As The Toast searches for its one true Gal Scientist, we will be running a ton of wonderful one-off pieces by female scientists of all shapes and sizes and fields and education levels, which we are sure you will enjoy. They’ll live here, so you can always find them.
Ladies, we are the weaker sex. At least that’s the message we’re getting from corporate America: we have tiny lady hands requiring special lady pens, dainty lady ears needing special lady earplugs, and fun-size appetites calling out for special lady candy bars. And did you know that we have little lady brains to match? They’re 10% smaller than a male brain. As Ron Burgundy declared: It’s science.
Every once in awhile, a clueless politician, lazy journalist, or well-intentioned Harvard University president mentions the difference between male and female brains as “scientific proof” of some sexist stereotype. Larry Summers asserted that lady brains are why women don’t go into science and math fields. News headlines declare that “WOMEN/MEN ARE HARDWIRED FOR X,” where x is a stereotype: women are hardwired for empathy, while men are hardwired to chase 20-something women! And as a backlash to the sexism, there’s always then a group of people who deny those differences in service of the idea that the sexes are equal.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. There are real differences between male and female brains, but those differences don’t have any inherent meaning. Take brain size, for instance – though it is true that male brains are bigger, that doesn’t mean they’re better. If that were true, we’d be submitting to our elephant and whale overlords. It’s not that absolute size of the brain that matters – it’s how big a brain is relative to the body it’s in. Human brains are much bigger relative to our bodies than most others animals’, and that’s thought to be the reason we have language, fire, and the internet. Relative brain size also explains why the male brain tends to be bigger than the female brain: male bodies are, on average, 15% bigger, so it makes sense that male brains are also larger.
Size is not the only difference between male and female brains. Studies have found that the brain’s structure differs by sex. Again, science, but that doesn’t stop people from making up a meaning. Recently, a study found female brains have more activity across the two hemispheres of the brain, while male brains generally have more activity within a single hemisphere. Those results gave way to some shady speculation: that men are hardwired for map reading while women are hardwired for multi-tasking. That interpretation of the data was widely criticized as unwarranted; many scientists believe that female brains have more cross-hemisphere communication due to its size, not because it’s housed inside a woman. Plus, it’s difficult if not impossible to determine whether brain function is responsible for improving skills as specific as map reading.
Another study found sex differences in brain tissue. Female brains have higher proportions of white matter, while male brains had higher proportions of grey matter. (Grey matter is the meat of the brain, where information is processed; white matter is the fatty tissue that allows for quicker communication between grey matter areas). Again, this was used as fodder to support stereotypes: one of the study’s authors speculated this could be why men are good at “local processing” tasks like math, whereas women are good at tasks that involve lots of parts of the brain, like language. However, this is another difference where sex may not be the primary difference; studies have found that overall brain size or individual differences play more of a role than sex.
Scientists’ sexist speculations – like those from the study author above – have led scientists to call out “neurosexism”: misinterpretations of data that support gender roles and stereotypes, even when the science isn’t sound. Scientists may have a sworn dedication to objectivity, but that doesn’t magically grant them objectivity. Science doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and like any other person, scientists are just as capable of buying into traditional gender roles, falling prey to biases, or harboring sexist beliefs. (For an example of how old school the ivory tower can be, consider that the experiences and brains of trans people are rarely included in these discussions of sex differences and gender stereotypes.)
While “hardwired” brain differences would be a convenient explanation for gender stereotypes, they’re not necessarily accurate. At birth, there are few differences between male and female brains. As those tiny brains live their lives and grow into adult brains, differences occur over time. Raw genetics do play a role – for instance, they’re responsible for releasing hormones, especially during puberty (thanks for my awkward years, genes!) – but scientists have long known that experiences can alter the structure and function of a brain. If you’re encouraged to play sports, your hand-eye coordination will improve; the cerebellum, used for motor control, is larger in basketball players and musicians. If you’re expected to navigate, you’ll have better map reading skills and sense of direction; the hippocampus, used for navigation and spatial awareness, is larger in London cab and bus drivers. If you’re encouraged to be aware of other people’s needs and feelings, you’re going to get better at reading people; people who were trained to be more compassionate showed changes in areas of the brain used for empathy and understanding others. It’s not about biological sex; it’s about practice.
Experience also plays a big role in how children learn to talk. We know that infants who hear more language from parents are quicker to reach language milestones, like saying their first word. And it’s also no secret that we treat girls and boys differently: a recent study found that parents speak to daughters more than to sons. Put those two facts together and it shouldn’t be surprising that girl toddlers often begin talking before boy toddlers. Still, many point to girls’ precocious language skills as evidence that girls are “hardwired” to be social. Language is just one area in which gendered treatment affects brain growth and development; imagine how a lifetime of differences in how boys and girls are treated could add up to change a brain’s trajectory!
