ABSTRACT
The social constructionist position is that gender is drummed into our heads by the expectations of our socializing agents and by our social roles, because the infant brain is tabula rasa onto which society can inscribe anything. Female brains are less lateralized than male brains, which implies higher functional connectivity in female brains, that their cerebral hemispheres are less devoted to specialized tasks, and that both hemispheres contribute more equally to similar tasks than they do in males. Boys' preference for moving objects such as toy trucks and balls is biased by their perceptual M-cells because these objects move in space and can be manipulated. Girls' preferences for dolls provide them opportunities to practice nurturance, and being more drawn to faces than moving objects is biased by the P-cell advantage. Females experience fear more readily and more strongly than males, whether assessed in early childhood, the middle-school years, or among adults across a variety of cultures.
