Speculation
Throughout Allysia Van Betuw’s book, the ‘and how to like it’ surfaces and resurfaces. Is Ms Van Betuw’s emphasis, consistently interweaving emotional reward with practice, consistent with a finding that women process emotion differently than men? This could be phrased, women are more emotional, or could be phrased, women are more emotionally discriminating and make use of distinctions that men characteristically miss? (Or that women remember the emotionally charged items used in experiments better than men because of the content of the images, while men might remember emotionally charged images of different materials—-to be stereotypical, the winning basket or touchdown—better than women.) Do women (statistically) perceive emotional nuance at a level of granularity that men (statistically) are less likely to? Or is that specifically social intelligence, more practiced by girls than boys (see Carol Gilligan), and does that transfer to musical (emotional) learning? Or is ‘emotional discrimination’ typically normed on male-female and female-female relationships, and less on male-male, where men may be more discriminating? (Is elegant music a beautiful logical construction or a well-integrated society of mutually-productive melodies and themes?) Does any of this influence learning? Influence learning music specifically?
I’m skeptical that there are meaningful differences in male and female learning, for music or much of anything else. Age effects are well-documented but sex differences are usually most usefully explained by culture (which is pretty synonymous with bias for anything with a public face). That does not mean there are no differences: there are. Estrogen is necessary for memory formation, but it’s a threshold effect, i.e., only a tiny amount is needed, and women’s larger capacity is used elsewhere. There is consistent evidence that men score higher on spatial tasks and women on verbal fluency, and even some evidence that women excel men at episodic memory (while semantic, primary, and, recognition-triggered memory are the same across sexes). Women are sometimes reported to excel men at fine motor control, which should be particularly relevant for music performance, but controlling for finger size relative to task seems to erase sex differences. Does any of this mean something for learning music?
It’s also possible that sex makes a difference for teaching style, and might influence learners, either for preferred style or in the metacognitive narratives students construct about their learning and their relationship with their teacher at any given point. Oxytocin levels may influence a student’s conformity to a trusted teacher. But both men and women produce oxytocin, and in other contexts it may promote violent protection of ‘in-group’ members.
In any event, if there are male/female differences in learning they’re likely to be slight (except for remembering birthdays and anniversaries, obviously). They’d be swamped by individual variation. A basketball point guard or soccer midfielder will have exteroception and dynamic spatial reasoning far in advance of most of us, whether he’s male or she’s female.
For interested readers, Anne Campbell’s A mind of her own and anything by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy are good on the evolutionary roots of male/female differences. Just published, not yet read by me, The Gendered Brain by Gina Rippon.
Learning music on guitar 