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May 15, 2021 09:34 pm

Analyzing 30 Years of Brain Research Finds No Meaningful Differences Between Male and Female Brains

"As a neuroscientist long experienced in the field, I recently completed a painstaking analysis of 30 years of research on human brain sex differences..." reports Lise Eliot in a recent article on The Conversation. "[T]here's no denying the decades of actual data, which show that brain sex differences are tiny and swamped by the much greater variance in individuals' brain measures across the population." Bloomberg follows up:In 2005, Harvard's then president Lawrence Summers theorized that so few women went into science because, well, they just weren't inherently good at it. "Issues of intrinsic aptitude," Summers said, such as "overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability" kept many women out of the field... "I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong," Summers said back in 2005. Well, sixteen years later, it appears his wish came true. In a new study published in in the June edition of Neuroscience & Behavioral Reviews, Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at Rosalind Franklin University, analyzed 30 years' worth of brain research (mostly fMRIs and postmortem studies) and found no meaningful cognitive differences between men and women. Men's brains were on average about 11% larger than women's — as were their hearts, lungs and other organs — because brain size is proportional to body size. But just as taller people aren't any more intelligent than shorter people, neither, Eliot and her co-authors found, were men smarter than women. They weren't better at math or worse at language processing, either. 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. "Another way to think about it is every individual brain is a mosaic of circuits that control the many dimensions of masculinity and femininity, such as emotional expressiveness, interpersonal style, verbal and analytic reasoning, sexuality and gender identity itself," Eliot's original article had stated. "Or, to use a computer analogy, gendered behavior comes from running different software on the same basic hardware."

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