hard-wired to read faces and tone of voice, to defuse conflict, and to form deep friendships; and that "girls' brains are wired for communication and boys' for aggression." Eliot's inescapable conclusion:there is "little solid evidence of sex differences in children's brains."

Yet there are differences in adults' brains, and here Eliot is at her
most original and persuasive: explaining how they arise from tiny sex
differences in infancy. For instance, baby boys are more irritable than
girls.

That makes parents likely to interact less with their "nonsocial" sons,
which could cause the sexes' developmental pathways to diverge. By 4 months of age, boys and girls differ in how much eye contact they make, and differences in sociability, emotional expressivity, and verbal ability—all of which depend on interactions with parents—grow throughout childhood. The message that sons are wired to be nonverbal and emotionally distant thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The sexes "start out a little bit different" in fussiness, says Eliot, and
parents "react differently to them," producing the differences seen in
adults.

Those differences also arise from gender conformity. You often see the
claim that toy preferences—trucks or dolls—appear so early, they must be
innate.

But as Eliot points out, 6- and 12-month-olds of both sexes prefer dolls
to trucks, according to a host of studies. Children settle into sex-based play
preferences only around age 1, which is when they grasp which sex they
are,identify strongly with it, and conform to how they see other, usually older,boys or girls behaving.

"Preschoolers are already aware of what's acceptable to their peers and
what's not," writes Eliot. Those play preferences then snowball, producing
brains with different talents.

The belief in blue brains and pink brains has real-world consequences,
which is why Eliot goes after them with such vigor (and rigor).

It encourages parents to treat children in ways that make the claims come
true, denying boys and girls their full potential. "Kids rise or fall according
to what we believe about them," she notes. And the belief fuels the drive for
single-sex schools, which is based in part on the false claim that boy brains
and girl brains process sensory information and think differently.

Again, Eliot takes no prisoners in eviscerating this "patently
absurd"claim. Read her masterful book and you'll never view the sex-differences debate the same way again.

*Begley is NEWSWEEK's science editor.*

Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/214834

Public release date:
4-Nov-1999 Print E-mail Share

Contact: Penny Burge or Sharon
Snowburge@vt.edu or
ssnow@vt.edu Virginia Tech

20-year-old sex-role research survey still valid

BLACKSBURG, Va.

In the late 1970s, Penny Burge, director of Virginia Tech's Women's Center, was working on her doctoral dissertation at Penn State University researching the relationship between child-rearing sex-role attitudes
and social issue sex-role attitudes among parents. As part of her research,
Burge designed a 28-question survey in which respondents were asked to mark how much they agreed or disagreed with statements such as: "Only females should receive affectionate hugs as rewards," "I would buy my son a doll," and "I would be upset if my daughter wanted to play little league baseball."

Hard-hitting questions, many of them. But Burge carried on. She received her
degree in 1979, and in 1981 her research findings were published in the Home Economics Research Journal.

Among her findings were that respondents who named the mother as their
child's primary caretaker held more traditional child-rearing sex-role attitudes
than respondents who named both parents. In addition, those respondents who held more traditional child-rearing sex-role attitudes also held more traditional social issue sex-role attitudes, and fathers were more conventional than mothers with respect to the issue of whether or not boys and girls should be raised differently.

"We found that parents do cling to traditional sex-role attitudes," Burge
said. "It was more pronounced with male children where pressure to achieve was more intense."

Over the years, Burge occasionally received requests from other researchers
for permission to use her survey in their own research. Burge always granted
permission, but had redirected her research focus to gender equity in education.

She had moved on in her career, serving on the faculty in Virginia Tech's
College of Human Resources and Education from 1979 to 1994 when she became director of the Women's Center.

But a recent request from a researcher at New Mexico State University sparked her interest. The researcher, Betsy Cahill, had used Burge's survey (with some modifications and additions) to conduct research on early childhood teachers' attitudes toward gender roles. After the results of Cahill's research were completed and published in The Journal of Sex Roles in 1997, some unexpected events occurred.

The Educational Testing Service, a national resource that makes research
instruments more widely available to other researchers, requested permission to use the Burge and Cahill survey tools in its upcoming Test Collection, a reference publication for future researchers. "I was honored," Burge said. "It was nice to have another researcher include my survey instrument in her own. And the request from the Educational Testing Service gave an additional sanction to my survey. It's amazing to me that the same type of social questions are still valid after 20 years."

And no one can dispute the past two decades have brought enormous social
changes in the world, which leads to the second unexpected occurrence.

Cahill found that many of the findings from Burge's research were still very
much the same. For example, teachers who espoused traditional gender role
beliefs for adults also did for children. For those who were more accepting of
cross-gender role behaviors and aspirations, they were more accepting of these behaviors from girls than boys.

