Pink Brain, Blue Brain: What Really Separates Men and Women

Summary

The discussion, hosted by the Aspen Institute, delves into the complexities of gender differences in neuroscience, guided by Lisa Elliot, a professor of neuroscience. The talk centers on debunking myths of significant biological brain differences between men and women, emphasizing the impact of socialization and cultural expectations. It challenges the idea of essentialist views, often touted in pop culture and some scientific circles, asserting that our brains are largely similar. The conversation also explores how these misconceptions reinforce existing societal structures and gender inequalities, urging a shift towards addressing social and experiential factors over assumed hardwired differences.

Highlights

• The myth of distinct 'male' and 'female' brains is debunked - our brains are mostly similar. 🧠
• Gender stereotypes are often based on minor differences and reinforce inequality. 🚻
• Societal expectations shape experiences significantly, altering perceived gender differences. 👀
• Testosterone is not the sole cause of aggression differences between men and women; it's more nuanced. 🔬
• Real change in gender perceptions requires addressing inequality politically and culturally. ✊

Key Takeaways

• Men and women have similar brain structures; variations are minimal and not indicative of distinct male or female brains. 🤯
• Socialization plays a significant role in perceived gender differences, more so than biology. 👥
• There's a need to shift focus from 'hardwired' gender differences to societal influences and power dynamics. 🔄
• The persistent quest for gender differences often reflects and reinforces existing stereotypes and power structures. 💥
• Challenging these stereotypes and promoting equality can reveal more similarities than differences between genders. 🌈

Overview

The talk kicks off with Lisa Elliot, who shares her journey from studying neuroplasticity to exploring gender differences in neuroscience. As a mother, she grew curious about these topics after observing her children's development and the assumptions people make about hardwired differences between boys and girls. Her exploration highlighted the minimal innate differences between male and female brains, compared to common gender stereotypes.

The conversation shifts to how the societal desire for distinct gender roles and characteristics continues to distort scientific findings. Anecdotes and historical examples reveal how science has been misused to justify gender inequality. The speakers argue that the minimal differences found in brain studies are often exaggerated, fueling misconceptions and maintaining gender hierarchies.

As the session closes, the emphasis is placed on the importance of socialization and challenging existing structures to understand true gender similarities and differences. The call to action is clear: address inequality politically and culturally to foster genuine gender equity and discard outdated beliefs about innate gender disparities in capability or behavior.

Pink Brain, Blue Brain: What Really Separates Men and Women Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 so we are gonna try and you know how academics think you know you sort of have a statement in it and the first thing in academics says what is well it's a little more complicated than that that's this session we are going to talk about I'm gonna have Lisa Elliot introduce herself we're gonna talk about some of her work as a neuroscientist and her book which is a fabulous book called pink brain blue brain and and we're gonna talk a little bit about what the
• 00:30 - 01:00 science tells us and what it doesn't tell us and so I think why don't you introduce yourself so we're gonna talk about biological differences between women and men and we're going to talk about the politics of the of those questions and how we think about them hi everybody thanks for coming my name is Lisa Elliot and I'm a professor of neuroscience at Chicago Medical School of rosalind Franklin University and if
• 01:00 - 01:30 you don't know rosalind Franklin she's a extremely important figure in the in the history of science and women in science so we're very proud of that so I started my career poking electrodes into brain cells and trying to understand how we learn so I didn't start working on sex or gender at all I was more curious about something we call neuroplasticity how the brain changes as a result of experience and when I first started in this field nobody knew this word plasticity now you
• 01:30 - 02:00 can barely open the health pages of a newspaper about how to keep your brain young through neuroplasticity well I started having babies and started writing books not nearly as many as Michael but I've written a couple of books and the first book it's called what's going on in there about how the brain and mind develop in the first five years and I was able to take my knowledge of both the nature and the nurture side of the equation to talk about early development and you know how
• 02:00 - 02:30 what's important in brain wiring and how that affects children's later cognitive emotional abilities well along the way you come across a lot of studies of gender difference and I started having girls and boys I had a daughter and then two sons and like most parents you become very curious and I unfortunately most parents we see these we see differences because we live in a very gender binary world I'm sure we're going to talk a lot about that and and we the kind of default
• 02:30 - 03:00 assumption is that these differences are hardwired that we see differences in boys and girls and must be all evolution and brain wiring well so I started writing the book and I was really rather shocked to see that what we neuroscientists know about brain sex differences is is this big and it's not for lack of trying I mean it turns out the the brain is a unisex organ male
• 03:00 - 03:30 brains and female brains are not much different from each other than male hearts and female hearts and male kidneys and female kidneys but when you're talking about gender differences we really have to take a developmental perspective and the plasticity part of the equation has really been left out largely in terms of how brain sex evolved so well great so this is a terrific introduction and let me so let me let me give you a little anecdote because I believe that right now look
