Photo: Thinkstock

There is an old "Phoebe and the Pigeon People" comic my mother found hilarious and had up on the wall of our basement playroom ("our" being me and my brother)—in the comic these hippie parents are explaining that they don't believe in gender typing and thus have given their little girl a tool set. Cut to the next frame, where the daughter is holding the hammer and saying for it, "Barbie, would you go to the prom with me?" The wrench girlishly replies, "Oh Ken, I'd love to!" I'm know the mother of a girl and a boy, and I get it: We think the differences between boys and girls are socially constructed and that we can outsmart them, but then we see how early the differences manifest themselves, as if by magic. But could it be that we are influencing how boys and girls act, perhaps without even realizing it?

At the recent annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, five researchers held a panel on this very topic, discussing the difference in male and female brains, and how superior the female brains actually are. (Kidding!) The actual findings can be read in this terrific summary on Slate, which details who's afraid to be "neurosexist" and which girls are whomping boys in math, but here are a two highlights for those of us dealing with actual little people:

"Anyone who dismisses boy-girl differences as cultural artifacts...isn’t accounting for similar patterns in animals, such as research showing that male monkeys prefer to play more with cars and less with dolls than female monkeys do." That's right. On one hand, any parent can tell you that little boys are magically drawn to wheely things, while girls will, you know, turn a wrench and hammer into dollies. But monkeys? Really?

"Maryjane Wraga, a psychologist at Smith College, presented research on stereotype threat, showing that women perform worse at mental rotation (compared with other women) when they’re told that men are better at it. So if scientists go around saying girls are bad with numbers, tests might appear to validate that prediction, but the prediction itself will be the culprit."

(Let us all now run to the girls in our lives and chant, "Girls are good at math. Girls are good at math.")

More:
Dr Oz on the differences between men and women's health
Why males and females react so differently to emotions
How (and why) to talk to little girls without saying "You're so pretty!"