INSIDE OUT

I'm not sure I believe in all of these gender differences being "innate". I believe more, that gender differences are learned. Now, of course I understand the physiological differences that will, indeed, cause slight skews in aggression, emotion, etc. However, I do not believe that the differences are all that obvious as some might like to think. I remember in my studies at University of Toronto. We covered this one particular experiment whereby women were placed in a room with toys. Babies would be placed in their care for a certain amount of time. Each baby was dressed in two different sets of clothing. One, would be female attire. The other, male attire. The results found that if a baby had been dressed in female attire, the woman would be more "nurturing". She would hold the baby more, her tone of voice would be gentle and sing-song'y, she would play with dolls and use words like, "pretty" and "beautiful". When the baby came dressed in male attire, the woman would play more "rough". She would find toys with wheels and used words such as, "fast" and "strong" and used descriptive words like "handsome". I find that even though I do not trust in these "gender biases", I catch myself using words like "pretty" and "beautiful" with my daughter and not my sons. I will attribute the boy's crying to anger and frustration whereas when my daughter cries, I attribute the tears to her "feelings" being hurt. Is it possible that consciously and subconsciously, we create these gender differences in our children? I've yet to see gender differences in my own children. When I only had two boys with this conviction, I was told to wait until I had a girl. Now, I have a girl and since I still don't see it, I'm told it's because she has older brothers. If you ask me, my middle boy seems more like a girl than either my first-born son and my daughter combined. If he was a girl, I might have changed my view completely. But, as it were, I have two boys and one girl. All of which seem pretty gender neutral to me. But I will wait. I'm sure I'll find this "truth", which so many continue to hold steadfastly to, once my daughter is a teenager.