No Meaningful Differences in Male and Female Brains, Study Finds
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This article is clearly presenting a single sided perspective on a complicated issue. It is also not a simple "do less harm" sort of thing - in order to one day understand issues like Fibromyalgia it will be critical to study diseases from a female perspective. If one can't acknowledge biological differences (which I have seen in some circles of scientists even), it will only hurt clinical research.
Further, there are plenty of studies showing sex differences actually in the brain in mice. How impactful those differences are to behavior is not well known yet, and obviously it is difficult to say exactly how that translates to humans anyway. But there are still differences that are pretty well established, for example in glial cell development.
Staci Bilbo is one up and coming PI at Harvard working on glial cell research, and one of her focuses has been sex differences. Some of her work is actually on how hormones interact with these systems: https://www.icon.mgh.harvard.edu/collaborators/staci-bilbo
Neuroimmunology in general is pretty wild and I think we will find some gendered differences there. Certain maternal immune activation mouse models of Autism only show abnormal behavior in the males. More generally I think it's accepted that there are gender differences in the immune system: https://www.nature.com/articles/nri.2016.90
Among the answers, one is the human language and the bias we carry with us. Female aggression is commonly treated very differently from male aggression. A mother bear protecting her young is seen as nurturing and protective, while a male bear protecting his territory is seen as aggressive and wrong. From a biological perspective both are just behavior in favor of protecting their reproductive success, but the human bias makes it look from our perspective as very different behaviors.
Further differences in reproduction can also be associated with behavior. In species where females will only mate with a small percent of males, the result tend to be males that biologically is more focused on sexual competitiveness with other males. In pair bonding species where male and female reproductive success is more identical, you get almost no finding of male aggression.
Testosterone was historically thought as triggering aggression, but in more modern time it has been established that the primary association with aggression is its ability to modulate how much energy is spent on behavior towards keeping social status. In non-pair bonding species, males who suddenly gain social status need to capitalize on it in order for reproductive success, and thus spending reserved energy and taking higher risk when their social status is challenged makes for a higher reproductive success. Females do not in general have this pattern.
Neither of the above imply a meaningful difference in male and female brains, or at least not in the term of cause and effect. It is also not purely environmental, through if we were to associated weight to them then environmental factors hold a more prominent role. Change how culture managed social status and the behavior change of testosterone will change with it. Apply culturally a more rigorous definition of female aggression and fewer differences between male and female aggression will be found. That said, biology bias culture, so if one want to understand behavior then both is critical concepts to explore.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/32d94fa6-e5a8-4c82...
[1] Well, I have to say, it was obvious to me, back in middle school, though I didn't know about the mechanics of X chromosome mosaicism at the time. It'd have been pretty weird if none of the information used to construct the brain was on the X chromosome.
Also, James Damore never claimed
few women went into science because, well, they just weren’t inherently good at it. “Issues of intrinsic aptitude,” ... “overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability” kept many women out of the field.
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Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership.
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Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.
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Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things
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Women on average are more cooperative
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Women on average are more prone to anxiety
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Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average
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The male gender role is currently inflexible
Also, I'm very _very_ curious to know what the transgender community thinks about this new study. Somehow I feel a new storm is a-brewing.
[0] - https://www.scribd.com/embeds/355823379/content?start_page=1...
It's a metaanalysis of brain studies, which have never consistently found significant differences between female and male brains that were unrelated to size. It's not saying anything new. There's nothing to see here.
Also, evolution is not a woke algorithm, it doesn't just stop working on sex.
Or above the neck. This is one of the things that baffles me most about people who claim to respect science. If there are meaningful differences about human populations in all sorts of physical characteristics, why should our mental faculties be precisely averaged out on the same gauge across almost 8 billion individuals? That would be extraordinary to say the least.
Now I can understand that we yet do not understand the nature/nurture balance when it comes to the capabilities of our brains and we cannot easily draw conclusions. But to claim that all the observable differences are due to cultural traits, oppression or privilege, sounds as a radically non-scientific opinion to me.