• 03:30 - 04:00 Mic Check okay so I I actually think that our default position as a culture has often been a kind of essentialist idea that women and men are from different planets Mars and Venus that we are completely hardwired to be completely different and and so one thing as I'm a social scientist right so as a social scientist I always question the parents who say well I have one boy and one girl they're completely different see because that's it that's
• 04:00 - 04:30 too small a sample but but my students so when I start my classes every year when I teach a course on sociology of gender with the following with with the following little experiment because I think we believe that we believe in gender different essential gender difference but I actually believe that we don't really believe it so here's what I do I ask my students you know the kind of human continuum expect a questions like okay array yourself on a
• 04:30 - 05:00 continuum from really strongly disagree to really strongly agree and then we'll sort of see where the class it sort of falls out so the first question I ask is apart from Anatomy there really aren't any differences between women and men there's really nothing inherently feminine nor inherently masculine and as you could probably predict my students are way on the strongly disagree side completely disagree with that I say fine so what are those differences within 10
• 05:00 - 05:30 seconds the class has completely achieved consensus that it is testosterone that men and women are different because men are more violent and more aggressive and the cause of that violence of aggression is testosterone I say ok fine so that's where you are so answer this question for me again same continuum peace is a gender issue if women were running things there would be less risk of violence in war now logically you might
• 05:30 - 06:00 be saying to yourselves right now well then they would certainly agree with that given what they just said my students completely disagree with that - isn't that interesting so I say well why well I mean it's logical that you'd say look if you woke up tomorrow morning seriously think about this for a moment if you woke up tomorrow morning and there was a woman in charge of every single local national state trans national political institution would you sleep better at night okay so you would
• 06:00 - 06:30 be on the agree side so I am but I asked them and they say no no whoever occupies that position has to be willing to be aggressive and put their finger on that button what about Golda Meir what about Indira Gandhi what about Margaret Thatcher what about Hillary Clinton so I say to them so what you're saying to me now despite the essential differences is that the person who occupies the position is that
• 06:30 - 07:00 the position is more important than the gender of the person who occupies it and they say absolutely and I say welcome to social science so that's what I mean but when I believe that our essentialism our belief in these in these biological differences is actually what I call soft essentialism we don't really believe it we believe it when it's convenient to not engage with the topic and then we don't believe it when it's convenient to not engage with the topic I think we're scared of this I don't think we really know what we're
• 07:00 - 07:30 gonna find so so I'm hoping that you Lise are going to be able to tell us actually from the position and one of the things being a social scientists I don't read neuroscience very often this is a really readable book so it was very helpful to me so help us through this what are the differences what are the difference yes are there any and right what are they so you know we neuroscience is a relatively new science but but not I've been at this for 25
• 07:30 - 08:00 years so it's not as new if it was when I started and especially since we've had brain imaging everybody knows about MRI and then functional MRI which is where you're able to put somebody in a in a brain scanner and give them a task say reading words or recognizing emotional expression and then look at where the changes in the blood flow happened we don't actually measure electrical activity directly with fMRI we measure changes in blood flow that are a
• 08:00 - 08:30 reflection of which part of the brains are active and so you've all seen these pictures and the newspaper of areas lighting up when we do things so this kind of research has been going on since the late 80s early 90s so we now have going on three decades of brain findings and in spite of this belief in a male brain and a female right even though the pop psychology sections of the bookstore you know you've got male brain and female brain men are from Mars Women are from Venus which is ultimately tried to
• 08:30 - 09:00 be linked to brain differences it turns out as I said that that the brain is a unisex organ we all have the same structures of Magdala hippocampus every gyrus is the same although biologists love this turn sexual dimorphism you know that's how we describe how evolution made the peacocks tail big and males and small through sexual selection dimorphism to shapes so unfortunately biologists being biologists and not
• 09:00 - 09:30 social science scientists any time they see a sex difference no matter how small and these differences really are quite quite small we're talking about 1% of the variance in we're talking about presence or absence of structure but 1% of the variance in the volume of the hippocampus is attributable to sex or gender and so these are very mmm they're minut according to one swedish researcher who studied a thousand brains
• 09:30 - 10:00 sex differences in the brain our minut and that is in adult brains too by the way so obviously men and women behave differently but neuroscientists have yet to find a single circuit that works differently that is wired differently we are wired the same there may be slight statistical differences and in fact the actual psychology of sex differences finds and this is the work of Janet Hyde and University of wisconsin-madison she
• 10:00 - 10:30 wrote this radical paper called the gender similarities hypothesis because most of our measures of of difference I mean aggression is actually one of the larger sex differences the average male is more aggressive than two-thirds of females but that also means one third of females are more aggressive than the average male these are not binary these are not dimorphism z are not different shapes and so there are there are slight statistical differences between men and
