March 1, 2019 at 10:24Neurosexism: debunking the myth that men and women have different brains
- Transfer
Translation of a review of the book by the neuroscientist J. Rippon - The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters The Myth Of The Female Brain (2019) .
Key ideas:
At the beginning of her book Gender Brain, the cognitive neuroscientist Gene Rippon describes one of the countless brain studies announced as “finally” explaining the difference between men and women.
This was an analysis of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of 21 men and 27 women, conducted by scientists from the University of California at Irvine ( RJ Haier et al. NeuroImage 25, 320–327; 2005 ).
Tiny by today's standards, this short message, however, gained quite wide popularity: from newspapers and blogs to television, books and, ultimately, conferences on teacher education and corporate leadership.
One morning in 2010, I discovered a particularly unsuccessful extrapolation of this study in the Early Show, the CBS program on the US television network. The host, Harry Smith, was delighted when medical correspondent Jennifer Ashton stated that men “have six and a half times more gray matter” than women, while women “ten times more white matter” than men. This was followed by obvious remarks on the talent of men in mathematics and on the supernatural abilities of women to perform multitasking. Despite the fact that such differences would require that female heads be approximately 50% larger, or that Irwin’s team did not even compare brain volumes, but investigate the correlation between IQ and gray or white matter.
The history of research on gender differences is replete with misinterpretations, bias in publications, weak statistical significance, inappropriate control groups, etc.
Rippon, the leading voice against the bad neuroscience of gender differences, reveals so many examples in this book that she uses the metaphor of the game “Hit the Mole” (where there are several holes in the machine in front of you, from which the mole comes out randomly and needs to be hit with a toy hammer to hide back into the hole and thereby earn points - approx. Margarita Kevats) to emphasize the endless cycle of all this.
Brain research aims to identify the differences between men and women - this is published as “finally, really!”, In mockery of political correctness. Other researchers find bloated extrapolation or fatal errors in research design. And, if you're lucky, the erroneous statement disappears - until the next analysis produces another “aha!” - the moment, and the cycle does not repeat.
As Rippon shows, this hunt for differences in the brain "has been actively developed for centuries using all the techniques that science could apply." And over the past three decades, this has intensified even more - since MRI research joined the fight.
Nevertheless, as shown by the "Gender Brain", convincing conclusions about the sexual differences of the brain did not materialize. In addition to the “missing five ounces” of the female brain - which has been gloating since the nineteenth century - modern neuroscientists have not revealed any crucial, fundamental differences between the brains of men and women.
In the brains of women, language processing is NOT distributed more evenly throughout the hemispheres than in men. This was originally stated in a small 1995 Nature study, but it was refuted by a large meta-analysis of 2008 ( BA Shaywitz et al. Nature 373, 607–609 (1995) and IE Sommer et al. Brain Res. 1206, 76–88; 2008 )
Brain size increases with body growth, and some features, such as the ratio of gray matter to white or a cross-section of the neural tract, called the corpus callosum, vary slightly nonlinearly depending on the size of the brain. But all these are differences in degree, and not in appearance. As Rippon notes, this becomes apparent when we compare men with small heads and women with large heads - and these differences have nothing to do with their preferred hobby or salary.
Rippon’s main idea is that “a gender world creates a gender brain.” Her book is on a par with Angela Sainey’s 2017 Inferior and The Delusions of Gender (roughly translated as Gender Misconceptions) from Cordelia Fine 2010, which eradicates “neurosexism” that pervades attempts to understand the differences in brain level. These are all juicy stories, super-fun reading. If only all this were really in the past ... Unfortunately, those same "moles" continue to appear.
Rippon begins with an 1895 quote from social psychologist Gustav Le Bon, who used his portable cephalometer to declare that women "represent the lowest forms of human evolution." She ends with the story of 2017, when Google engineer James Damore talked with his colleagues on the blog about the “biological reasons” for the lack of women in technical and managerial positions.
As Rippon shows, the hunt for evidence of women's inferiority has recently moved into a new form - the hunt for evidence of the “complementarity” of men and women. This idea says that women are actually no less intelligent than men, just “different” - in the sense in which they coincide are presented in descriptions of biblical teachings and the current position of gender roles. Thus, the female brain is said to be tuned to empathy and intuition, while the male brain must be optimized for reason and action.
