Neurosexism: Dispelling the myth that men and women have different brains
Translation of the review of the book of the neurobiologist J. Rippon - The Gendered Brain: The Myth Of The Female Brain (2019) .
Key ideas:
At the beginning of her book Gender Brain (“Gender Brain”), cognitive neuroscientist Gina Rippon describes one of the countless brain studies announced as “finally” explaining the difference between men and women.
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This was an analysis of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of 21 men and 27 women, conducted by scientists from the University of California, Irvine ( RJ Haier et al. NeuroImage 25, 320–327; 2005 ).
Tiny by today's standards, this short message, nevertheless, has become quite widely known: 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 Early Show, the program of the American television network CBS. The presenter, Harry Smith, was delighted when medical correspondent Jennifer Ashton said that men "have six and a half times more gray matter" than women, while women have "ten times more white matter" than men. Then there were obvious remarks about the talent of men in mathematics and about the supernatural abilities of women to perform multitasking. Despite the fact that such differences would require that women's heads were about 50% larger, or that the Irving team did not even compare brain volumes, but investigated the correlation between IQ and gray or white matter.
The history of research on gender differences abounds in misinterpretations, bias in publications, weak statistical significance, inappropriate control groups, etc.
Rippon, the leading voice against the bad neuroscience of sex differences, reveals so many examples in this book that it uses the metaphor of the game “Hit the mole” (where there are several holes in the machine in front of you, a mole crawls out at random and needs to be hit toy hammer to hide back into the hole and thereby earn points (note Margarita Kevac), to emphasize the endless cycle of all this.
Brain research aims to identify differences between men and women - it is published as “finally, really!”, In mockery of political correctness. Other researchers discover bloated extrapolation or fatal design research errors. And, if lucky, the erroneous statement disappears - until the next analysis produces the next “aha!” - the moment and the cycle does not happen again.
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, it has intensified even more since MRI research has joined the fight.
However, as the Gender Brain shows, convincing conclusions about the sex differences of the brain did not materialize. In addition to the “missing five ounces” of the female brain — which have been gloating since the nineteenth century — modern neuroscientists have not identified any crucial, fundamental differences between the brains of men and women.
In the women's brain, language processing is NOT distributed more evenly across the hemispheres than in men. This was initially stated in a small 1995 Nature study, but it was refuted by a large 2008 meta-analysis ( BA Shaywitz et al. Nature 373, 607–609 (1995) and IE Sommer et al. Brain Res. 1206, 76–88; 2008 ).
The size of the brain increases with the growth of the body, and some features, such as the ratio of gray matter to white or the cross section of the nerve tract, called the corpus callosum, vary slightly non-linearly depending on the size of the brain. But all these are differences in degree, not in appearance. As Rippon notes, this becomes apparent when we compare men with small heads and women with big heads — and these differences have nothing to do with the preferred hobby or salary.
Rippon’s main idea is that “the gender world creates a gender brain”. Her book is on a par with “Inferior” (“Lower”) Angela Saini 2017 and Delusions of Gender (roughly translated as “Gender Misconceptions”) to Cordelia Fayn 2010, which eradicates “neurosexism”, permeating attempts to understand the differences in brain level. All this - juicy stories, super-fun reading. If only all this was really in the past ... Unfortunately, those “moles” continue to appear.
Rippon begins with a quote from 1895 by social psychologist Gustav Le Beaune, who used his portable cephalometer to state that women "represent the lowest forms of human evolution." She ends with a story in 2017, when Google engineer James Damore blogged with colleagues about the "biological causes" of the lack of women in technical and managerial positions.
As Rippon shows, the hunt for evidence of the inferiority of women has just recently passed 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 the 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.
In this vein, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia developed a widely publicized 2014 MRI study, which captured in the public imagination a picture of the male and female brain as diametrically opposed metro maps: for women, for the most part, are between the hemispheres and for 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 were NOT different among adolescent participants; neither did it take into account puberty-related maturation and other significant factors.
So if this is not a hard brain flashing, how can we explain the frequent sharp differences in behavior and interests of men and women?
Here we come to the thesis of Rippon about the influence of the gender world on the human brain. It bases its position on four parts: from the history of research on sex differences through modern methods of brain imaging, the emergence of social cognitive neuroscience, and surprisingly weak evidence of sex differences in the brain in newborns. Rippon shows how children's brain sponges seem to begin to differ from each other thanks to the pronounced cultural aspects of “pink vs. blue”, with which they have been soaked since 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 viewed as “workhorses,” and men as “wild geniuses.” This is a difference children learn by the age of six, according to a study by Lin Bian, Sary-Jane Lesley, and Andrei Simpian ( L. Bian et al. Am. Psychol. 73, 1139–1153; 2018 ). And all this contributes to the cycle of shaping the differences between expectations, self-confidence and risk taking that lead boys and girls along different career and success trajectories.
The brain is gender-specific (i.e. it may be of some gender) no more than a liver, kidney, or heart.
And here Rippon flirts with the implications of this discovery, pointing to a growing number of people living somewhere between existing binary gender categories - or coming to it.
But for now, she concludes, most of us remain in “biosocial straitjackets”, which guide the basic universal (if you wish, unisex) brain along one or another culturally defined gender path.
Key ideas:
- The brain has a gender specificity (i.e., it can have some kind of “gender”) no more than a liver, kidneys, or heart.