> non-scientific opinion
That's because CT has come to be skeptical of science (Or at least science that doesn't support CT's assumptions). Science can provide evidence that empirically justifies existing structures, whether that's at the abstraction level of physics or the level of society. This is very often at odds with the claims of those who believe in CT and its derivatives.
In the context of contemporary society, it has become taboo to claim that, for example, men and women are different (an oversimplification). A difference, if quantifiable, can be sorted/enumerated - which implies a hierarchy can be formed. Its this implication of hierarchy that I believe is at the core of many of these social and cultural conflicts.
On the flip side, I'm also not asserting that populations are not the same when it comes to their capabilities; it just makes no difference. As stated, the variance between individuals is sufficient that I'd just as soon deal with the individual, rather than treating them as an avatar for some arbitrary collective. It makes no difference to me if less women are inherently interested in engineering, or if exactly as many women are inherently interested in engineering, it matters to me if an individual, woman or not, is not treated/evaluated in accordance with her own characteristics.
"In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere."
- Ratatouille
The discussion in the current state is pushed by how can we explain the differences in outcomes and how to erase those differences. That's how the discussion is pushed to the point where some people claim there is no difference in inputs, all the differences are created in the process.
One group's essentially takes the outcomes produced by two different populations, and takes any differences as sufficient evidence that the systems themselves are biased towards one population or another. Implicit in their argument is that the populations serve as identical inputs. This is the argument of the Ibram X. Kendi/Robin Diangelo, collectivist/CRT types of the left.
The other group's essentially says that outcomes produced should be proportionately relative to inputs, and consistent between individuals such that comparable inputs produce comparable outputs. Implicit in this argument is that race and gender are almost never relevant inputs to any outputs, such that two individuals with comparable inputs aside from race or gender should be expected to net comparable outputs in most circumstances. This is the argument of the individualist/liberal types of the right.
How I personally classify these problems is that the first solution is "bad code," it's a bad diagnosis and produces bad solutions. The second solution is "good code," it would produce a just and stable system. However, the second solution ignores "bad data" which is already in place, whereas the first solution implicitly picks up and addresses the bad data as the bad data will largely contribute to the different outputs. And what I mean by good code vs bad data is that previous "bad code" (i.e. procedural systems producing outputs from inputs) have put individuals from different populations in unequal circumstances. So while the system I described as being the better of the two for producing just society is better at actually serving as the basis for our procedural systems, it is insufficient in addressing the "bad data" which is already in place, such that people from different populations, and individuals in general, are given such drastically different starting positions, that it doesn't matter that their inputs are going to net them proportional outputs so long as their inputs were so dramatically hampered from the get go.
But that argument concedes populations are different [1]. How does it counter those that say protecting these differences is legitimate?
[1] https://dienekes.blogspot.com/2010/07/more-uniform-sampling-...
This is specious. Nobody is saying that biological women are no different than biological men, or that those differences aren't a result of evolution. You might as well be saying that because evolution doesn't stop "working on" hair color, it's obvious that blondes would have systematically different brains than brunettes.
Yeah, that sounds a bit suspicious, if we do not make a distinction between "naturally" shorter people and people whose growth was stunted by lack of nutrients in their childhood. For example, growing during periods of famine or war.
https://www.rosalindfranklin.edu/academics/faculty/lise-elio...
Most seem to be pop-science editorials from the past 15 years which make the same basic claim. Certainly one can have a hypothesis, but after this many years, I expect a scientist to actually pursue the question further than just “the weights of these two structures are about the same in men and women”. Where’s the molecular work? This looks more like activism.
[we sought to integrate findings from a wide survey of the extant literature on s/g effects in human structural and functional brain imaging, using the search terms “sex” and “gender” in lieu of “sex difference” and “gender difference.” ]
So they excluded studies that found differences.
An interactive test that can ascertain your gender simply based on a variety of tests (e.g. rotation of objects in 3d space vs remember locations). It's been around for over a decade and was right on n=5 people I know who have done it. [Sadly requires flash]
"In her paper, Eliot and her co-authors acknowledge that psychological studies have found gendered personality traits (male aggression, for example) but at the brain level those differences don’t seem to appear."