Even if sex differences are actually “hardwired,” there’s no reason to expect those differences to persist into adulthood. For instance, some studies have found that young girls “naturally” prefer playing with dolls while boys prefer trucks. Scientists think hormones play a big role in these preferences – girls with atypically high levels of testosterone prefer trucks. Studies like this are often used as a justification for why fewer women go into science and math fields in college. It’s biological – ladies just aren’t naturally interested in all that science stuff! But the preferences kids start out with aren’t usually the ones they have for life. Think about all the stuff you liked as a kid that you don’t care for anymore. (On my list: spray cheese, bologna, and Polly Pockets.) We should be encouraging kids to try new things, regardless of their “natural” preferences.
So even if ladies do tend to have little brains with more white matter and cross-hemispheric activity, that doesn’t mean we’re doomed to a life of shying away from math and multi-tasking. Biology is not destiny, and brain differences are a poor excuse for sexist tropes.
Tags: feminism, gal science, jane c hu, science, what is brain
This is literally the most sensible thing I have ever read.
Wait, if men’s bodies are 15% larger than women’s on average, but their brains are only 10% larger, doesn’t that mean that women’s brains are larger relative to body size?
I was just wondering the same thing!
I have found that my fiance is right about something 5% of the time more than I am, so this squares with my reality.
I’ve legit met birds I considered more practical and empathic than the average human being, and they weigh almost nothing, so I dunno if we can overstate the brain mass/body mass ratio
Ever since I read The Brain That Changes Itself, “hardwired” in relation to human psychology has been one of those words that makes me stop paying attention and respect the person saying it less, like “females.”
I’ve never read that book, but I took a neuroscience course as part of my major (which was otherwise not neuroscience) in college and came away with the exact same prejudice. If you’re referring to brains as being “hard” anything, you don’t know how brains work.
brain plasticity! sometimes I imagine (…playfully, not for real) that we exist because an alien civilization developed massive cosmo-weapons but couldn’t learn to use them, and so seeded a planet with what’d become a species that could self-integrate with any machine after a few months of dedicated use
This sounds like a super amazing YA book (not because it is childish, because YA is my favorite)!
Even just reading the word ‘females’ legit made my eye twitch.
Scientists may have a sworn dedication to objectivity, but that doesn’t magically grant them objectivity.
DEAR ALL MALE SCIENTISTS, ARE YOU LISTENING???
(I know the answer is “no,” but humor me.)
But… but I, a male scientist, have a sworn dedication to objectivity. That means that anything I think or say must be objective, and anyone disagreeing with it is irrational, emotional, and probably hormonal. RIGHT???
My god, every day there are more and more studies about the incredible neuroplasticity potential of our brains, any article making sweeping generations about stuff being hardwired is silly.
“it’s how big a brain is relative to the body it’s in.”
So they still had absolutely no right to be surprised in “Deep Blue Sea”.
“This is literally the most sensible thing I have ever read.”
Which, as we know, is often a liability.
Wonderful piece! I’m lucky in that I’m at a university where male faculty have this point of view, but man is it irritating when you see it in popular science writing. Now I have something to refer others to when they insist that ladies are just different because science.
In sum, you make good points but what exactly IS updog?
Great piece!
(I do like those special lady earplugs, tho…)
Something about trying to stuff things in one of the most sensitive orifices of my body does make me actually appreciate scaled product sizes. The pink is a little overmuch, though.
Awesome! Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine really opened my eyes to just how biased science reporting (and, sadly, some of the scientists) on this topic is. I hadn’t realized just how skewed the view we got through the popular press was before.
GREAT title.
Welp, I’m downloading that from amazon now.
Pink Brain Blue Brain by Lise Eliot is also really good on the subject.
+1, love this book
Came for the picture of Spock. Stayed for the science.
HE would.
“You could count on Leonard for that kind of thing”
*sniffle*
Always here for toast talk about brains. Excellent article! Most of the stuff mentioned here is human imaging data, but there’s the absurd fact that almost all behavioral experiments (and in some cases all experiments period) using model organisms are done in males (mainly because ladies are too complicated because of all their raging hormones).
Y U SO CRAZY?
We can’t trust those female mice, they’re SO irrational.
THIS is why we can’t have nice science.