• 10:30 - 11:00 women's brain activity and certain measures and the issue is is it nature or nurture and we all kind of assume because the brain is biology that this is hardwired that this is nature if we see a sex difference in the brain and so the neuroscience of sex differences really reinforced this essentialism that I think we're gonna talk about when the fact is plasticity our brains wire up as a result of experience and this experience begins at the moment of birth
• 11:00 - 11:30 in terms of gender interactions because boys and girls we we interact with differently because we have different expectations so so really there is there is no male brain female brain absolutely not and in fact I mean the the fact that transgenderism is as common as it is proof how easy it is in a sense that we're where we have a spectrum okay so that's a big big a question but before before I get to sort of the politics question that it begs so what about the gay brain now we do know
• 11:30 - 12:00 from Simon Levay Simon Levay made the argument that one little tiny part of the anterior hypothalamus had something to do with sexual orientation or that at least with with sexual function so could you say a little bit about that you've heard you know this because this is some of these are really masterpieces of sort of problematic research yeah so this is one of them right and you know unlike most areas of biology I think
• 12:00 - 12:30 neuroscience is more vulnerable to to larger social forces and so Simon Levay is a gay out were out gay neuroscientist and he published a paper in 91 I think it was very small study published in science which is very high-profile and they found this tiny little nucleus in the ante now anterior hypothalamus itself is the size of a dime the anterior hypothalamus is is a tenth orientation and this nucleus which they
• 12:30 - 13:00 called this sexually dimorphic nucleus is literally 1/10 of a millimeter in diameter so you know picture of a pencil point a tenth of that and they found that it's larger in men than women and that much is true this has been replicated in science nowadays we must find replication because we're so we've discovered how biased we are in spite of our objective methods and it's very easy to find what you're looking for so I
• 13:00 - 13:30 don't believe anything unless it's been published by two three four independent laboratories so we do know this little tiny sdn sexually dimorphic nucleus is larger in males and females that's been replicated Levay had a study with gay men and straight men and straight women and that the the homosexual men had a Sdn about the same size as the women as the women however that was not replicated by independent groups and so even though it was the gay brain and it's got a lot of
• 13:30 - 14:00 press and I think he kind of wrote a whole book on it we don't believe anymore but to me as a social well but as a social scientist what was interesting is his study comes out in science and suddenly he's on the cover of Time Newsweek every single major magazine 60 minutes everybody covered it and to me again so I read I went and read the study and what was interesting of course now remember the size of this anterior hypothalamus in this particular nucleus in in gay men was the same size as women all of the gay men this is 1991 the study was done
• 14:00 - 14:30 in the late 80s all of the gay men had died of HIV in the late 80s when brains were were preserved they because of HIV in fear of an of contagion the the formaldehyde solution that they were preserved and was double the strength of the other brains now what is formaldehyde due to brains it removes the liquid that's how it preserves that drinks them right it drinks them so what you what I think the the National Institute for Health funded was a study
• 14:30 - 15:00 of the effect of the strength of formaldehyde on the ant under the nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus which we know now strengths it but I don't think it's so so this is one of those cases and and it and it brings up for me that we keep finding these things we keep looking for difference we keep finding it it keeps getting discredited in a way and yet we seem so eager to to find it I'll give you one sort of
• 15:00 - 15:30 historical example the best-selling book on education in in the 19th century was Edward C Clark's book sex and education came out in 1874 Edward C Clark was the first the first / full professor of education anywhere in the nation at Harvard and his books exited education made the following argument he argued that women going into higher education was a really bad idea because if women went to college their brains would get
• 15:30 - 16:00 bigger and heavier and their wombs would shrink now his evidence his evidence for this was that college-educated women had fewer children than non college-educated women he also found that in mental hospitals in the state of Massachusetts there were a higher percentage of college-educated women than non college-educated women but non college-educated men over college-educated men so you see not only
• 16:00 - 16:30 does it make your womb shrink but it also drives you mad so this now this this book went through 15 printings in the firm in the 19th century alone this was the single best-selling book now you have a guy at Google who writes in a manifesto he has a Jerry Maguire moment writes a manifesto about the differences between women and men at Google gets fired and is now the poster boy of
• 16:30 - 17:00 besieged men who feel that the workplace has been turned toward toward women and and and crazy feminist scientists who deny science I've been equated with a climate denier because because I challenge these claims about massive sex differences and so so so so tell us a little bit about the James Day more argument and tell us a little bit tell us a little bit about why it is that we seem so desperate to find differences
• 17:00 - 17:30 yeah please I mean you talked about the Clark and then these eruptions seem to happen periodically during on the dawn of women's suffrage in nineteen eighteen nineteen fifteen in the US we got suffrage in 1920 there were suddenly uh similar manifestos that appeared in the New York Times by of all people Charles Dana who's a big figure in the history of neurology there's a Dana foundation that funds a lot of research in
