It’s a myth that baby boys are less social than girls – a new look at decades of research shows all babies are born to connect

Girls and boys are equally social at birth.

This finding, based on my team’s synthesis of six decades of research, may come as a surprise. Gender differences in adults’ social sensitivity are famous. Women outperform men at recognizing faces and emotions, and they score modestly higher on measures of empathy. They are likelier to take jobs working with people, such as in teaching and health care, whereas men are likelier to choose jobs working with “things,” such as in engineering or plumbing.

But how early do these differences emerge, and are they a matter of evolution or social learning? For years, some theorists have argued the former: that the difference is innate, built into the brain hardware of girls and boys through Darwinian selection. But this perspective relies almost exclusively on just one high-profile, yet deeply flawed, study of 102 newborns.

Mining the neonatal research trove

Realizing that psychologists have been studying newborns’ social orientation for decades, my team of neurobehavioral researchers and I set out to collect all the data – every published study that has compared boys’ and girls’ attention to social stimuli in the first month of life. Our goal was to better test the hypothesis of an inborn gender difference in attention to, or interest in, other people.

Our study was a systematic review, meaning we searched through every published report indexed in both medical and psychological databases from the 1960s onward.

We cast a wide net, looking for any research that measured newborns’ attention to or preference for human faces or voices and that reported the data separately by gender. Importantly, we did not limit our search to the terms “gender difference” or “sex difference,” since these would bias the collection by potentially excluding studies that failed to find boy-girl differences.

As expected, we unearthed dozens of studies comparing newborn boys and girls on social perception: 40 experiments reported in 31 peer-reviewed studies and involving nearly 2,000 infants. The majority of studies measured the amount of time newborns spent looking at faces, either at a single face or comparing a baby’s preference between two faces of differing social value, such as their own mother versus a woman who was a stranger.

Our data collection was large enough that we were able to carry out meta-analysis, which is a statistical method for combining the results of many studies. Meta-analysis essentially turns many small studies into a single large one. For studies measuring neonates’ looking time at faces, this included 667 infants, half of them boys and half of them girls.