Enter Sharon Snow, newly hired assistant director of the Women's Center at
Virginia Tech, and the third coincidence regarding Burge's survey tool. As part of a survey research class Snow took while working on her graduate degree at Texas Woman's University, she cited Burge's study in her literature review.

"As part of the class, we conducted a survey of students to determine their
attitudes about gender roles in children," Snow said. "We found that parents do indeed drive gender-based behavior. It's not something that just happens
naturally."

So 20 year later, researchers find that parents still have a profound
influence on their children's gender roles.

"The most amazing finding is that despite tremendous societal change over the past two decades, many parents still hold fast to raising their children with traditional sex-roles," Burge said.

There is an excellent online article that I printed out 13 years ago,by
Jungian psychologist Dr.Gary S.Toub,called,Jung and Gender:Masculine and Feminine Revisted. On his site it now only has part of this article and it says you have to register to read the full article. I emailed Dr.Toub years ago and he wrote me back several nice emails,in one he said he really liked my
letter,and that it was filled to the brim with excellent points and
references.

In this article he talks about what parts of Jungian thought he finds
useful and what he finds problematic. The first thing he says he finds useful
is, In the course of Jungian analysis, he often assists female clients to
discover traditionally,masculine qualities in their psyche and that he likewise
frequently assist male clients to recognize traditionally feminine qualities in
their psyche. He says this process frees each gender from the straight-jacket of stereotyped sex roles and expands his clients identities. He then said that the process also mirrors and furthers the breakdown of male-female polarization in our culture,and the cultural shifts towards androgyny.

He also says that most importantly, his practice of Jungian analysis places
the greatest emphasis on facilitating his clients individuation process. He says this means that he tries to assist clients,male or female,to search for their authentic self-definition,distinct from society's gender expectations.He also says that many Jungian definitions of masculine and feminine are narrow,outdated and sexist.

He also says that he has found that generalizing about what is masculine
and what is feminine is dangerous,often perpetuating gender myths that are
discriminatory and damaging.He says while there is some researchsupporting biological roots to personality differences,the majority of studies suggest that much of what is considered masculine or feminine is culture determined.

He also says that viewing masculine and feminine as complementary
opposites,while useful at times,is problematic. He then says as his gay,lesbian, and transsexual clients have taught him,gender is more accurately viewed as encompassing a wide-ranging continuum. He then says that likewise,the more people he sees in his practice,the more he is impressed at the great diversity in human nature. He says he has seen men of all types and varieties,and women of all kinds. He then says,he is hard-pressed to come up with very many generalizations based on gender.He says he knows that there are some statistical patterns,but how useful are they when he works with individuals and in a rapidly changing society? He says if each person is unique,no statistical norm or average will be able to define who my client is.

He then says,from a psychological perspective,men and women are not, in
fact,opposite. He says his clinical experience is that they are much more
psychologically alike than different,and the differences that exist are not
necessarily opposing.

Interview with long time feminist Letty Cottin Pogrebin about her teaching
and erasing her two twin daughters and her son with non-sexist non-gender roles and gender stereotypes.

http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/activist/transcripts/Pogrebin.pdf

Feminist Letty Cottin Pogrebin's son didn't reject playing with dolls and
tea sets, just as her identical twin daughters didn't reject the non-gender
stereotyped toys and behaviors she encouraged them to have. And her son didn't grow up gay or transgendered he's married and I think has children,but he didn't grow up to be a macho football player either,as Letty said he's a chef and loves to cook.

And there is a lot wrong with sexist very limiting gender roles,gender
myths and gender stereotypes that are mostly artificially created by the very
sexist,gender divided,gender stereotyped,woman-hating male dominated family and society we all live in,which makes both sexes,into only half of a person,instead of full human people able to develop and express their full shared *human* traits,abilities,and behaviors etc. And then these artificial gender differences continue to reinforce gender inequalities,male dominance and men's violence against women,children and even each other.

There is a great 2005 book,Sex Lies And Stereotypes Challenging
Views Of Women,Men and Relationships by social and cognitive British
psychologist Dr.Gary Wood.He too shows plenty of great important research
studies done over decades by many different psychologists that finds small
average sex differences,and the sexes are much more similar than different.He also thoroughly demonstrates that gender roles,gender myths and gender stereotypes which are mostly socially and culturally constructed,harm both sexes because they are very liming,cause conflicts and misunderstands between women and men,and only allow each of them to become half of a person which can cause mental and physical conditions and diseases.

Dr.Anne Fausto-Sterling's Myths of Gender:Biological Theories About Women and Men.She is a biologist and geneticist at Brown Univetsity and she thoroughly debunks these claims about testosterone levels and aggressive behavior and a whole lot of other sexist,racist claims made by both women and men scientists.

