I just read a book by Leonard Sax called Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences. The book was lent to me by a colleague, and my expectations were quite low.

On the whole, though, I was plesantly surprised. Sax’s thesis is that boys and girls develop and learn at different rates and in different ways and that teaching (and parenting) should reflect this reality. He builds a pretty substantial case for this at the beginning of the book, citing quite a bit of recent research that was previously unfamiliar to me. Unfortunately, he falls off the research wagon around the middle of the book and starts grinding his own ax (same gender education) without a lot of support to back it up.

In any case, I was expecting a right-wing polemic, but that’s not what I got. Sax outright rejects the hypothesis, for instance, that boys are naturally more inclined to like math and science, concluding instead that our schools tend to teach math and science in a way more suited to the learning styles of boys. (Just as, he claims, they tend to teach art and literature in a way that is better suited for girls.) He also notes that many of these developmental differences vanish by about 18 years of age, so he primarily advocates single-sex K-12 education.

I don’t buy all of Sax’s claims, and I think that some of his non-research-based suggestions are downright loopy. (For instance, I think requiring your teen to wear a GPS tracking device is over the top.) But his book did open my eyes to some research that I hadn’t seen before, and at least held forth the possibility of a middle road on issues of gender differences. If you’re interested in such things, I suppose that I could recommend at least the first third or half of the book.