It is in this vein that researchers from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia developed the widely publicized MRI study of 2014, which captured in the public imagination a picture of the male and female brain as diametrically opposite metro maps: the connections in women are mainly between the hemispheres, and in men, inside them ( M. Ingalhalikar et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, 823-828; 2014 ). However, this “map” omits evidence that the vast majority of connections in the brain did NOT differ among participants in adolescence; nor did it take into account maturation associated with puberty and other significant factors.
So if this is not a hard brain firmware, how can we explain the frequent sharp differences in the behavior and interests of men and women?
Here we come to Rippon's thesis on the impact of the gender world on the human brain. She bases her position on four parts: from the history of research on gender differences through modern brain imaging techniques, the emergence of social cognitive neurobiology, and surprisingly weak evidence of brain sex differences in newborns. Rippon shows how children's “brain sponges” seem to start to differ from each other thanks to the pronounced cultural aspects of “pink versus blue” that they have been soaking from the moment of prenatal sex determination.
Part 4 takes us to the twenty-first century, although not to a happy ending. The focus is on women in science and technology, as well as how the gender world - including the professionalization of science and the male stereotype of “genius” - impedes their entry and advancement in this high-status area. Talented women are seen as “workhorses,” and men as “wild geniuses.” This is a difference that children learn by age six, according to a study by Lin Bian, Sarah-Jane Leslie, and Andrei Simpian ( L. Bian et al. Am. Psychol. 73, 1139–1153; 2018 ). And all this contributes to the cycle of creating differences between expectations, self-confidence and risk taking, which lead boys and girls along different paths of career and success.
The brain is gender-specific (i.e., may have some gender) no more than the liver, kidneys or heart.
And here Rippon flirts with the consequences of this discovery, pointing to the growing number of people living somewhere between existing binary gender categories - or coming to this.
But for now, she concludes, most of us remain in “biosocial straitjackets” that direct the basic universal (if you will — unisex) brain along a culturally defined gender path.
Key ideas:
- The brain has a gender specificity (that is, it can have some kind of “gender”) no more than the liver, kidneys or heart.
- The gender world creates the concept of “gender brain”.
- In the brains of women, language processing is NOT distributed more evenly throughout the hemispheres than in men. An earlier study was refuted by a large meta-analysis of 2008 (see links in the text below).
- Other fundamental differences between the brains of men and women - in quality, specifics of information processing and a neural device - are absent. Differences are only quantitative and, rather, due to social factors than biological. This is confirmed, inter alia, in studies of a teenage sample.
***
At the beginning of her book Gender Brain, the cognitive neuroscientist Gene Rippon describes one of the countless brain studies announced as “finally” explaining the difference between men and women.
This was an analysis of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of 21 men and 27 women, conducted by scientists from the University of California at Irvine ( RJ Haier et al. NeuroImage 25, 320–327; 2005 ).
Tiny by today's standards, this short message, however, gained quite wide popularity: from newspapers and blogs to television, books and, ultimately, conferences on teacher education and corporate leadership.
One morning in 2010, I discovered a particularly unsuccessful extrapolation of this study in the Early Show, the CBS program on the US television network. The host, Harry Smith, was delighted when medical correspondent Jennifer Ashton stated that men “have six and a half times more gray matter” than women, while women “ten times more white matter” than men. This was followed by obvious remarks on the talent of men in mathematics and on the supernatural abilities of women to perform multitasking. Despite the fact that such differences would require that female heads be approximately 50% larger, or that Irwin’s team did not even compare brain volumes, but investigate the correlation between IQ and gray or white matter.
Neurosexism
The history of research on gender differences is replete with misinterpretations, bias in publications, weak statistical significance, inappropriate control groups, etc.
Rippon, the leading voice against the bad neuroscience of gender differences, reveals so many examples in this book that she uses the metaphor of the game “Hit the Mole” (where there are several holes in the machine in front of you, from which the mole comes out randomly and needs to be hit with a toy hammer to hide back into the hole and thereby earn points - approx. Margarita Kevats) to emphasize the endless cycle of all this.
Brain research aims to identify the differences between men and women - this is published as “finally, really!”, In mockery of political correctness. Other researchers find bloated extrapolation or fatal errors in research design. And, if you're lucky, the erroneous statement disappears - until the next analysis produces another “aha!” - the moment, and the cycle does not repeat.
