Question about the brain gender

I love that Nature review almond! Wonder what the author of the female brain would have made of my son's habit of placing all his cars in the dolls house so they could have tea parties, then (on realising the lorries would not fit) making the cars have a conversation, the upshot of which was that they should have a barbecue instead of a tea party so the lorries could join in too.

Delusions of Gender is good, as is "Pink Brain, Blue Brain" by Lise Elliott (a neuroscientist whose specialism is neuroplasticity in infant brain development). On the social science side, but great for debunking all those myths about "men and women talk differently, use language differently, mean different things..." is Deborah Cameron's "The Myth of Mars and Venus."

www.businessinsider.com/gender-brain-differences-2015-11

This study was widely reported - it found that there were differences, but that from a given brain, you couldn't reliably tell if that person was a male or female, because the majority had features of both (or rather, had features that correlated with the datasets they'd declared male or female - so not quite the same thing).

They didn't check how the owners of the brains felt they conformed themselves though, and of course, these were adult brains which will have had a lifetime of conditioning.

I can't see it now, but I'm pretty sure the most reliable, externally measurable indicator of the sex of a brain is its weight - and even then, it's just a good guess rather than a clear cut thing (rather like guessing sex from a person't height)

This is the review of the book 'The Female Brain' as it appeared in Nature (a scientific journal).

Yet, despite the author’s extensive academic credentials, The Female Brain disappointingly
fails to meet even the most basic standards of scientific accuracy and balance. The book is
riddled with scientific errors and is misleading about the processes of brain development, the
neuroendocrine system, and the nature of sex differences in general. At the ‘big picture’ level,
three errors stand out. First, human sex differences are elevated almost to the point of creating
different species, yet virtually all differences in brain structure, and most differences in behaviour,
are characterized by small average differences and a great deal of male– female overlap at the
individual level. Second, data on structural and functional differences in the brain are routinely
framed as if they must precede all sex differences in behaviour. Finally, the focus on hormone
levels to the virtual exclusion of the systems that interpret them (and the mutual regulatory
interactions between receptor and secretion systems) is especially lamentable, given the book’s
clinical emphasis on hormone therapies.

Misrepresentations of scientific details are legion. Readers who studied biology in high school
may puzzle over the invocations of the male brain with its single “dose of X chromosome (there are
two Xs in a girl)”: is the author suggesting that Xchromosome dosage compensation is absent from
female brains? Is it an improvement to dispel the myth that testosterone is a “male hormone” only
to call it the “sex and aggression hormone”? (If each hormone needs a sound bite, “confidence
and sense of well-being hormone” might better fit the data.) Ironically, at the intracellular level,
much of the differentiation of the “testosterone formed male brain” is accomplished by oestrogens. Fostering such misleading metaphors may prevent broader understanding.

The text is rife with ‘facts’ that do not exist in the supporting references. A typical example
is the claim that young boys “physically cannot hear” the cues in the intonation of adult human
female voices that girls can, “just as bats can hear sounds that even cats and dogs cannot”.
The references provided (including a paper on songbird brains) require major misunderstanding
or misrepresentation to be twisted into such a statement, a state of affairs that is repeated
throughout the book.

Like other popular books on the biology of human nature, The Female Brain has a rigid plot
line: the foil of ‘political correctness’ against which the author wages a struggle for truth.
We are told that the media, feminists, pointyheaded intellectuals and a vaguely specified
‘culture’ dogmatically insist that gender or racial differences in personality and behaviour are
entirely cultural, an observation that is hard to reconcile with the volume and tone of media
attention to the biology of gender and sexuality.

Such assertions require empirical support. This genre loves to dwell on childhood toy
preferences: little girls cradle inanimate, ‘boycoded’ objects as if they were baby dolls (here,
as is often the case, it’s a fire engine); and little boys turn harmless objects into weapons (our
favourite is the boy who bites his toast into a gun in Deborah Blum’s Sex on the Brain (Allen Lane,
1997)). The emphasis on myth-busting turns into a vehicle for dressing the myth up in new
clothes—such as Simon Baron-Cohen’s recent hypothesis that the ‘male brain’ is hard-wired for
‘systematizing’, and the ‘female brain’ is hardwired for ‘empathizing’—there is no shortage of
pseudo-scientific ways of saying ‘thinkers’ and‘feelers’. The problem with such explanations
of sex differences is not that they are overly biological, but that they are fundamentally
non-biological and explain nothing.

Ultimately, this book, like others in its genre, is a melodrama. Common beliefs are recast as
imperilled and then saved. Stark, predictable protagonists (an initial “cast of neuro-hormone
characters” that reads like a guide to astrological signs) interact linearly with foreseeable results.
The melodrama obscures how biology matters; neither hormones nor brains are pink or blue.
Our attempts to understand the biology of human behaviour cannot move forward until we
try to explain things as they are, not as we would like them to be.

So, a girl who has everything in pink will soon say pink is her favourite colour because that's what she's learnt not because there's a 'pink gene' IYSWIM.

That's interesting.

My daughter's had a nursery and babygrows in white and Winnie the pooh or a mix of colours. They were speaking by the time they had their own bedroom. One wanted a pink bedroom, the other a yellow bedroom, when asked what they wanted. Later the one who liked pink decided she wanted blue and the next time white. The one that liked yellow to begin with had purple and then white as bedroom colours.

I noticed on the high street marketing trends did change from neutral coloured prams, car seats and so forth and there was a push in younger children to have a pink pram, bottle, breaker, bib and so forth for a girl and so forth.

Back to the brains, what does it matter?

I want to feel safe in spaces where I am vulnerable and I want others to feel the same.

'Male and female brains are definetely different. Biologically this was essential when we were hunter gatherers with different roles.
What these differences mean is that there are certain things that males find easier and certain things that females find easier and there are differences between the requirements of boys and girls that need to be considered.'

This is a. bollocks and b. not what the OP asked. The OP asked about the scientific consensus.

Also, I put the link up for the OP, so there's no need to apologise.

OP, you might find this interesting. It is about how scientific reports on the topic are misinterpreted by the media and the public:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4212998/

Sorry almond can't do the link at the moment.
Male and female brains are definetely different. Biologically this was essential when we were hunter gatherers with different roles.
What these differences mean is that there are certain things that males find easier and certain things that females find easier and there are differences between the requirements of boys and girls that need to be considered.
This doesn't mean that men and women/ boys and girls can't do the same things but will find them more difficult on average e.g.boys find sitting still harder than girls, girls find verbal communication easier than boys.

Iirc, Baron-cohen has an idea that autism is some kind of extreme male brain.

Also, testosterone isn't the only hormone linked to aggression.

Delusions of Gender is brilliant, definitely worth the read. I think there may be a few innate differences but much, much more overlap than we're generally led to believe. Plus, our brains are being moulded from birth. So, a girl who has everything in pink will soon say pink is her favourite colour because that's what she's learnt not because there's a 'pink gene' IYSWIM.

I keep linking to this video...