• 17:30 - 18:00 neuroscience and so I was pretty shocked to discover that he wrote this letter to the New York Times backing the group that was anti-suffrage based on differences in men and women's brains and although men's brains are ten percent larger than with and that's usually the thing that keeps bringing this topic back over and over you know since the 18th century what what Dana focused on for some reason was the spinal cord that women's narrow spinal cord somehow impeded rational judgment and decision-making
• 18:00 - 18:30 but anyway somehow why because it's there because I mean it's you know just like the womb anything again and you know damar actually the so this has been the latest surge we had the Larry Summers debacle in 2005 and then Dame or actually didn't talk about the brain in his manifesto but he did talk about testosterone he said you know these differences and he talked about
• 18:30 - 19:00 psychological differences and he particularly focused on neuroticism so females are more neurotic females are more agreeable females are less status oriented and this was the rationale for why women have not and will not achieve leadership at Google or any industry he didn't get into the math science stuff which is always which is what Larry Summers waded into but there certainly are people that believe that male brains
• 19:00 - 19:30 are better cut out for math and science and they always try to link it to testosterone so I'll tell you testosterone does have effects on behavior it does contribute to aggression in most animals and probably in humans as well but it's just a tilt it's just a tipping point and furthermore the pure testosterone at puberty which is where you really see the big differences in male/female aggression are completely uncorrelated with testosterone levels this is work of
• 19:30 - 20:00 John Archer right Lancaster they have looked at this at every possible dimension and I have struggled to find a correlation within males between testosterone level and aggression and furthermore the aggression thing is really complex I'm sure you're familiar with domestic partner aggression and within couples females are actually are likely or to assault than males or at least this was also from archers data that that within couples
• 20:00 - 20:30 there's actually quite a bit probably because males are have learned that there's a much greater cost if they physically aggress against a female let me I'm gonna comment on that yeah I'm gonna comment on that because they that data Marie Straus is research for example at that University New Hampshire has found that it this is a research that that looks at quote conflict tactics is the and if you ask a married couple have you ever used violence in
• 20:30 - 21:00 the course of your relationship an equal number of women and men will say yes however however that doesn't factor in severity frequency who initiated it whether the violence was aggressive or defensive that is to say a woman using violence to protect her children from the violence of the father and so and if you factor those in then it begins to skew a lot toward what we already know about violence against women more than that it only looks at intact married
• 21:00 - 21:30 couples so if you look at divorced couples for example you know nearly a hundred percent of the violence is men to women if you look at post-relationship stalking etc if you look at sexual assault which it also doesn't ask rape it also excused so heavily toward males so if you actually factor all those things in it looks like the what we thin the point is everybody's competitive and everybody's aggressive and you don't need you don't
• 21:30 - 22:00 need to say its equivalent in order to say that right we find we have different strategies for doing it I think physical aggression works better for males because they're physically larger and relational aggression works better for females as anyone who ever lived through middle school is probably right exactly and and the fact that everyone lasted that is we all know that yeah we all know man engage in relational aggression you bet as well you bet so so there's a couple of things that I want to I want to say about this I want to make this you know a little more complicated I
• 22:00 - 22:30 want to add something else that we often don't talk about when we talk about the the the sect the biology of the sexes and that is that a lot of the conversation within the biological or the pseudo scientific world is also raced and we don't often see that not of course in the conversations about trains but I want to I want to just read you a passage from a credible a pair of biologists who wrote an article in a biology journal about why it is that girls you know pink brain
• 22:30 - 23:00 blue brain why pink and red for girls and blue for boys why this is natural why this is biological here's what they say they say that they have two reasons one as gatherers women developed a preference for red hues like pink because they needed to identify ripe fruits and berries further women and this is a quote women needed to
• 23:00 - 23:30 discriminate subtle changes in skin color due to emotional states and social sexual signals in their roles as caregivers and empathizers now I'm hoping that you all saw that as the whitest statement you could make who did they think these early hominids were on the African savannah noticing if their child was blushing did they think the first humans were white I mean it's so you can see how this is so subtle erased
• 23:30 - 24:00 not only that of course most of you know that up until the early 20th century boys and girls were dressed similarly as toddlers in like what looked like white christening gowns if you don't believe me Google FDR baby and you'll see him in his little white person he looks like a adorable little girl exactly and then initially they were cut it was coated pink pink and red for boys and blue for girls because blue was the color of the sky it was aryan light and virgin mary
• 24:00 - 24:30 usually painted him didn't blue yeah so so just I mean so it's bad history but also bad racial politics so this this has a racial component as well as a gender component and the pink blue thing now a couple of different infant psychologists have studied baby color preference because you can do these great experiments on infants by look tracking their retinas and what they were focusing on and it turns out there is no gender difference boys and girls don't prefer pink or blue until