(which isn’t to say there aren’t real and legitimate reasons to have well-matched cohorts and to control for sex, but the fact that accounting for the real difficulty of accounting for sex is often simplified to “well I guess we’ll just use all males and only males because it’s easier” can be problematic)
yes, there are legitimate reasons (and other reasons to exclusively use female animals) AND YET http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24456941
(article titled Female mice liberated for inclusion in neuroscience and biomedical research.)
And also that studies for drugs, etc often don’t include women, or older people, or people of different genders.
So doses and effectiveness are tested for, basically, middle aged white men. And if you’re anything else then you takes your chances.
Look, if we want to study lady mice, we’ll use lady mice. If we want to study ALL mice, we’ll use boy mice, because the masculine experience is just a universal one, right? You women, with your desire for niche science.
I have read that actually women are the most hormonally like men when menstruating. So saying women are irrational then is basically saying ‘and men are irrational always’
I don’t know if that’s good science but I’m into it.
Non Sequitur: I also ADORED Polly Pocket and it was 100% a choking hazard.
But only the old ones. None of this changing clothes nonsense. The house is supposed to fit in your pocket!
I think you mean The Old Ones.
I came down here to say the same thing, and also that the few times I have come across a Polly Pocket as an adult I have been charmed, so.
But madam, consider: your absurdly-named “smart phone” is tiny enough to fit in a pocket of your handbag, whereas the ENIAC electronic brain fills an entire warehouse! Is it not therefore self-evident which of the two calculating machines is the more powerful?
inherent brain sex theories, esp those based on evopsych, make me want to vom. i revel in anything that helps tear down such misconceptions, so thanks for this!
What does the “female” in “female brain” mean? I’m so here for dismantling myths of biological essentialism, but it’s important to keep in mind that not everyone with xx chromosomes, or an estrogen-based hormonal system, etc is a woman, and a “female brain” is a brain that a woman has, cis or trans.
My understanding is that “female” and “male” typically refers to sex, not gender– aka, the biological makeup of one’s reproductive organs. This is how the terms tend to be used in the behavioral and brain sciences, at least in my experience. Typically neuroimaging studies (like several cited here) have mostly or all cisgender participants. So by that definition, a “female brain” would be the brain of a women who was born biologically female and raised as a girl/woman– her brain’s size and makeup are the result of a combination of genetics and socialization, and would therefore be different than a “male” brain, a trans man brain, or a trans woman brain (with the HUGE caveat that there also giant individual differences within each category). I’m not aware of any research on transgender brains (sadly), but hopefully we’ll get there soon!
also, apologies if that sounded scientist-splain-y. I tend to nerd out when I think about the intersection of genetics and environment and their effects on the brain.
sex is also constructed.
the more appropriate (or not ciscentrist term) to use would be male-assigned or female assigned – or if it is more accurately represented by hormonal load, it could be specified by noting the type of hormones that lead to those brain developments, potentially.
the phrase “born biologically female” is pretty problematic.
also, a google search yielded this: http://press.endocrine.org/doi/full/10.1210/jcem….
there are lots of studies that include trans women/men/non-binary people
there’s a rad zine on the neurobiological etiology of transsexuality by imogen binnie but i dunno how to get it online…
this is also by her http://www.keepyourbridgesburning.com/2012/11/sex…
Very interesting, thanks for sharing the links! Yeah, the terms are for sure super ciscentric, and I’m clearly not an expert in this area. What would be better than “born biologically female?” Assigned female at birth?
AFAB would be a good way of saying it.
Or even better, just saying exactly what it is they studies are studying, which are the brains of cis men and cis women. Or drop in a “so-called female brain (i.e. the hypothetical average of the brains of cis women)” to drive in the point about how ridiculous biological essentialism really is.
Totally down with this article, but can I be super nitpicky for a moment? The observational studies that examine basketball players, musicians, taxi drivers, etc., cannot assess causality. The compassion training, a randomized controlled experiment, is a more targeted demonstration of the point.
First things first, thanks for writing this.
Second, it may be unintentional but this article has great timing. There’s been a slow-brewing controversy over British chess grandmaster Nigel Short saying men are “hardwired” to be better at chess than women (link: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/20/nige…. It’s total bullshit, obviously, but boy is he doubling down on it.
(For the record, Short played against Judit Polgar, a woman, fellow grandmaster, and one of the best to ever play the game. She wiped the floor with him.)
AFAB would be a good way of saying it.
Or even better, just saying exactly what it is they studies are studying, which are the brains of cis men and cis women. Or drop in a "so-called female brain (i.e. the hypothetical average of the brains of cis women)" to drive in the point about how ridiculous biological essentialism really is.