Are you saying that aggression is not related to the brain?
I'm not surprised. There's not really much evolutionary sense in building different brain hardware when you can dynamically manipulate so much with hormones and social pressure. Why are people so devoted to the idea that there must be a big structural or anatomical difference? It simply doesn't make sense to me, from observing children before & after puberty -- unless I think of the societal benefits of enforcing belief in structural difference in the brain. It makes division of labor easier and keeps divide & conquer going if you can exploit genders against each other rather than thinking they've got a common interest against another economic class.
That would make it highly likely that differences in aggression are related to differences in receivers for those transmitters in the brain.
The issue is exactly those differences
I'd guess it would also be extra difficult for sex-specific brain differences in high-level structure to evolve when X chromosome inactivation happens quasi-randomly. But nature can surprise you...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/science/seeing-x-chromoso...
When I see studies coming from Europe, (especially the UK, and Nordic Countries, which tend to be a step ahead), it has more credibility on my books.
I have no idea whether women brains have on average a advantage or a disadvantage at scientific/engineering cognitive tasks. However it is clear that there are meaningful differences in specific tasks, see ->
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition
There are also many known empirical results (that are not necessarily caused by brain difference but could very well be)
study2 of samples of university students, in which we found that the average IQ of men is 4.6 points higher than that of women
Women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and the prevalence of anxiety disorders is significantly higher for women (23.4 percent) than men (14.3 percent).
Males are generally more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than females, with a male to female ratio of approximately 4:1 in community samples.
About twice as many women as men experience depression.
Globally, death by suicide occurred about 1.8 times more often among males than among females in 2008, and 1.7 times in 2015.[4][5][6] In the western world, males die by suicide three to four times more often than do females.[4]
A way to determine if some of those effects are causative would be to monitor cognitive performance alterations in trans people.
To me the greatest possible advantage of a woman brain would be a higher verbal fluency. If hormone changes could make someone's brain win some of the advantage from one gender to another, then he could periodically in its life by changing gender be more optimal at certain cognitive tasks. (of course I don't recommend doing that lol)
I worry that Hyde’s analysis plays the same trick. She does a wonderful job finding that men and women have minimal differences in eg “likelihood of smiling when not being observed”, “interpersonal leadership style”, et cetera. But if you ask the man on the street “Are men and women different?”, he’s likely to say something like “Yeah, men are more aggressive and women are more sensitive”. And in fact, Hyde found that men were indeed definitely more aggressive, and women indeed definitely more sensitive. But throw in a hundred other effects nobody cares about like “likelihood of smiling when not observed”, and you can report that “78% of gender differences are small or zero”.
Hyde found moderate or large gender differences in (and here I’m paraphrasing very scientific-sounding constructs into more understandable terms) aggressiveness, horniness, language abilities, mechanical abilities, visuospatial skills, mechanical ability, tendermindness, assertiveness, comfort with body, various physical abilities, and computer skills.
With all due respect.
The reason there aren’t more women in IT and the sciences is you.
It’s all of you.
It's because the barriers to entry include years of lonely study. Men are quite happy to shut themselves off from everything for years to learn something. Women generally aren't. We're wired differently.
Skip this nonsense and read the actual study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976342...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969295/#!po=0....
Men's brains are 8 to 13% bigger depending on age. It doesn't seem to lead to higher IQ (itself a terrible measure), though men (boys) are a lot more likely to be diagnosed with a bunch of issues like autism...
Per your comment male brains are bigger and different in other ways. You can argue about whether a male brain is bigger because it is male, or because it has higher white/grey ratio because its male.
Either way, male -> bigger.
Again, I'm not saying bigger is better or smarter or whatever. I'm just pointing out that submitted article seems to be unaware of other (well reproduced) work that disagrees with its conclusions...
Given how little brain size actually matters (it's not like blue whales are the dominant species and they win the size race), I don't get why people have such a problem with these stats...