> Is this retraction and resulting modified study seen as an important victory for people promoting that there are no differences between the "male" and "female

> Is this retraction and resulting modified study seen as an important victory for people promoting that there are no differences between the "male" and "female" brains? Not especially - more like an averted defeat. It's certainly not a win for gendered-brain theories, but it's not much of a loss either. Cohen's work is hugely controversial even after taking the existence of "gendered brains" as a given. He makes his claim from two directions: first, that most autistic people are male, and second, that most autistic women have 'male brains'. Rejecting first claim is obviously compatible with sex differences. The basic answer is that autism in women is underdiagnosed and Cohen is mistaking test error for base rates. There are lots of possible reasons which are indifferent to brain sex (gender stereotypes, clinician expectations), plus the claim that autism presents differently in men and women, which is compatible with both socialization and deep-seated gender differences. His second claim basically requires brain sex differences to exist, but it's still possible to accept that while disputing that autistic women have "male brains". For one thing, a lot of the debate about brain sex today works from the same underlying framework (e.g. the 2015 'mosaic brain' work) while reaching very different conclusions about how substantial sex differences are, and that whole model is largely incompatible with Cohen's. For another, lots of people charge that Cohen's data is simply wrong - that his stats on autistic women with 'male brains' come from botched studies which should be discounted regardless of what brains are like. People who reject major sex differences like Cordelia Fine aim at Cohen a lot, because his model would largely invalidate theirs. But lots of people claiming major sex differences also reject Cohen, either because their models don't match (e.g. "higher male variance" versus Cohen's "male brains"), or because they simply think studies like these are methodologically weak independent of that question.