And Delusions of Gender How Our Minds Society and Neurosexism Create
Differences by Australian neuro scientist Cordelia Fine also thoroughly debunks common myths of gender http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/delusions-of-gender-cordelia-fine/1101003614?ean=9780393340242

And also the book,Brain Storm:The Flaws in The Science of Sex Differences
by Barnard professor Rebecca Jordan-Young as reviewed by Amanda Schaffer on Slate's site Oct 21,2010 called The Last Word On Fetal T Rebecca Jordan-Young's masterful critique of the research on the relatiopnship between testosterone and sex differtence.And she says how remarably similar women and men's brains and minds actually are.

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/10/the_last_word_on_fetal_t.single.html#

Also there is a lot of evidence from sociologists and anthropologists that there are androgynous cultures. Many anthropologists like Walter Williams author of the award winning,The Spirit and The Flesh,and many other anthropologists have done field work for decades in places like Tahiti and Malaysia, women and men are encouraged to have androgynous roles there and they are not polarized into "opposite" categories and gender roles,and they are more alike in their personalities and behaviors. This is thoroughly explained in the good book, Manhood In The Making:Cultural Concepts Of Masculinity.

And the men there unlike in our very gender divided,gender stereotyped, sexist male dominated society ,aren't punished for being similar to women or appearing so-called "feminine", they are encouraged and rewarded for it! And it's in the very gender divided, gender stereotyped sexist male dominated societies where the sexes are polarized into "opposite" categories and gender roles that makes *more* gender
differences!

ISBN: 0262720310

ISBN-13: 9780262720311

Pub. Date: February 1999

Publisher: MIT Press

Why So Slow?: The Advancement of Women

by Virginia Valian

Overview

Why do so few women occupy positions of power and prestige? Virginia Valian uses concepts and data from psychology, sociology, economics, and biology to explain the disparity in the professional advancement of men and women. According to Valian, men and women alike have implicit hypotheses about gender differences — gender schemas — that create small sex differences in characteristics, behaviors, perceptions, and evaluations of men and women. Those small imbalances accumulate to advantage men
and disadvantage women. The most important consequence of gender schemas for professional life is that men tend to be overrated and women underrated.

Valian's goal is to make the invisible factors that retard women's progress
visible, so that fair treatment of men and women will be possible. The book
makes its case with experimental and observational data from laboratory and
field studies of children and adults, and with statistical documentation on men
and women in the professions. The many anecdotal examples throughout provide a lively counterpoint.

What People Are Saying

The MIT Press

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Publishers Weekly

Social psychologist Valian thinks that the Western world has gotten gender all wrong. "As social beings we tend to perceive the genders as alternatives to each other, as occupying opposite and contrasting ends of a continuum," she writes, "even though the sexes are not opposite but are much more alike than they are different." Indeed, despite nearly three decades of feminism, "gender schema"the assumption that masculine and feminine characteristics determine personality and ability continue to influence the expectations and thinking of most Americans. Just about everyone, Valian writes,
assumes that men are independent, task-oriented and assertive, while women are tagged as expressive and nurturing. As such, women lag behind in many professions and continue to do the lion's share of housework and child-rearing. Girls remain less attentive in math and science, while even women who attend medical school tend to steer themselves into "gender appropriate" slots such as family practice or pediatrics. Valian bases her findings on research conducted by social scientists in fields as disparate as psychology, education, sociology and economics, and the result is a work that is both scholarly and anecdotally rich. But it also posits concrete suggestions for changing the way we view the sexes, from stepped-up affirmative action programs, to timetables for rectifying gender-based valuations. Accessible and lively, Why So Slow? is a breakthrough in the discourse on gender and has great potential to move the women's movement to a new, more productive phase. (Jan.)

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780262720311

Publisher: MIT Press

Publication date: 2/5/1999

Edition description: Reprint

Pages: 421

Sales rank: 726,586

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

A Note on Method and Scope

1 Gender Schemas at Work 1

2 Gender Begins - and Continues - at Home 23

3 Learning About Gender 47

4 Biology and Behavior 67

5 Biology and Cognition 81

6 Schemas That Explain Behavior 103

7 Evaluating Women and Men 125

8 Effects on the Self 145

9 Interpreting Success and Failure 167

10 Women in the Professions 187

11 Women in Academia 217

12 Professional Performance and Human Values 251

13 Affirmative Action and the Law 277

14 Remedies 303

Notes 333

References 353

Author Index 385

Subject Index 393

© 1997-2013 Barnesandnoble.com llc

"Feminine" and "masculine" are really *HUMAN* traits,thoughts,feelings and
behaviors! Unfortunately transsexuals both reflect and reinforce these
artificial socially constructed categories in the very sexist,gender
divided,gender stereotyped,woman-hating male dominated society we all live
in!

