The neuroscientist shattering the myth of the gendered brain

[DancelikeEmmaGoldman]

“Neuroscientist Gina Rippon has been ruffling some feathers with her research that is shattering the myth of the gendered brain.

Her work reveals how brains reflect the life they have lived, not the sex of their owners. And that there is no consistent evidence that shows fundamental differences between the brains of men and women. In other words, there is no such thing as the male or female brain.”

“So there is no consistent part of the brain or network we have currently been able to measure that establishes whether a brain is from a man or a woman. That’s the key thing that surprises people because they assume differences are there.”

“The type of games you play will change your brain. We know that from judo and juggling to violin and keyboard playing. By definition, moving the body differently according to the demands of the skill you are acquiring will change the brain. So not playing football will have a direct effect on the brain. But making sure we are doing the right things to stay part of our social group is also an important driver.

“Our brains are gathering the rules of behaviour and if those rules are gendered, then our brains will make us gendered.

“It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some research may find differences, but then you say, ‘have you looked at the education level of those participants, have they been at school for the same amount of time, have you looked at the sports they play or their occupation?’ To which the answer is always ‘no’. So how do you know what you are finding is a sex difference and not an excludence difference.”

www.cambridgeindependent.co.uk/whats-on/amp/the-neuroscientist-shattering-the-myth-of-the-gendered-brain-9086242/?fbclid=IwAR1hvQ5pz71elbRfv0sgCxZ-4zt0HhjrdzH4pA5ms0ZkuCZQzSYfAc5JVtc&__twitter_impression=true

She also makes the point as others have that there's more variation in terms of brains within a sex than between the sexes.

How is this really relevant though? It's true of many things where we understand there are real differences in the population as a whole, but also significant individual clarification. It's the scientific equivalent of class analysis.

She also makes the point as others have that there's more variation in terms of brains within a sex than between the sexes.

How is this really relevant though?

because unfortunately 'women tend to be like this' often gets translated into 'all women are like this'

that's why the conversation gets so fraught

Goosefoot, I suppose class analysis is one way to think about it. But in more scientific detail it's down to a statistical measure called the d-value - the difference between means of two populations divided by the square root of the product of the standard deviations. Graphically, it tells you how much the "bell curves" for the two populations overlap.

Lise Elliott's book Pink Brain, Blue Brain is good on this. For physical differences like height or time to run a mile or how far you can throw a shot put (of the same weight, for the sake of argument) there's overlap between the two distributions but they look quite distinct - see attached figure. For height, for e.g. the d-value is round about 2.

Insofar as people have measured cognitive differences in experiments which are (a) statistically significant (crudely put, large enough sample size that you have some confidence that what you're looking at isn't an accident) and (b) reasonably robust across different studies (other scientists can replicate your results using slightly different methodologies, for example), two things emerge.

One is that the d-values for cognitive differences (where they can be found at all) are tiny - typically less than 0.5.

The second is that the brain is an amazingly plastic organ in early childhood in particular (but right into adulthood - see for example changes in brain structure in cabbies doing the "knowledge", or recovery from stroke where a different part of the brain takes over some of the lost functions, or congenital blindness where the auditory system takes over part of what would have developed as the visual cortex in children without sight loss, enabling deaf children to build spatial maps from auditory input - the brain really is a fabulous organ). This plasticity means there is in principle no experiment or test you could design which would separate nature and nurture - and we know from a variety of studies across psychology, linguistics, sociology... that the ways in which male and female children are treated in our society starts from infancy. So even where you can find a small difference in the distributions (maybe the age a toddler first acquires a vocabulary of 50 words varies between sexes, or the age at which they can count to 100, or whatever) you just can't tell whether that's because girls and boys are intrinsically different or whether it's because the adults around them treat them differently.

because unfortunately 'women tend to be like this' often gets translated into 'all women are like this'

I understand this, but I really think it has no place in how we determine scientific questions.

This plasticity means there is in principle no experiment or test you could design which would separate nature and nurture - and we know from a variety of studies across psychology, linguistics, sociology... that the ways in which male and female children are treated in our society starts from infancy.

