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"During the learning process, we often find girls using words as they learn, and boys often working silently."

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Dr. Godfrey Pearlson, professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Behavior Science & Mental Hygiene at Johns Hopkins University Medical School and director of the Division of Psychiatric Neuro-Imaging, has found in an ongoing serious of studies that a part of the brain, the inferior parietal lobe, is generally larger in male brains after other factors are adjusted for. As it happens, the inferior parietal lobe is involved in spatial and mathematical reasoning, skills at which boys tend to perform better than girls.

Is this proof somehow that boys are wired for these tasks and girls are not? We must be careful in jumping to conclusions, says Pearson; what we're seeing are differences between groups of males and females, not between individuals. Individual girls and boys vary-sometimes wildly-from one to the next.. To wit, we could not choose a random boy and girl out of a hat and expect that the boy would be better at spatial tasks and the girl better at verbal tasks.

"Population differences, while real are of no use whatsoever in characterizing a given male or female," says Dr. Paul Grobstein, professor of neurobiology at Bryn Mawr College. "For any particular measure, a given male may be more 'male-like' or more 'female-like' than a given female."

Actress Jane Fonda recently handed over $12.5 million to the Harvard Graduate School of Education for the creation of the Harvard Center on Gender and Education. With an inter-disciplinary research focus concerned with gender and education worldwide, the center will build on the work of Carol Gilligan, the Patricia Albjerg Graham Professor of Gender Studies at Harvard, who has researched the way gender affects girls and women. "It's taken me a very long time to see the impact gender roles have had on my life," Fonda explained to the Harvard University Gazette. "And if I, as a privileged, white, aging movie star, have had to wait this long, I can't even imagine what young women who are less fortunate than I am have had to deal with."

There are other teachers and educators who also believe that gender affects the way we learn and that this is an area worth exploring. Michael Gurian, in his new book Boys and Girls Learn Differently! proposes that educators should take advantage of the differences between boys and girls in ways that accommodate for those differences.