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Once, after I had done such an evaluation and made my recommendations, the parents told me that the school had advised them to seek a second opinion. "It's not that we don't trust you, Dr. Sax," Mom said. "It's just that the school really thinks we should get an opinion from an expert."

I soon learned that the only doctors that this particular school considered to be "experts" were doctors who always prescribed medication. Curious to know whether my experience was unique, I obtained funding from the American Academy of Family Physicians to survey all the doctors in the Washington area. Our survey basically asked one simple question: Who first suggests the diagnosis of ADD? The results: in the majority of cases the diagnosis of ADD is made by the teacher. Not by the parents, nor the neighbors, nor the doctor.(4)

There would be nothing wrong with teachers diagnosing their students as long as they had the training-and the resources, and adequate time-to distinguish the boy with ADD from the boy who just doesn't hear as well as most girls do. But after talking to dozens of teachers in our county, I didn't find one who was aware of the studies showing that girls hear better than boys.

"You should write a book, Dr. Sax," one of these parents told me. "Write a book so that teachers know about the differences in how girls and boys hear."

I allowed myself a patronizing smile. "I'm sure that there must already be dozens of such books for teachers, and for parents," I said.

"There aren't," she said.

"I'll find some for you," I said.

That conversation took place about seven years ago. Since then I've read lots of popular books about differences between girls and boys. And guess what. That mom was right.

Not only do most of the books currently in print about girls and boys fail to state the basic facts about innate differences between the sexes, many of them promote a bizarre form of political correctness, suggesting that it is somehow chauvinistic even to hint that any innate differences exist between female and male. A tenured professor at Brown University recently published a book in which she claims that the division of the human race into two sexes, female and male, is an artificial invention of our culture. "Nature really offers us more than two sexes," she claims, adding, "Our current notions of masculinity and femininity are cultural conceits." The decision to "label" a child as a girl or a boy is "a social decision," according to this expert. We should not label any child as being either a girl or a boy, this professor proclaimed. "There is no either/or. Rather, there are shades of difference."(5) This book received courteous mention in the New York Times and the Washington Post. America's most prestigious medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine, praised the author for her "careful and insightful" approach to gender.(6)

I soon assembled a small library of best-selling books that counsel parents that the best child-rearing is gender-neutral child-rearing. These books tell parents that true virtue is to be found in training your child to play with toys traditionally associated with the opposite sex. You should buy dolls for your son, to teach him how to nurture.(7) You should buy an Erector set for your daughter. The underlying assumptions-that giving dolls to boys will cause boys to become more nurturing, or that giving girls Erector sets will improve girls' spatial relations skills-are never questioned. In fact, no scientific evidence exists to support the claim that gender-neutral child-rearing has any measurable benefit, regardless of which parameter you measure.(8)

On the same bookshelf you can find books that do affirm the existence of innate differences in how girls and boys learn. But what books! Books with titles like The Wonder of Boys and Girls Will Be Girls promote antiquated and inaccurate gender stereotypes. "Girls are more emotional than boys." "Boys have a brain-based advantage when it comes to learning math." As we'll see, those familiar notions turn out to be false.

On one hand, you have books claiming that there are no innate differences between girls and boys, and that anybody who thinks otherwise is a reactionary stuck in the 1950s. On the other, you have books affirming innate differences between girls and boys-but these authors interpret these differences in a manner which reinforces gender stereotypes.

These books have only one thing in common. They are based less on fact, and more on their authors' personal beliefs or political agenda-either to deny innate sex differences, or to use sex differences in child development as a justification for maintaining traditional sex roles.

After waiting a few years for somebody else to write a book about girls and boys based on actual scientific research, I finally decided to write one myself. But I made myself a promise. Every time I make any statement about how girls and boys are different, I will also state the evidence on which my statement is based. Every statement I make about sex differences will be supported by good science published in peer-reviewed journals.

There is more at stake here than the old question of nature versus nurture. The failure to recognize and respect sex differences in child development has done substantial harm over the past thirty years-such will be my claim throughout this book. Children today face challenges that are substantially different from those you faced as a child or teenager, fifteen or twenty or thirty or forty years ago. Look at the statistics on drugs and alcohol, for starters. Teenage girls today are four times more likely to drink than their mothers were. They're fifteen times more likely to use drugs than their mothers were.(9) Traditionally, alcohol abuse has been more of a problem for teenage boys than for teenage girls. Not anymore. In a report published in 2004, the National Research Council reported that young teenage girls are now more likely than boys to be drinking alcohol regularly-not because boys are drinking less, but because girls are drinking more.(10)

If girls have closed the gender gap with regard to alcohol abuse, boys are still more likely to be getting into trouble with drugs. According to FBI statistics, the number of boys under eighteen arrested for drug abuse offenses has increased by more than 50 percent in the past ten years; boys under eighteen are still five times more likely to be arrested for drug abuse violations than are girls under eighteen.(11) In chapter 7, I'll explore how the cultural and professional neglect of sex differences has compounded the drug problem.

But school, not drugs, is the "new" problem for boys. While today's girl is more likely to have problems with drugs and alcohol than her mother was, today's boy is much more likely to be struggling in school than his father was. Boys today are increasingly alienated from school. Recent investigations have shown a dramatic drop over the past twenty years in boys' academic performance in American schools.(12) According to the United States Department of Education, the average eleventh-grade American boy now writes at the same level as the average eighth-grade girl.(13) Similar gender gaps have been documented in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.(14) And the percentage of boys going on to college, and graduating from college, is falling. The U.S. Department of Education now projects that in the year 2011, there will be 140 women graduating from college for every 100 men-very nearly a 60/40 female-to-male ratio.(15)

The future may already have arrived. Several major U.S. colleges and universities, such as New York University and the University of North Carolina, already report that their student body is more than 60 percent female.(16) I'm all in favor of women's colleges, but you have to ask the question: Why are nominally coed schools looking more and more like all-women's colleges? The proportion of boys going on to college is dropping steadily, as is the proportion of young men who are sticking around long enough to graduate. The high school dropout rate in the United States is now close to 30 percent, and the great majority of dropouts are boys.(17) More and more boys, discouraged by years of failure in elementary school, middle school, and high school, are asking: "Why should I stick around for any more of this?" Later in the book we'll hear from teachers who know how to use gender differences to kindle real enthusiasm for learning in both girls and boys.

Still, many educators and policymakers stubbornly cling to the dogma of "social constructionism," the belief that differences between girls and boys derive exclusively from social expectations with no input from biology. Stuck in a mentality that refuses to recognize innate, biologically programmed differences between girls and boys, many administrators and teachers don't fully appreciate that girls and boys enter the classroom with different needs, different abilities, and different goals.

Excerpted from Why Gender Matters by Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D. Copyright © 2005 by Leonard Sax, M.D., Ph.D.. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Tags: Child Development

About the Author

LEONARD SAX, M.D., Ph.D., is a doctor and a psychologist and the founder of the National Association for Single-Sex Public Education. His scholarly work has been published in a wide variety of prestigious journals including American Psychologist, Behavioral Neuroscience, Journal of the American Medical Association, Journal of the American College of Nutrition, Journal of Family Practice, Annals of Family Medicine, Journal of Sex Research, and others. He has been a featured guest on CNN, PBS, Fox News, Voice of America, NPR's Talk of the Nation, and many other news programs, discussing the importance of sex differences in how children learn.