• 24:30 - 25:00 about two or three years of age and of course by then they've been swaddled and bundled and had their hair bands and they know quite well what is appropriate for them and not so so so so let's let's let's get to the the politics question why are we so desperate do you think as a scientist how do you read our temper that we are so desperate to believe in categorical difference when that that confirms all the stereotypes that we
• 25:00 - 25:30 already hold how are we what are we to make of this why do we keep looking when you all keep saying there's no there there what is it about our temperament that that wants us to believe this well I I'd like to say it's you all but I think biologists have been very guilty of this of fueling the fire because sex differences cell look at every magazine I mean sex cells and so neuro scientists when they run a brain scan
• 25:30 - 26:00 hopefully they have a decent sized sample a couple hundred people you're studying what you're studying you're studying face recognition you're studying language whatever you publish your paper yay you really want to get tenure you want to publish another paper so what do you do you go back to the data you analyze it for sex you look at the male group the female group if you find a significant difference guess what you have another paper and a grant yeah and if you don't find a difference uh nobody's interested in lack of
• 26:00 - 26:30 difference and so we have a very real file drawer phenomenon and a group at Stanford just prove this for functional brain imaging that all the small study you only see sex differences in the small studies the large studies there's very few sex differences and that's exactly the opposite of what the statistics would predict statistics would predict with larger studies big data if any of you who went to the prior section you have more sensitivity to find difference and so there's a huge bias in the literature so there's this
• 26:30 - 27:00 just zeitgeist out there of men and women are fundamentally different our brains are different and it must you know it for one thing it's fun sexy and especially you know college students love this kind of thing because they're right at that age when they're their most invested in their gender identity or their sexual identity but in addition it reinforces our existing status quo I mean our we have a power structure that is very much what looks like a sex difference is very often
• 27:00 - 27:30 status differences which was which was a big revelation for me the the thing that's interesting to me teaching at a university that it's co-educational is my students are sitting in the same class reading the same text grading you know writing the same papers being graded by the same criteria and nobody ever goes to the Dean of Students and says well like I'm a Martian and my professors of Venusian so like shouldn't I get extra credit or a translator my students are perfectly capable of being in the same place reading the same book
• 27:30 - 28:00 taking the same tests being graded by the same criteria and nobody makes a big Mars Venus difference because in practice they're far more similar right but so this this raises a question again the social science question so which gender is more committed to biological essential difference which gender benefits from this which gender wants it here's Simon baron-cohen Sasha's dad cousin that's right who writes in his book essential
• 28:00 - 28:30 difference the female brain is predominantly hardwired for empathy and the male brain is predominantly hardwired for understanding and building systems now how many women in here are insulted by that all right now how many of the men are insulted by that like not empathic not capable so interesting I think men are far more committed to essential difference than women are in the same way that surveys that have suggested that gay men are far
• 28:30 - 29:00 more likely to believe that they are hardwired that sexuality is hardwired than lesbians are hmm something something in the neighborhood of 75 to 80 percent of gay men and somewhere somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 to 45 percent of women yeah well it you know whoever has the power is going to be invested in proving that this is the way it's supposed to be and so I mean you could say the same thing about analyses of racial differences in
• 29:00 - 29:30 the in the in the 19th century you know we were finding all these they were measuring brains of people from different countries and finding these big differences in explaining who was doing that work well I can tell you it was an African scientist doing that work right so we have very much the same like I said these eruptions keep happening every time you know women are nearly achieving some level of breakthrough then we kind of default back to this backlash of well that's fine but we're only gonna you know women can only expect to achieve so much because of
• 29:30 - 30:00 these hard-wired differences and so we've had a debate for example about math achievement actually average math scores no longer differ between males and females in large representative samples across the country girls have caught up to boys in math but if you look at the most extreme tale the right tale the high-performing there was data in the in the in the 80s that looked at eighth graders and who scored perfectly on the math SAT exam well that's 8th grades pretty young for for math SAT exam and
• 30:00 - 30:30 among the students who performed perfectly the ratio was 13 to 1 boys to girls outperform and so that again science papers policy you know maybe where we you know what are we trying to do push these girls into STEM land you know the talent pool and this was what Larry Summers relied on in 2005 in arguing why Harvard had no tenured women science and math professors are extremely few well you know maybe average performance is the same but hightail performance brilliance in math
• 30:30 - 31:00 is uniquely or almost uniquely male phenomena well guess what that thirteen to one ratio is now a four to one ratio or even a three to one ratio over the course of one generation 25 years that ratio has declined guess why well we've encouraged girls to do math we've started to tell them you can do math you're smart at math they're taking calculus now in equal numbers as boys and so this this ratios declined a lot but you know we're just very invested in