Yes, that's what the author is arguing, but it doesn't particularly represent the scientific consensus. That's not to say she surely is wrong, but people here seem to consistently present her work as if it is somehow worth more than that of other researchers in the same area of study.

I understand this, but I really think it has no place in how we determine scientific questions.

Doesn’t mean it’s not sensible to point out the range of variation within the sexes, to help people avoid falling into that trope

I found Kevin Mitchell did a balanced critique of Gina Rippon's assertions.

aeon.co/essays/the-gender-wars-will-end-only-with-a-synthesis-of-research

One is that the d-values for cognitive differences (where they can be found at all) are tiny

Not surprising at all, if referring to "cognition" as reasoning, learning, etc.

But "brain" encompasses a lot more than that, including personality, sexual orientation, sexuality, preferred activities etc. These areas are where the real (population averaged) differences are to be found, and where other neuroscientists disagree with Rippon. This is not a settled area of science, and in my opinion, it's best to keep an open mind about it.

Barbara what a good explanation!

I understand this, but I really think it has no place in how we determine scientific questions.

What do you think determines which scientific questions we should be asking? Scientists, and the people who fund them, choose to study all sorts of areas for all sorts of reasons. All scientists are biased. But they should try to overcome that bias in their work.

This is from the article Nonny posted about Gina Rippon:

She provides compelling evidence that much of the historical research in this area has been (and, in some cases, continues to be) driven by an overtly or implicitly sexist agenda, intent on finding scientific proof of female inferiority.

I imagine DNA testing brain cells would be the only definitive way to tell.

Experience creates physical structure and growth, and it starts from the beginning, with the newborn baby's brain.

I saw a graphic showing the difference between the brain scans of children from abusive neglected backgrounds and children from loving nurturing backgrounds. Sizes were remarkably different.

I bought the book at the same time as Invisible Women - I think it's time to read it!

And yet, what all that motivated research has shown is that intelligence and cognition is extremely similar between the sexes, so that no one knowledgeable now has a case for the sort of sexist tropes that used to be accepted folk wisdom. So that's a positive development even though some of the researchers may have had biased motivations. The science wins out in the end.

@kesstrel it’s my understanding IQ pretty much averages out amongst the sexes. Although I saw a paper that was not actually refuted, but politically buried that presented the GMVH (greater male variability hypothesis). Which found that only a slight variation produces effects at the extremes: female IQ clusters around the average whereas men occupy more spots at the extreme top and extreme bottom.

This potentially explains several things like: why more women achieve passing grades or higher at college, why there are more men in prison (low IQ correlated with violence and criminal behaviour and lastly why 75% of professorships are held by men, and there are more men represented on boards of companies (IQ also correlates with income and professional success).

This paper got suppressed mostly I suspect because of the third conclusion as it speaks against the narrative that it is systemic sexism that is the biggest barrier to women’s success.

Obviously the paper doesn’t even touch upon the nature/nurture debate though people will try to shoe horn it in when it shouldn’t be. It does however perhaps expose that the positive discrimination strategies in favour of getting better female representation in the upper echelons of academia and business are not going to work, and indeed as experiments in Scandinavian countries have born out the opposite of what proponents of these strategies predicted, in that when given the levellest of playing fields the gaps between men and women widen when women have access to more choices.

In case anyone feels I am arguing against women here my personal lean on this subject was settled 2000 years ago when Socrates argued that whatever differences that do exist between men and women are so minor that should be no barrier to women accessing the same opportunities that men have historically enjoyed. However I do feel it is probably important to be looking in the right places to close any gaps.

The greater variability hypothesis is an interesting one from a personal perspective.

My undergraduate tutor (female) campaigned long and hard for blind marking in physics finals. Received wisdom was that women were bright-ish plodders who got 2.1s; men were geniuses or duffers and got 1sts or 3rds. Pre blind marking, the results seemed to confirm this.

Post introduction of blind marking, the discrepancy disappeared. Suddenly women started getting 1sts in the same proportion as men