MIT’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program presents:
“The Truth About Boys and Girls”
Tuesday, September 16th 2008 7:00pm
Bldg 32-141
*Free*
WOMEN ARE the chatty sex, using three times as many words each day as men. They are society’s great communicators. The verbal parts of their brains are larger than men’s and they are hard-wired for empathy, but they lack a natural ability to reach the top levels of math and science.
MEN, on the other hand, have brains that are good at understanding systems, and they are adept at acquiring and using power. They are hard-wired to excel at math and science, but lag behind women in reading ability. They talk less and are not naturally inclined toward caring for others.
Sound familiar? In the past decade, such claims have coalesced into an almost unshakable conventional wisdom: Boys and girls are different because their brains are different. This idea has driven bestsellers, parenting articles, and even – increasingly – American education. In their presentation, Dr. Rosalind Barnett and Professor Caryl Rivers reveal the bad stories about women that never die, de-constructing the cultural and media myths that support the notion that women are not suited (because of their brains and their hormones) for math, science and analyzing systems.