Leonard Sax Md Phd - Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differe Nces

Table of Contents

In Memory of David Reimer,
August 22, 1965May 4, 2004

Until recently, there have been two groups of people: those who argue sex differences are innate and should be embraced and those who insist that they are learned and should be eliminated by changing the environment. Sax is one of the few in the middleconvinced that boys and girls are innately different and that we must change the environment so differences dont become limitations.

Time

Convincing... Psychologist and family physician Leonard Sax, using twenty years of published research, offers a guide to the growing mountain of evidence that girls and boys really are different... This extremely readable book also includes shrewd advice on discipline, and on helping youngsters avoid drugs and early sexual activity. Saxs findings, insights, and provocative point-of-view should be of interest and help to many parents.

New York Post

Using studies as well as anecdotes from his practice and visits to classrooms, [Sax] offers advice on such topics as preventing drug abuse and motivating students... The book is thought-provoking, and Sax explains well the science behind his assertions... [WhyGender Matters ] is a worthy read for those who care about how best to prepare children for the challenges they face on the path to adulthood.

Scientific American

Why Gender Matters is an instructive handbook for parents and teachers... to create ways to cope with the differences between boys and girls.

Boston Globe

Why Gender Matters pulls together wide-ranging findings on everything from how girls respond to stress, to how antidrug ads actually encourage teenage boys to use drugs, and how all of these differences are hardwired from birth.

The National Post (Canada)

A potent new book... [Dr. Sax] cites a cascade of research that shows the many ways boys and girls differ, from how their brains develop to how they handle stress.

Margaret Wente, The Globe and Mail (Canada)

[Sax] challenges parents and teachers to acknowledge the latest evidence of lifelong gender differences or risk their childrens educational success and emotional health.

Joanne Good, Calgary Herald

Sax presents a reader-friendly, persuasive argument, challenging many basic assumptions by interspersing hard data with numerous case studies.

Mary Ward Menke, January Magazine

Fascinating... This book takes an outside the box position on gender. Paradoxically, Sax says, gender-neutral education favors the learning style of one sex or the other, and so only drives men and women into the usual stereotyped fields. The best way to raise your son to be a man who is caring and nurturing, says Sax, is to first of all let him be a boy. The best way to produce a female mathematician is to first of all let her be a girl... I think Sax is on to something. Mature men and women do draw on qualities that stereotypically belong to the opposite sex. But the easiest way to get them to that point is to first make them confident about being a man or a woman... Sax adds that children are less happy and confident nowadays because no one is teaching them how to be men and women. This is a powerful, even obvious insight, once you dare think it.

Stanley Kurtz, National Review Online

As the principal of an elementary school, I am constantly on the lookout for outstanding articles and books about gender-specific learning differences. Why Gender Matters is the best Ive read.

John Webster, Head of School, San Antonio Academy

Why Gender Matters is an outstanding work of scholarship. I am going to make it our faculty read this summer.

Paul Krieger, Headmaster, Christ School (North Carolina)

Extremely interesting... Challenged many of my basic assumptions and helped me to think about gender in a new way.

Joan Ogilvy Holden, Head of School,
St. Stephens and St. Agnes School, Alexandria, Virginia

Why Gender Matters is a fabulous resource for teachers and parents. Dr. Sax combines his extensive knowledge of the research on gender issues with practical advice in cogent, highly readable prose. I am eager to have my colleagues at school read this book and discuss it!

Martha Cutts, Head of School,
Agnes Irwin School, Rosemont, Pennsylvania

In this reader-friendly book, Dr. Sax combines his comprehensive knowledge of the scientific literature with numerous interesting case studies to argue for his thesis that single-sex education is advantageous.

Sandra Witelson, Ph. D., Albert Einstein Chair
in Neuroscience, McMaster University

I simply will never be able to express how eye-opening this book has been for me. Yes, meeven though I thought I was a boy-raising specialist. After all, I have produced four healthy, smart athletes. I must know what Im doing. But many of my boy-raising days I thought I was going mad. Id come home from some sports event trembling because of the way the coach yelled at my kid. Id ask my husband and whichever son it happened to be that day how they could stand being yelled at like that. Almost every time husband and son would look at me and not have any recollection of being yelled at during the game. Now I understand!

Janet Phillips, mother, Potomac, Maryland

As the father of a four-year-old daughter and now new twin boys, this particular book looked intriguing. Well, I couldnt put it down. Not only is it well written, with engaging anecdotes, but it presents the latest scientific findings in gender research (with lots of footnotes so you can read the studies yourself if you are so inclined) and relates [them] to the job of parenting. It helps that the author is a family doctor who has seen his share of dysfunctional situations that in hindsight might easily have been prevented with a little knowledge. The book is more than just informative about gender differences in childrenhe relates this information to such parenting topics as disciplining your child, gender specific education strategies, dealing with problem children, kids and drugs (both the legal and nonlegal kind), and teenage sex.

Phillip Trubey, father, Rancho Santa Fe, California

As a high school administrator, I am leading a book study on WhyGender Matters with my faculty this fall. As an aunt to a newborn, this was the shower gift to my sister. As a mother of two boys and one girl, I hung on every word. There is simply no category of individuals who are in contact with children of any age who should not read this book. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

Leone Langseth, Deer Park, Texas

DIFFERENCES

Were entering a new period in science, in which the rewards willcome less from the breakthrough investigations of individual scientists than from fitting together the pieces of research to see what itall means... Social and biological insights are leaping together,part of a large and complex jigsaw puzzle to which the contributions of many sciences are essential.

Shelley Taylor, professor of psychology, UCLA, 20021

Matthew turned five years old the summer before kindergarten started. He was looking forward to it. From what he had heard, kindergarten sounded like just one long play date with friends. He could hardly wait. So his mother, Cindy, was surprised when, in October, Matthew started refusing to go to school, refusing even to get dressed in the morning. More than once, Cindy had to dress him, carry him writhing and thrashing into the car, and then drag him from the car into the school. She decided to investigate. She sat in on his kindergarten class. She spoke with the teacher. Everything seemed fine. The teacher gentle, soft-spoken, and well-educatedreassured Mom that there was no cause for alarm. But Cindy remained concerned, and rightly so, because major problems were just around the corner.