• 31:00 - 31:30 finding something to represent what already exists and it's a matter of giving up power yeah um I do want to say something since you've invoked Larry Larry Summers infamous 2005 everybody knows what we're talking about he was asked at a conference is often off the cuff asked at a conference why there was so few women at the very very top of the premier STEM fields not only Harvard MIT etc and his answer was and this is the this is the quote that least that the
• 31:30 - 32:00 Harvard Crimson reported was that most women are unable or unwilling to work the 80 hours a week it takes to rise to that level so I you know now I think everyone focused on the unable part the the biological inability but as a social scientist I thought to myself oh you know what about the unwilling part so let's take that as a you know model instead of like saying okay we're the binders fill of women who are willing to do this you know rather ask the question okay let's take take the take that model
• 32:00 - 32:30 at the 80 hour week a work week so you work 80 hours the 168 hours in a week you work 80 of them you drive the American average of 35 minutes each way to work let's say you have a designated parking space I'm from New York that's a big deal so let's say you sleep the American average of seven and a half hours a night let's say it takes you two hours every day to prepare a to prepare and consume all meals perform all sanitary events and and I'll give you
• 32:30 - 33:00 one date a week by a date I mean sort of you know dinner movie make love now I gave that five hours you could see a shorter movie but if you if you add that up what you get is thirty seven and a half minutes a day to read watch TV engage in any hobbies that you might have and spend time with your children so the wrong answer to that question is
• 33:00 - 33:30 how many women are willing to do that derives of that level and the right answer to that question is who in their right mind would do this and which gender thought this up as a good model for a career ladder right so it seems to me that that's the sociology so that so again so this is a place where and one of the reasons that I was so excited to do this with Lisa's because I think these are places where set this the social science and the neuroscience meet the questions of why we want why we are so desperate for
• 33:30 - 34:00 these differences so let me ask you a last question and then I want to open it up for for your questions and comments as well so let me ask you this are there any differences that you know that seem to matter in in this you know there can be differences without difference right right so I mean I have done a very thorough review with my students and we're about to publish a big big review on this in terms of brain volumes as I said male brains are bigger than female brains but as every other
• 34:00 - 34:30 organ is also larger in males the kidney the liver the heart you don't hear about that very much but and so when we're looking for individual differences in the brain and we do this whether we're interested in gender or not neuroscientists correct for brain size even if you're comparing a large male to a small male you must normalize their overall brain size when you want to know is the hippocampus which is important for memory bigger is the amygdala which is important for emotion and aggression
• 34:30 - 35:00 bigger you need to always a co-vary as we say are normalized for brain size and so when we've done when neuroscientists do this correct for individual brain size there are no differences in the size of the structures in our brain what about the circuits okay what about the connections the current data are all over the map because this connectome research is relatively new but the differences are minut they're like I said on the order of 1% of the range of
• 35:00 - 35:30 connectivity across the human species can be explained by gender education socioeconomic status all these things have much bigger effects and most importantly this idea that we have different circuits there is not a single ability language math face recognition in which males and females use different brain structures or different circuits to carry out these tasks and this has been looked at again by dozens of labs the world but their circuits are the
• 35:30 - 36:00 same so there isn't the sort of the brain lateralization those the two sides the left brain right brain the connections between them has severely lateralized none of that really we are all we're all left lateralized so there was a big splash a big study came out from Penn in 2013 studying adolescents and claimed and it was reported in 300 news outlets and they showed the subway map of brain connections and unfortunately they didn't show the actual connections they
• 36:00 - 36:30 showed the connections that were statistically significantly different and so these showed the subway map of men's brains are all like this with intra hemispheres connections just within one side women's brains were all like this with these connections across the hemispheres book course these weren't men and women these were actually adolescents and they did not correct her brain size so again it turns out larger brains have relatively smaller intra hemispheric connections because it's just too inefficient it's
• 36:30 - 37:00 it's an engineering problem when the brain gets big you can't get information across enough and so statistically you it's about the size yeah so it's because for me the idea that the subway map illustrates your earlier point cuz in New York City the subway map is it's always under construction lately so so that's the idea that it's always responding to environmental environmental stimuli there's nothing that's sort of like fixed absolutely that's the most important point that I want to make about the brain is we've been studying neural plasticity for 50
• 37:00 - 37:30 years we know the brain changes as a result of learning that's why you all are here to hope to learn something to change your synapses that's that's how children learn anything and to take a snapshot of men and women's brains at 25 35 years of age and claim that any small difference you detect is hardwired is ignoring the 25 or 30 years of experience in socializing with friends and math problems and sports that they've played which are going to be
• 37:30 - 38:00 affecting those circuits as well maybe we should co-author a book like not Mars and Venus but we're all earthlings so let's open it up for for your questions and comments we have microphones scattered around and we have some people already you right there and then you right here second and over there third and fourth hi Joe Neely back have there been studies about how the