Nothing intelligent to add, just that I loved this, and I love that articles debunking neurosexism are becoming more widely read and shared.
How to understand women who believe in neurosexism? I know someone who’s successful and accomplished in her (sciency) field and who would never accept being told she was less than a man professionally, but who still buys into the ‘my boyfriend’s better at parking cos SCIENCE’ type of line. It’s weird, I feel like saying ‘why would you espouse a belief that undermines your own success?’ But then she’s kind of a ‘I don’t need feminism’ sort of person too so maybe she’s just beyond hope haha. Still, I’ll never understand women who are professionally successful and accomplished and can still be anti-feminist. The cognitive dissonance gives me nausea.
Because if the problem is that brains are different, she’s succeeded due to luck and hard work, and if the problem is sexism, she’s succeeded due to the careful efforts of thousands of other people, and she is obligated to pass that effort to the next generation. Laziness: the easiest way to resolve dissonance.
Well put!
I want to forcibly download this article to the brain of every person who works for Cosmo.
I like all of this, of course, but especially the comment about how some of the observed differences might be more to do with the significant difference in average body sizes between males and females than with anything hormonal. we definitely rush to tag differing results as the product of the most obvious/traditional difference in causes. “men and women are different” is such an easy thought to have that it’s difficult even to think of “big people and little people are different.”
and now I want a window on a world where instead of sexism being the defining feature of society it’s sizeism. mostly the same, except history is full of unusually giant women taking over nations for a generation.
I love this so much: “Scientists may have a sworn dedication to objectivity, but that doesn’t magically grant them objectivity. Science doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and like any other person, scientists are just as capable of buying into traditional gender roles, falling prey to biases, or harboring sexist beliefs.”
I’ve had some percolating feelings about science lately — obviously I am pro-science, logic, reason, etc — but I have a family member who is so obnoxiously pro-science that any time he doesn’t immediately empathize/agree with something on a gut level, he starts demanding stats, data, “proof.” For example, if I were to say, “yeah, a lot of women are having X issue with X medication” he’d go, where’s the data? Not that the science isn’t useful, but the science not existing yet (or science/money for the science not being interested) doesn’t mean it’s not happening, and while anecdata =/= proof, willfully ignoring many voices saying something is happening is also pretty bunk.
ANYWAY. All of this to say, awesome post, and you articulated something I hadn’t been able to find words for, so thanks.
I can’t remember the study, if someone has a link to it, but I remember reading the results of a toy-choice experiment: with the scientists present in the room, small children will choose ‘gender appropriate’ toys, or the ‘appropriate colour’ one (a pink car, for instance), but when observed from a fake mirror, their selection was incredibly more vast. That is, children understand extremely early the subtle (or not-so-subtle) rewards and punishments for sticking to their gendered categories, but their curiosity extends beyond that.
Which makes sense, because WTF girls ‘naturally’ like dolls and boys ‘naturally’ like trucks? Both of these objects (even extending the ‘truck’ category to ‘mobile contraption’ have existed for half a blink of an eye in human evolution! That’s just not how behavioural selection works…
THIS!
Where was this a week ago when my friend said “You’re not gonna believe DOCTORS’ and SCIENTISTS’ decisions about what women can and can’t do [physically]??”
Well, no, not off the bat just like that.
I’m a nanny currently working with one boy and one girl baby, and it is ASTONISHING how differently people treat babies based on their perceived gender, without realizing or questioning it at all. I’m actively trying not to, and I still do it. (I tell myself it doesn’t help that girl baby is 2mos behind boy baby, so is actually littler/more fragile, but honestly I can’t be sure I’d be doing any better if they were actually twins. That shit is ingrained.) Boy baby gets his hair ruffled, gets picked up and tossed around, gets spoken to in a normal register, and ignored/laughed at when he yells for no reason. Girl baby gets her cheeks stroked, gets gently held and hugged, gets spoken to more and in a higher register, and gets shushing or concerned faces when she yells for no reason. WHY DO WE EVEN GIVE BABIES GENDERS. all they do is eat and poop? But we are so conditioned to immediately assign babies gender, and see everything they do through a gender binary lens, that it’s no wonder boy and girl babies develop differently. We’ve been treating them differently from the moment they were born.
RIGHT like, if it’s super duper important to someone what bits a baby has in its pants, I AM CONCERNED.
And they are babies, so it’s 100% about the bits in their pants. It may well be that that baby ‘boy’ is trans and actually a girl, or genderfluid, they’re not old enough to know even if we could ask them.