- Gender world creates the concept of "gender brain".
- In the women's brain, language processing is NOT distributed more evenly across the hemispheres than in men. An early study was refuted by a large 2008 meta-analysis (see links in the text below).
- Other fundamental differences in the brains of men and women - in quality, the specifics of information processing and the neural device - are absent. Differences are only quantitative and, rather, due to social factors than biological. That is confirmed, among other things, in studies of the teenage sample.
***
At the beginning of her book Gender Brain (“Gender Brain”), cognitive neuroscientist Gina 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, Irvine ( RJ Haier et al. NeuroImage 25, 320–327; 2005 ).
Tiny by today's standards, this short message, nevertheless, has become quite widely known: 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 Early Show, the program of the American television network CBS. The presenter, Harry Smith, was delighted when medical correspondent Jennifer Ashton said that men "have six and a half times more gray matter" than women, while women have "ten times more white matter" than men. Then there were obvious remarks about the talent of men in mathematics and about the supernatural abilities of women to perform multitasking. Despite the fact that such differences would require that women's heads were about 50% larger, or that the Irving team did not even compare brain volumes, but investigated the correlation between IQ and gray or white matter.
Neurosexism
The history of research on gender differences abounds in misinterpretations, bias in publications, weak statistical significance, inappropriate control groups, etc.
Rippon, the leading voice against the bad neuroscience of sex differences, reveals so many examples in this book that it uses the metaphor of the game “Hit the mole” (where there are several holes in the machine in front of you, a mole crawls out at random and needs to be hit toy hammer to hide back into the hole and thereby earn points (note Margarita Kevac), to emphasize the endless cycle of all this.
Brain research aims to identify differences between men and women - it is published as “finally, really!”, In mockery of political correctness. Other researchers discover bloated extrapolation or fatal design research errors. And, if lucky, the erroneous statement disappears - until the next analysis produces the next “aha!” - the moment and the cycle does not happen again.
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, it has intensified even more since MRI research has joined the fight.
However, as the Gender Brain shows, convincing conclusions about the sex differences of the brain did not materialize. In addition to the “missing five ounces” of the female brain — which have been gloating since the nineteenth century — modern neuroscientists have not identified any crucial, fundamental differences between the brains of men and women.
In the women's brain, language processing is NOT distributed more evenly across the hemispheres than in men. This was initially stated in a small 1995 Nature study, but it was refuted by a large 2008 meta-analysis ( BA Shaywitz et al. Nature 373, 607–609 (1995) and IE Sommer et al. Brain Res. 1206, 76–88; 2008 ).
The size of the brain increases with the growth of the body, and some features, such as the ratio of gray matter to white or the cross section of the nerve tract, called the corpus callosum, vary slightly non-linearly depending on the size of the brain. But all these are differences in degree, not in appearance. As Rippon notes, this becomes apparent when we compare men with small heads and women with big heads — and these differences have nothing to do with the preferred hobby or salary.
History bias
Rippon’s main idea is that “the gender world creates a gender brain”. Her book is on a par with “Inferior” (“Lower”) Angela Saini 2017 and Delusions of Gender (roughly translated as “Gender Misconceptions”) to Cordelia Fayn 2010, which eradicates “neurosexism”, permeating attempts to understand the differences in brain level. All this - juicy stories, super-fun reading. If only all this was really in the past ... Unfortunately, those “moles” continue to appear.
Rippon begins with a quote from 1895 by social psychologist Gustav Le Beaune, who used his portable cephalometer to state that women "represent the lowest forms of human evolution." She ends with a story in 2017, when Google engineer James Damore blogged with colleagues about the "biological causes" of the lack of women in technical and managerial positions.
As Rippon shows, the hunt for evidence of the inferiority of women has just recently passed 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 the 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.
In this vein, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia developed a widely publicized 2014 MRI study, which captured in the public imagination a picture of the male and female brain as diametrically opposed metro maps: for women, for the most part, are between the hemispheres and for 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 were NOT different among adolescent participants; neither did it take into account puberty-related maturation and other significant factors.
Cultural paths
So if this is not a hard brain flashing, how can we explain the frequent sharp differences in behavior and interests of men and women?
Here we come to the thesis of Rippon about the influence of the gender world on the human brain. It bases its position on four parts: from the history of research on sex differences through modern methods of brain imaging, the emergence of social cognitive neuroscience, and surprisingly weak evidence of sex differences in the brain in newborns. Rippon shows how children's brain sponges seem to begin to differ from each other thanks to the pronounced cultural aspects of “pink vs. blue”, with which they have been soaked since 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 viewed as “workhorses,” and men as “wild geniuses.” This is a difference children learn by the age of six, according to a study by Lin Bian, Sary-Jane Lesley, and Andrei Simpian ( L. Bian et al. Am. Psychol. 73, 1139–1153; 2018 ). And all this contributes to the cycle of shaping the differences between expectations, self-confidence and risk taking that lead boys and girls along different career and success trajectories.
Conclusion
The brain is gender-specific (i.e. it may be of some gender) no more than a liver, kidney, or heart.
And here Rippon flirts with the implications of this discovery, pointing to a growing number of people living somewhere between existing binary gender categories - or coming to it.
But for now, she concludes, most of us remain in “biosocial straitjackets”, which guide the basic universal (if you wish, unisex) brain along one or another culturally defined gender path.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/442150/
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