And there is plenty of decades worth of great psychological research
studies by many different psychologists that shows that the sexes are much more alike than different in most traits,abilities and behaviors with a very large overlap between them,and that most of the differences between them are really small average differences,many of which have shrunk even smaller,and they find much greater individual *people* differences! Biologically the sexes are more alike than different too! As I said comedian Elaine Boosler said in the 1980's,I'm only a person trapped in a woman's body.

Feminists(such as Robin Morgan,Janice Raymond,Gloria Steinem,Germain'e
Greer Sheila Jeffreys etc) who have rightfully pointed this fact out,are not
afraid of transsexuals or prejudiced against them,the issue is what I said it
is. The only transsexual woman who actually debunks these common sexist gender myths,and gender stereotypes is Kate Bornstein author of Gender Outlaw:On Men,Women And The Rest Of Us,Gender Outlaws,My Gender Workbook etc. She was a heterosexual man who was married and had a daughter,then had a sex change and became a lesbian woman and then decided not to idenify as a man or a woman.

I heard Kate interviewed in 1998 on a local NPR show and she totally
debunks gender myths,and rejects the "feminine" and "masculine" categories as the mostly socially constructed categories that they really are.She even
said,what does it mean to feel or think like a woman(or man) she said what does that really mean.

And as cultural anthropologist Roger Lancaster wrote in his
introduction, in his very good 2003 book,The Trouble With Nature sex In Science when he's talking about how scientists constantly search for a ''gay brain'',a ''gay gene'' or ''gay intergovernmental'' patterns. Roger came out as a gay man in college.

He then says (One can hardly understate the naive literalism of present-day
science on these matters: Scientists still look for the supposed anatomical
attributes of the opposite sex embedded somewhere in the inverts brain or
nervous system.) He then says and this notion now enjoys a second,third,and even fourth life in political discourses.He then says it is by appeal to such conceits that Aaron Hans,a Washington,D.C.- based transgender activist,reflects on his uncomfortable life as a girl:''I didn't *think* I was a boy,I *knew* I was a boy.'' He says,Hans elaborates: ''You look at pictures of me- I actually have great pictures of me in drag-and I literally look like a little boy in a dress.

Roger then says,Far,far be it from me to cast doubt on anyone's sense of
discomfort with the ascribed gender roles.Nor would I question anyone's sense that sexual identity is a deeply seated aspect of who they are .But testimonies of this sort and appeals to the self-evidence of perception beg the obvious question:Just what is a little boy or girl * supposed* to look like? The photograph that accompanies Han's interview shows a somewhat robust girl.Is this to say that (real) girls are necessarily delicate and (real) boys athletic? He then says (If so,virtually all of my nieces are ''really'' boys,since not a one of them is delicate or un presupposing)

Roger then says,There is indeed something compelling about such
intensely felt and oft- involved experiences-''I knew I was gay all along''; ''I
felt like a girl'' - but that compulsion belongs to the realm of outer
culture,not nature.That is, if ''inappropriate'' acts,feelings,body types,or
desires seem to throw us into the bodies or minds other genders,it is because acts,feelings,and so on are associated with gender by dint of the same all-enveloping cultural logic that gives us pink blankets ( or caps,or crib
cards,I.D. bracelets) for girls and blue for boys in maternity ward cribs.He
then says,when we diverge one way or another from those totalizing
associations,we feel-we really feel;in the depths of our being-''different''.Therein lies the basis for an existential opposition to the established order of gendered associations.

Roger then says But therein also lies the perpetual trap: Every
essentialist claim about the ''nature'' of same sex desire in turn refers to and
reinforces suppositions about the ''nature'' of ''real'' men and women (from
whom the invert differs), about the ''naturalness'' of their mutual attraction(demonstrated nowhere so much as in the inverts inversion),about the scope of their acts,feelings,body types,and so on( again, marked off by the deviation of the deviant). Aping the worst elements of gender/sexual
conservatism,every such proposition takes culturally constituted meanings -the correlative associations of masculinity and femininity,active and passive,blue and pink- as ''natural facts''.

Roger then says,In a twist as ironic as the winding of a double helix
that goes first this way,then that,the search for gay identify gradually finds
it's closure in the normalcy of the norm as a natural law.In the end,I am not
convinced of the basic suppositions here. I doubt that most men are unfamiliar with the sentiment given poetic form by Pablo Neruda:''It happens that I became tired of being a man. ''Even psychiatrists who treat ''gender dysphoria''- a slick term for rebellion against conventional gender roles -admit that at least 50% of children at some point exhibit signs of mixed or crossed gender identify or express a desire to be the ''opposite'' sex. Roger has a note number to the reference in his notes section to a March 22,1994 New York Times article by Daniel Goleman called,The 'Wrong' Sex:A New Definition of Childhood Pain.