Gender Bias

Education has been a major factor in everything for as long as I’ve known. It’s definitely something that everyone needs to have in order to be successful in any sort of way. So to hear that I may have been put at a disadvantage because of gender bias in the classroom upsets me in a way. I mean not to an extent where I think that every single thing I have ever learned was made so a woman could understand it, but just in the way that maybe something I didn’t understand could have been better explained but due to gender bias the ability to learn a certain subject to my complete potential was kept from me. But I think that the differences of the male and female brain alone can impair someone’s ability to learn, in fact the most important reason as to why people don’t as much as they can so I think the best way to avoid bias is single sex classrooms.

According to Dr. Sax, author of the book Why Gender Matters: what parents and teachers need to know about the emergence of sex differences, the brain develops differently. In girls, the language area of the brain develops before the areas for spatial relations and for geometry develops. Also, the brain is wired differently. In girls, emotion is processed in the same area of the brain that processes language. Therefore it is easier for most girls to talk about their emotions. For boys, the regions involving talking and the regions involving feelings are completely separate. So the hardest question for boys to answer is “Tell me how you feel.” Girls also hear better than boys do. For example the average teenage girl can have sense of hearing up to seven times better than that of a boy the same age. That is why girls may complain that their teachers yell at them when in all reality the male teacher is talking in his normal voice. Girls and boys also respond differently when it comes to stress. Not just in the human species, it has been proven amongst every single kind of mammal that humans have studied. Stress increases the ability to learn in males. While, the same exact stress makes it harder for girls to learn. One may say that some of these reasons don’t really matter but according to Dr. Sax they all do. Even other experts believe that the neglect of hardwired differences between the male and female mind can increase the chance of a boy becoming an illegal street racer, and a girls chances of experiencing an unwanted pregnancy.

So looking more into the differences of the male and female brain we can see that sex differences of a child’s brain begin in their mother’s womb. It all starts about halfway through a pregnancy. When a males testicles begin to make and give out testosterone in large quantities. Actually making about the same amounts of testosterone as a young adult male. (www.singlesexschools.com) These hormones are distributed amongst the body of the boy and actually bind to the tissue of the brain and begin to change it. Around the eighteen to twenty-four week period of the term the brain have become permanently and irreversibly a male brain.

Research actually shows that you are born with either a male or female brain. And it also shows that nothing, even things as extreme as castration twenty minutes after your birth can change your brain from a male brain to a female brain. The anatomy of a young boy’s brain is so different compared to that of a young girl that it is easily visible, especially when it comes to babies because you can see the difference with your naked eye.

An example of how a male’s brain works differently than a woman’s could be something as simple a giving directions, it is easier for women to use landmarks to describe how to get to a destination like, “go down the street till you see a high school, then turn left and go down that street till you arrive at a yellow house with a little blue mail box, while on the other hand it is easier for males to use approximate distances and directions like north, south, east and west for example, “go North on Mattis Ave. for about two and a half mile and turn west onto Kirby then go about a mile down the road and it’ll be on the left..

Knowing how the brain works has a lot to do with knowing how someone learns because it is were everything is stored. So when it comes to learning boy and girls don’t like to learn the same way at all. Educational psychologists have found that girls set higher standards for themselves when it comes to school, and they look over what they have accomplished more critically than guys do. (www.singlesexschools.com) Overall girls beat guys in all every age group in every subject. But even though they do a lot better than boys do, their confidence in themselves when it comes to schoolwork is nowhere near that of a boy’s. Because boys on the other hand are sometimes