It is always reassuring when an assumption developed over decades and often learned through bitter experience, is validated not only by academic research but now, finally, by government itself.
I’m speaking of course about Gender Based Analysis Plus (GBA+) which officially recognizes that men and women are different, see things differently, respond differently to a variety of situations and require planning to mitigate the effects of the differences especially in work environments.
Every government department and agency is now required to include gender-based analysis in budget proposals, Treasury Board submissions and memorandums to cabinet — this according to a report by Joanna Smith of the Canadian Press.
The good news is that Women and Gender Equality Canada, is in the process of providing online training in GBA for 150,000 public servants, MPs, Senators and Parliamentary staff.
Good luck with that, but I could have saved them a lot of trouble about all this had anybody asked me. As a survivor of an all-boys Catholic military-style secondary school I, for the first time came face to face (at every opportunity I might add) with members of the opposite gender during my first year at Sydney (NSW) University.
It was an epiphany that saved my first year bacon from complete disaster. I learned the hard way what serious research has since authenticated — that boys and girls, men and women approach learning differently.
Leading the field of that research has been Michael Gurian, co-founder of the educational research and training Gurian Institute and author of The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons From Falling Behind in School and Life. Gurian claims that his studies show that boys learn differently than girls. Brain scans tell part of the story. In general, more areas of girls’ brains, including the cerebral cortex (responsible for memory, attention, thought and language) are dedicated to verbal functions.
The hippocampus — a region of the brain critical to verbal memory storage — develops earlier for girls and is larger in women than in men. “That has a profound effect on vocabulary and writing,” Gurian says.
That explains why, as I sat in lectures thinking about a variety of unrelated topics, the young lady beside me to whom I had become attracted, took notes, underlined significant points and went straight to the library to elaborate on the key points of the lecture while I met my buddies for lunch and a beer.
As an adult, some 60 years later I wonder why, knowing what we now know (and, apparently, what our federal government has discovered) we have, nonetheless, persisted in teaching co-ed classes as if boys and girls learn in the same way.
Some parents of boys complain, and not without some justification, that classrooms favour girls who can sit still and listen to the teacher for longer periods of time.
That’s not an argument for separate schools, just for a broader range of teaching techniques.
Boys, the researchers tell us, are more drawn to doing stuff, building things and manipulating objects while girls are comfortable sitting still and paying attention. These, it is important to state, and, like most broad generalizations, can be misleading.
My son, who is in the midst of a successful post-grad academic career, is married to a young woman with a master’s degree and a career of her own who, while she was still in high school, rebuilt a 1950s Ford truck.
Their generation seems to understand that gender differences can be complementary, not contentious. In my own field of public education, I’ve had the opportunity, without any need for data-based research, to observe the different operational and even the leadership styles of men and women. As school principals and district administrators, women almost inevitably employ skills associated with encouraging and supporting.
The misconception is that men are considered better at decision-making and problem solving and would make better leaders, but I have yet to come across any successful female administrator who is less decisive than her male counterparts.
There is too much research to even begin, in the space of a single newspaper column, to outline all the studies that conclude gender diversity is a major factor in improving the overall performance of a company or, for that matter, any organization.
Now even government departments, according to those now implementing GBA, will apparently benefit from the participation of people with different skills and views who are able to co-operate in decision-making processes
So let’s wind this up with a quote from the always controversial and often misunderstood Gloria Steinem: “We raise our daughters to be more like our sons … but few have the courage to raise our sons to be more like our daughters.”
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
