Apropos yesterday’s post on deep vs. shallow behavioral studies Mark Liberman of Language Log takes to task yet another study “proving” gender differences.

According to Abigail Norfleet James, Teaching the Male Brain: How Boys Think, Feel, and Learn in School (2007), p 37:

The shape of the inner ear is not the same for boys and girls. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the female cochlea responds more quickly to sound than does the male cochlea (Don et al., 1993) That means that boys are likely to respond to aural information of questions just a bit slower than girls will. Because boys don’t hear soft or high sounds very well and because they don’t respond to sounds as rapidly as do girls, boys may have trouble with auditory sources of information.

The reference is to M. Don et al., “Gender differences in cochlear response time: An explanation for gender amplitude differences in the unmasked auditory brain-stem response“, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 94(4): 2135-2148, 1993. And yes, there really are sex differences in cochlear response time — but the distributions for males and females overlap, as usual, and the average sex differences are less than a thousandth of a second.

He said it here.

It may or may not be the case that boys think, feel, and learn differently from girls in school. If you read his post, though, Liberman questions how a study demonstrating an infinitesimal difference in a single component of hearing and processing language could possibly support the burden placed on it.

Compare how we would interpret a similar study of thousandths-of-a-second differences men’s vs. women’s reaction times as “proof” that men are better drivers than women (or vice versa.) If that were the only factor, biological, social, or psychological between men and women we could all go home. But actually before you left you’d probably want to ask whether the difference was large enough to account for many actual accidents, whether there might be other factors affecting men’s or women’s behavior (likelihood of drinking and driving, likelihood of rubbernecking or attention to the road, socialization to be cautious or aggressive, etc., or for that matter other minute, biological, even gendered-biological cognitive or metabolic factors that might account for the differences — average blood-sugar levels at peak drive times, for instance.) And the reason you’d look for those factors, by the way, is to see whether they make more or or less of a difference than the reaction-times under discussion. And, finally, you might even want to know because, seriously, we’re not going to be influencing reaction-processing neuron speed any time soon but we probably could influence alcohol or blood-sugar levels or rubbernecking/cell-phone use. Which would probably make everyone safer drivers because...? Because as usual there’s liable to be a great deal of overlap, which means that while men on average and women on average might have different reaction times it’s far less likely that differences between any two randomly-chosen individuals can be attributed to their gender.

Same with learning differences in school. Having shepherded two children to the verge of puberty I’m aware there really are differences between boys and girls. I’m also (as Liberman mentions in his post) aware that there’s massive overlap. In other words while the two individuals most likely to face discipline for being inattentive or disruptive over the last six years in either of my children’s classes are definitely boys the five next-most-likely children to be inattentive are a mix of girls and boys.

Same with the topic Liberman discusses, learning difficulty. Two of the seven least attentive children in one of my children’s classes, both boys, are also near the top of their classes academically speaking. They learn fine, they’re just bumptious. (Their hearing, incidentally, is also perfectly fine, as I’ve determined by whispering “ice cream” across the room.) A number of of the kids who get pulled out for special coaching, on the other hand, are perfectly attentive.

The point being that while there are surely differences in the children’s inner ears, and the differences may even be gender-identifiable, I’m… pretty sure that

• That minute hearing differences are not the biggest factor in children’s thinking, feeling, or learning in class.
• That even if it were there’s enough overlap between boys and girls to make assertions about “how boys learn” or “how girls learn” useful only in the aggregate, and therefore
• You probably wouldn’t want to use hearing differences as your justification for dividing classes into boys and girls, or, if you did
• It would make even more sense to divide classes into one for “faster” hearing boys and girls and another for “slower” ones… or

• Heck, once freed of gender binaries you might be able to divide the class into even smaller categories of inner-ear shape or auditory-processing speeds.

In other words in a technical sense it might be interesting that on average boys and girls hear very slightly differently, but in a practical sense of determining education policy, even determining gendered policy, it’s irrelevant.

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One other point about this? Let’s say boys really are handicapped hearingwise compared to girls. And not fractionally but markedly — enough so that, upon learning it teachers radically altered the way they taught. (Yes, this requires forgetting that teachers are bright, motivated, trained, and experienced professionals who wouldn’t have noticed and adapted to differences years or decades ago but let’s say that too.) Would that be enough to warrant separate-but-equal instruction for boys and girls? Or would it be enough to, oh, say, recommend that teachers speak louder and more clearly? And/or, possibly, more directly and to the point using simpler or shorter sentences? Call me a wild-eyed gender-equalitarian here but wouldn’t girls also benefit. (Hint: as an adult educator familiar with instructional design and information delivery I know it facilitates information adoption in both female and male adults.)

If you look at the history of modern-day conveniences, from TV remote controls to self-opening doors to telescopes and microscopes (which derive from eyeglass technology), to comfortable handles on kitchen utensils you see all kinds of technology originally developed for the physically or biologically disadvantaged that’s been readily, even enthusiastically, adopted by the general public because it benefits everyone and not just the bedbound (tv remotes), people with crutches or wheelchairs (door openers), bad eyesight (glasses), arthritis (Good Grips knives and peelers), or developmental disabilities (Montessori education.)

Point being that it’s very unlikely that educational technology that might benefit boys would only benefit boys. Certainly not so much that boys should be segregated from girls. (Remembering that gender segregation leads to… other social problems.)