The Truth About Girls and Boys

"BRAVO! This is a much needed, informative, and engaging book. The authors, Rosalind C. Barnett (a highly respected research psychologist) and Caryl Rivers (a skilled journalist), take the reader on a critical and clarifying tour of claims about categorical, biologically-based sex differences used to justify the move towards more publicly funded single-sex schooling. This book is a significant contribution to an area of heated debate and policy struggle. Parents, teachers, and policy-makers can turn to it as a reliable guide through a thicket of hype and over-claiming. The authors do an excellent job of unpacking empirical assertions, exposing shabby "science," unfounded generalizations and jumps of logic." -Barrie Thorne, Professor of Sociology, and Gender and Women's Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Author of Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School.

"The gloves are off. Rivers and Barnett provide a convincing case that much of what parents, teachers, and the general public know about differences between girls and boys is based on highly publicized accounts of shoddy and misleading science. They provide readers with an understanding of the ways girls and boys are similar and different and how we can use that knowledge to raise happy, healthy, and successful children" -Diane F. Halpern, Trustee Professor of Psychology & Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College; Past-president, American Psychological Association, Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities (fourth edition)

"A bracing antidote to the conventional wisom. Like Malcolm Gladwell, Rivers and Barnett take the reader into the world of research and emerge with surprising-and unsettling-conclusions. Teachers, educators, parents, journalists and researchers would do well to read this book before hopping on the bandwagon about the "differences" between boys and girls" -Jonathan Kaufman, Bloomberg News, Broken Allianc, A Hole in the Heart of the World

"The Truth About Boys and Girls is exactly that-the real story about over-hyped claims of sex differences and how they are harming boys and girls. Rivers and Barnett expose the sloppy journalism that has allowed pseudoscientific ideas to percolate into our collective beliefs about gender development. Parents, teachers, and policy-makers will do well to read this book-to rescue today's boys and girls from the false claims of "hardwired" differences that are limiting their learning and stunting their futures" -Lise Eliot, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Chicago Medical School, Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps and What We Can Do About It

"Barnett's and Rivers' dissection of the ways tired stereotypes are being repackaged as "science" is urgently important. It must be read immediately by parents, educators-anyone who believes children should develop their full intellectual and emotional potential." -Peggy Orenstein, Cinderella Ate My Daughter

"The Truth About Girls and Boys is a must read for anyone vouchsafed with the upbringing, care, teaching or social policy, which impacts our most precious legacy: our children-Girls and Boys. We must read this "game changing" book, ponder its meaning, and not put it down until we move from our present position of empty minded acceptance to open minded and critical thinking. Barnett and Rivers throw out a sturdy life preserver to bring us back from the harm of mangled pseudoscience to the shores of thoughtful, gender equitable understanding" -William S. Pollack, Ph.D. ABPP, Assocaite Clinical Professor, Harvard Medical School, Real Boys