• 38:00 - 38:30 biology can make for the differences and the experiences in the sense that women get their period so they're in pain every month possibly as kids and so they're much more aware of their role birthing the child and so empathy can be more instinctive and they have to be more protective in that way even the sexual act is different the guy has to you know perform and then he leaves city
• 38:30 - 39:00 or so on the first point about the menstrual fluctuations again this is another area of research where there's been a horrible file drawer problem anybody who found who did who measured verbal fluency across the menstrual cycle and they found that women were more fluent we know when estrogen was peaking and lower during menstruation bingo
• 39:00 - 39:30 publication now we've got many many large studies there are no changes in cognition across the mental statement menstrual cycle you know our you can do math you don't have to switch your geometry test by two menstruating and then on the nurturing question so you know we we think Oh females are instinctively nurturing and men aren't but it turns out the changes in one's brain after one becomes a parent are the
• 39:30 - 40:00 same in men and women in other words those the nurturing is induced by the act of caring for an infant and of course girls get more practice at that if there's one thing we can do for boys it's higher than as babysitter's hmm you know I mean actually when I was a kid we had more male babysitter's in those days and now I guess because of fears of whatever or the over saturation of boys and maturity boys don't get that opportunity to be nurturers early on it is learned even in animals a female animal that was not
• 40:00 - 40:30 around other other young fails as a mother the first time around unless she's had some practice at that so it men's testosterone level drops when they when they become new father absolutely but the reason that I mean look the reason boys I asked my students whose questions all the time cuz I'm interested in a wage discrimination and gender gender discrimination in the workplace so I asked my students how many of them were babysitter's during middle school or high school and you know about 2/3 of the women in the class
• 40:30 - 41:00 raised their hands and maybe a scattering of men and I say how much did you get paid and they say oh you know $15 an hour something like that and and I say ok that's fine children an average night you would make like 60 75 dollars fine how many of them how many of you in the class shoveled snow or mowed lawns and a lot of the guys hands go up in very few women's hands go about how much did you make well you know good a good morning a shuffling snow I could make $100 a driveway I could do three driveways I get me $300 in the morning
• 41:00 - 41:30 and I said and women who had been babysitters are looking around like what and I said so clearly so clearly you know this is why boys oh baby said now so I said clearly wage discrimination sex segregation in the workplace leads to wage discrimination starts very early and of course the men immediately object oh my god no it is so much harder to shovel snow and and and mow a lawn than it is to care for a baby clear indication that note they have never cared for a baby but but even more than
• 41:30 - 42:00 that do we pay people professionally who shovel snow and mow lawns more certainly not so in fact it is really that they are becoming accustomed to the fact that we pay men more than women and that that's really that starts very early in our skin and parents pay their sons more for chores than their daughters I think so I think that that's a great ideas encouraging you know encouraging that because that idea I'm so insulted by that that baron-cohen idea that women are hard-wired for empathy I feel like
• 42:00 - 42:30 well that kind of leaves me out you know I'm perfectly happy to you know does and understand systems but really you know empathy is you know it's a core human value it's pretty handy in the workplace - yeah so yes Thank You chip Eden's and I'm struck that you've debunked most popular literature today and I was just looking
• 42:30 - 43:00 at an article in the Atlantic that was talking about the significant differences between male and female brains and I and I saw I'm it's really interesting to be able to move away from that consideration and really think about socialization what are the key pieces of socialization that we really need to be thinking about so I'd love for you to speak to that maybe that was your parenting class earlier but key considerations of socialization and then this business of maturity and this idea
• 43:00 - 43:30 of the male brain clothed you know developmentally slower I would assume that that would not hope maybe maybe not the knucklehead effect that the that that's a myth as well but it could you say something about the development of the brain and matters of maturity whether or not that's a social construct so that's a great question males do develop more slowly than females puberty happens in one and a half years earlier in girls than boys and so it's kind of a
• 43:30 - 44:00 trajectory from birth and we do know that males are less physiologically mature by about a couple of weeks at births judging by their likelier they're likely to get all kinds of neonatal infections respiratory infections gi infections premature males are more likely or to die than premature females so we do know there's some kind of medical vulnerability nobody understands why what that is if it's hormonal or genetic but I think that parents
• 44:00 - 44:30 nowadays because I think in the olden days boys were given responsibilities and chores and so on now we've kind of over emphasized boys in maturity and I think parents use it as an excuse all the time teachers uses it an excuse I've heard teachers say oh you know Johnny's not reading as well as as his sister but you know boys are slower well you know when it comes to cognitive differences the differences are this big the language difference there's a one-month difference in vocabulary between boys and girls in the second year of life
• 44:30 - 45:00 one month girls are you know a 13 month old girl has the vocabulary of a 14 month old boy and yet parents pediatricians will even say oh you know don't worry it's a boy yeah which is the worst thing you can do language development is so critical early on more enrichment more stories more songs more so we've over emphasized male immaturity god when I think of my dad enlisting in World War two and when he was 17 years