As Rippon shows, this hunt for differences in the brain "has been actively developed for centuries using all the techniques that science could apply." And over the past three decades, this has intensified even more - since MRI research joined the fight.
Nevertheless, as shown by the "Gender Brain", convincing conclusions about the sexual differences of the brain did not materialize. In addition to the “missing five ounces” of the female brain - which has been gloating since the nineteenth century - modern neuroscientists have not revealed any crucial, fundamental differences between the brains of men and women.
In the brains of women, language processing is NOT distributed more evenly throughout the hemispheres than in men. This was originally stated in a small 1995 Nature study, but it was refuted by a large meta-analysis of 2008 ( BA Shaywitz et al. Nature 373, 607–609 (1995) and IE Sommer et al. Brain Res. 1206, 76–88; 2008 )
Brain size increases with body growth, and some features, such as the ratio of gray matter to white or a cross-section of the neural tract, called the corpus callosum, vary slightly nonlinearly depending on the size of the brain. But all these are differences in degree, and not in appearance. As Rippon notes, this becomes apparent when we compare men with small heads and women with large heads - and these differences have nothing to do with their preferred hobby or salary.
Bias history
Rippon’s main idea is that “a gender world creates a gender brain.” Her book is on a par with Angela Sainey’s 2017 Inferior and The Delusions of Gender (roughly translated as Gender Misconceptions) from Cordelia Fine 2010, which eradicates “neurosexism” that pervades attempts to understand the differences in brain level. These are all juicy stories, super-fun reading. If only all this were really in the past ... Unfortunately, those same "moles" continue to appear.
Rippon begins with an 1895 quote from social psychologist Gustav Le Bon, who used his portable cephalometer to declare that women "represent the lowest forms of human evolution." She ends with the story of 2017, when Google engineer James Damore talked with his colleagues on the blog about the “biological reasons” for the lack of women in technical and managerial positions.
As Rippon shows, the hunt for evidence of women's inferiority has recently moved into a new form - the hunt for evidence of the “complementarity” of men and women. This idea says that women are actually no less intelligent than men, just “different” - in the sense in which they coincide are presented in descriptions of biblical teachings and the current position of gender roles. Thus, the female brain is said to be tuned to empathy and intuition, while the male brain must be optimized for reason and action.
It is in this vein that researchers from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia developed the widely publicized MRI study of 2014, which captured in the public imagination a picture of the male and female brain as diametrically opposite metro maps: the connections in women are mainly between the hemispheres, and in men, inside them ( M. Ingalhalikar et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, 823-828; 2014 ). However, this “map” omits evidence that the vast majority of connections in the brain did NOT differ among participants in adolescence; nor did it take into account maturation associated with puberty and other significant factors.
Cultural paths
So if this is not a hard brain firmware, how can we explain the frequent sharp differences in the behavior and interests of men and women?
Here we come to Rippon's thesis on the impact of the gender world on the human brain. She bases her position on four parts: from the history of research on gender differences through modern brain imaging techniques, the emergence of social cognitive neurobiology, and surprisingly weak evidence of brain sex differences in newborns. Rippon shows how children's “brain sponges” seem to start to differ from each other thanks to the pronounced cultural aspects of “pink versus blue” that they have been soaking from the moment of prenatal sex determination.
Part 4 takes us to the twenty-first century, although not to a happy ending. The focus is on women in science and technology, as well as how the gender world - including the professionalization of science and the male stereotype of “genius” - impedes their entry and advancement in this high-status area. Talented women are seen as “workhorses,” and men as “wild geniuses.” This is a difference that children learn by age six, according to a study by Lin Bian, Sarah-Jane Leslie, and Andrei Simpian ( L. Bian et al. Am. Psychol. 73, 1139–1153; 2018 ). And all this contributes to the cycle of creating differences between expectations, self-confidence and risk taking, which lead boys and girls along different paths of career and success.
Conclusion
The brain is gender-specific (i.e., may have some gender) no more than the liver, kidneys or heart.
And here Rippon flirts with the consequences of this discovery, pointing to the growing number of people living somewhere between existing binary gender categories - or coming to this.
But for now, she concludes, most of us remain in “biosocial straitjackets” that direct the basic universal (if you will — unisex) brain along a culturally defined gender path.