Perhaps no question sparks more controversy than whether children assume sex roles as a result of their biology or the socialization they’re exposed to. The answer, of course, is probably not an “either/or” but a “with” – some combination of the socialization we receive interacts with our natural biology (itself a knot of complicated and intertwining factors) to turn us into the people we become.
Parents are quick to call “nature”, possibly because we don’t want to acknowledge that we treat our boys and girls differently. It seems that every one of us has a story about toys and young children like the one my favorite pediatrician, Dr. George Lazarus, shared with me. A very modern and enlightened parental pair presented their daughter with a set of wonderful toy trucks. Several hours after she had unwrapped the present, the parents noted that neither the toddler nor the trucks were anywhere to be found, and the child’s room was darkened and silent. The little girl met them at the door, pointing to the four trucks under the covers in her bed: “ Shh!” she cautioned her parents. “They’re sleeping.” Another mother told me, laughing, of finding her 21-month-old daughter’s shiny new Tanka front loader wearing a frilly white diaper cover taken from the laundry hamper.
As much as some dispute the existence of the “feminine” and “masculine” brain, we’re at a loss to explain how many of these same biases show up in the animal kingdom, if there’s no biological imperative. UCLA psychologists Gerianne Alexander, PhD, and Melissa Hines, PhD, did an experiment in which they presented vervet monkeys with six toys. The males played more with the truck and ball, while the females chose the doll and a pot; gender-neutral toys (a book and a stuffed dog) got equal attention. Certainly, socialization didn’t influence these subjects!
We see the interaction of socialization and biology in the following research on rats. Mother rats lick the anogenital area of male pups more than they do those of their daughters. They can detect the smell of the breakdown products of testosterone in the urine of their newborns. It seems that this licking helps neurons survive in an area of the nervous system (the SNB system), which enervates the penis. This nerve cluster is, for obvious reasons, larger in males. If the mother rat cannot smell, she won’t lick her pups as much and can’t favor her sons with more licks than she does her daughters, Her pups will grow up, whether male or female, with smaller, female-like SNB systems. In other words, the way the rats are treated (licked or not) directly influences the biology of their sex.
If it is true that human parents treat babies differently from the day they are born depending on the child’s sex, then the lesson we can take from these rats is that all the ways in which we stimulate and interact with our children may have an impact on their gender-specific differentiation and behavior.
Legato, M.J. (2005). Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget. Rodale Press
Ch. 6 pg. 127
Marianne J. Legato, MD, Ph. D. (hon. c.), FACP is an internationally renowned academic, physician, author, lecturer, and pioneer in the field of gender-specific medicine. She is a Professor Emerita of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Dr. Legato is also the Director of the Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine, which she founded in 2006 as a continuation of her work with The Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia University. She received an honorary PhD from the University of Panama in 2015 for her work on the differences between men and women.
At its core, gender-specific medicine is the science of how normal human biology differs between men and women and how the diagnosis and treatment of disease differs as a function of gender. Dr. Legato’s discoveries and those of her colleagues have led to a personalization of medicine that assists doctors worldwide in understanding the difference in normal function of men and women and in their sex-specific experiences of the same diseases.
She began her work in gender-specific medicine by authoring the first book on women and heart disease, The Female Heart: The Truth About Women and Coronary Artery Disease, which won the Blakeslee Award of the American Heart Association in 1992. Because of this research, the cardiovascular community began to include women in clinical trials affirming the fact that the risk factors, symptoms, and treatment of the same disease can be significantly different between the sexes. Convinced that the sex-specific differences in coronary artery disease were not unique, Dr. Legato began a wide-ranging survey of all medical specialties and in 2004, published the first textbook on gender-specific medicine, The Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine. The second edition appeared in 2010 and the third edition, dedicated to explaining how gender impacts biomedical investigation in the genomic era, won the PROSE Award in Clinical Medicine from the Association of American Publishers in 2018. A fourth edition is forthcoming.
She also founded the first scientific journals publishing new studies in the field, The Journal of Gender-Specific Medicine, and a newer version, Gender Medicine, both listed in the Index Medicus of the National Library of Medicine. She has founded a third peer-reviewed, open access journal, Gender and the Genome, which focuses on the impact of biological sex on technology and its effects on human life.
Dr. Legato is the author of multiple works, including: What Women Need to Know (Simon & Schuster, 1997), Eve’s Rib (Harmony Books, 2002), Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget (Rodale, 2005), Why Men Die First (Palgrave, 2008), The International Society for Gender Medicine: History and Highlights (Academic Press, 2017), and most recently, The Plasticity of Sex (Academic Press, 2020). Her books have been translated into 28 languages to date.
As an internationally respected authority on gender medicine, Dr. Legato has chaired symposia and made keynote addresses to world congresses in gender-specific medicine in Berlin, Israel, Italy, Japan, Panama, South Korea, Stockholm, and Vienna. In collaboration with the Menarini Foundation, she is co-chairing a symposium on epigenetics, Sex, Gender and Epigenetics: From Molecule to Bedside, to be held in Spring 2021 in Italy. She maintains one of the only gender-specific private practice in New York City, and she has earned recognition as one of the “Top Doctors in New York.”