• 45:00 - 45:30 of age you know our seventeen year olds now that the same thing yeah incapable so I think that's one lesson to parents of boys is you know don't overestimate their immaturity we know parents treat boys and girls differently and as we discussed this morning the biggest problem for gender development right now is that we tell we tell girls and boys you can be anything when you grow up but we only mean it for girls we only mean you can be an astronaut or a physician
• 45:30 - 46:00 or scientist or a teacher or a nurse we say Oh mom or a mom right and we say that to boys but we don't really mean about the teacher in the nurse part in the nurturing part you know we're secretly hoping that they'll do something because in part because of the pay we all want our kids to go into careers that pay more in an all-male label careers pay more than almost every female naval career but anyway it's it's that point but what do we what do we say versus what do we really mean and so
• 46:00 - 46:30 when we see boys stopping art classes and and music classes when they're 6 7 8 years of age what how much are we restricting boys developmental potential whereas we've opened it up for girls with athletics and leadership and all that you had a question over there yeah hi my name is pong I'm from the Basel Scholars Program and my question for you is for both of you is how can we reduce
• 46:30 - 47:00 our preoccupation with gender differences and promote that the neurobiology of men and women are very similar yeah well I I think as always communicating the real science the real data the big data is essential because we've been relying too much on tiny little anecdotes and I do we are making some progress I think among the neuroscientists and this is where
• 47:00 - 47:30 scientists have to step up to their social responsibility and appreciate how information is being misused I would just challenge everybody when you hear about a sex difference to just examine it a second time and ask is that really a sex difference is that really something about males and females or does that relate to status and power so for example you know when James de Moura says that women are cut out and it's true that women score higher on measures
• 47:30 - 48:00 of neuroticism which is a psychological predisposition towards anxiety correct and that well positions of power will influence anxiety you know we we caution our daughters we encourage our sons to take risks and and so we in some ways we instill anxiety and girls and not boys and once they once we pass puberty and the boys are bigger and taller and there
• 48:00 - 48:30 are you know sexual assaults and things there's a lot of reasons why females express greater neuroticism or anxiety and that's because they're in a more vulnerable lower status position in society so it may not be as hardwired as it seems let me let me just give you a way to think about this just for a moment so I think what we think because most of these these sex differences that we keep reading about reaffirm the stereotypes that we already hold and so
• 48:30 - 49:00 we feel validated somehow culturally that the inequality that we see in there is actually of natural so we think that gender difference is the cause of gender inequality right from these differences comes the inequality that we see upper body strength math ability whatever what if you flipped it what if you said that gender difference is actually the result of the gender inequality right if you began to think about it that way what
• 49:00 - 49:30 you would say with the answer to your question is if you reduce gender inequality which is a political political question reducing gender inequality will actually enable us to see that we are more similar than we are different so I would flip it I would make it a political question because I think that we have to we have to challenge that inevitability of these gender difference leading to gender inequality and then we just sort of see you can't do anything about it and I
• 49:30 - 50:00 think that political resignation we see that in many many spheres right now I think that's a really important thing to challenge so we have zero minutes remaining does that mean we get one last question one last question right there thank you you might you made a really good point about how the politics color how we look at all this and you had good examples of the past but why has the
• 50:00 - 50:30 past ended why don't we think the same about you here on the panel that you're invested with a certain political perspective and that in one generation will chuckle about you so I hope so hopefully I'll be gone by so so so so tell us why your objective in past generations of researchers were subjective well we conceived past generations were just nonsense when you look at Charles Dana and Edward sequel
• 50:30 - 51:00 Edward C Clarke were making it up and you know the the proof is in the pudding but I will be happy to show you large studies with tens of thousands of subjects and show you that that these brain wiring differences are quite modest you're right you know we're still in them very much in the middle of a social experiment women have always been in a subordinate essentially enslaved position until fairly recently and still are in certain parts of the world when
• 51:00 - 51:30 you look at the guardianship system and Saudi Arabia so you know I would just say it's it's a salute we've never done the Equality experiment to take Michael's example of does the Equality produce the difference or vice-versa we have never had true power equality economic equality you know 24 out of 500 CEOs in the fortune 500 are women so you know it's hard to to say that we're in a
• 51:30 - 52:00 in a politically egalitarian society and therefore the experiments been done I'm a scientist I'm very skeptical I'm totally willing to admit that I may be wrong but we haven't you know until the actual data come in in a different environment I think there's a case to be made I'm looking forward to having my grandchildren chuckle at the kinds of things I believe I hope that people will build on the stuff that we've been thinking I make no claims toward objectivity as a social scientist what
• 52:00 - 52:30 I'm what I'm interested actually is in in interrogating the claims sort of objectivity of others so thank you all very much for coming