Look. If you have two babies, a boy and a girl, and you give them a choice of pink or blue toys to play with, and the boy chooses blue and the girl chooses pink (bear with me), and if this happens every single time in every repetition of the experiment, this would still prove NOTHING whatsoever about the innate or biological relationship between sex and gender, because guess what? THERE IS NO RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SEX AND GENDER!

Gender is a social construct. ‘Pink for girls’ is a social construct. As is ‘tea sets for girls’ or ‘tractors for boys’.

So, whilst if the above experiment actually took place with the results described, it would almost certainly indicate something about the relationship between sex and colour preferences, or contrast preferences, but it would reveal nothing whatsoever about gender.

Plus, as Polly points out, we begin to inflict gender on babies from even before they are born. The first thing we ask is the child’s sex, and from that moment we start to initiate them into their gender role.

I’m not a scientist but it’s just logic, innit?

This was precisely my point. In the same way that one cannot eliminate the potential influence of social factors, neither can we eliminate biology from the mix of potential confounds.

What counts as a gendered toy can perfectly well have cross-cultural equivalents – amazingly enough, the researchers have actually thought of that.

I’m not particularly an apologist for this type of research, but if it’s going to be rubbished, at least let it be rubbished on proper, logical grounds, and not from a stand-point of entirely misunderstanding the method.

i completely agree. you only have to look at the amount of pink and blue crap in mothercare to know that barely at any point in its life is a child free from gender stereotypes.

i am always curious in these debates about how “developed world” and western they are. what about in countries where children can’t get barbie dolls and action man? is their gender identity/biological sex in flux? this i think is where the biological propensity argument falls down. children haven’t played with gendered toys since cavepeople times, neither do in every corner of the world. it is a remakably recent thing. when children played with spillikins and jacks, for example, what statement were they making about their biological sex?

just a thought anyhow.

Now in the case of smoking for instance (I am not an expert, so this is a laypersons summary) tar builds up in the lungs and causes a tumour.

It doesn’t always happen, but approxmately 4 times as many smokers as non smokers contract the disease among women and it’s 9 -1 among men.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8893051

Reason:there are other things that cause lung cancer.

So we can say, ok there is a very strong correlation between lung cancer and smoking. And we’ve showed the way that can happen by experiments. (Again laypersons summary, just take the experiments on beagles or whatever as having happened). So ONE factor that can cause lung cancer is smoking.

Now you are saying that children play with certain toys according to their biological sex, but wait a minute, their toy choice can also be influenced socially too.

Fine. Except the social conditioning (see the study above) mostly goes the same way as the supposed ‘innate’ biological preference. So how do ANY children defy the stereotypes?

And what exactly is the mechanism by which the effect of hormones in (pre pubertal ) children is to make them play with tea sets?

And how do we prove any of this? Since there are so many variables and we can’t control them?

A correlation on its own proves sweet FA. Sorry statistics lovers, but them’s the facts.

Mothers often deny treating boys and girls differently,
but studies show they do. The parents know the gender
of the child and from then on treat him or her as a member of that sex – often unconsciously. Boys’ limbs are
exercised and stretched far more, and the vocal babblings of girls are imitated far more. Later in infancy,
boys are allowed less physical contact and less verbal and eye contact than girls. Boys are more likely to be
held facing away from the mother (and father) than toward. The parents are more likely to point something
out to a boy than a girl. The mother tends to yield more often to the boy’s demand to feed, whereas the girl
is more readily denied and given direction. She has to yield to her mother’s ideas of how much to take and
when. When this sort of different behavior is repeated hundreds of times, it is bound to have an effect. “By
the age of thirteen months, there are clear differences between male and female children,” says LaTorre.6
“There is apparently an attempt to “develop independence, adventure and mastery
in the boy…. The males
show much more exploratory
and autonomous behavior.”

Most other people also reflect their gender expectations
toward the child. In some experiments,
researchers took young babies and pinned opposite-sex names on them: girls names on boys and vice
versa. Without knowledge
of the experiment, people who were strangers to the babies were brought in
to see them. Predictably, they cooed over the “girl” babies saying “Isn’t she pretty?”, and over the “boys”
said things like, “Looks like he’ll be a good cricket player when he grows up.” A father, watching
his young
son tear into a steak with unsteady knife and fork, remarked approvingly, “That’ll give you big muscles!”
Presumably he would never have said it to his young daughter. If a little boy drops his trousers and piddles in
the back garden, mother laughs tolerantly, but if her daughter takes off her underwear and throws it over the
neighbor’s fence, she is probably scolded. Studies again show that the boy is given much more freedom and
allowed to do many things the girl is not. His dirtiness and untidiness is tolerated far more than a girl’s.

http://www.mygenes.co.nz/Ch3.pdf

And given how many variables there are in human behaviour, why are you so determined to conclude that a correlation shows biological determination?