6 ms·

No Meaningful Differences in Male and Female Brains, Study Finds

38 points by leephillips 5y ago

fallingfrog 5y ago
Guys... With all due respect. The reason there aren’t more women in IT and the sciences is you. It’s all of you.
- botwriter 5y ago
  you're probably right there!!
- fortran77 5y ago
  No! It's Antonio García Martínez's fault. Fortunately he's been sent to a re-education camp.
- dominicjj 5y ago
  Naah. IT and the sciences are merit based, always have been and always will be. No one cares about your race, gender or whatever. Have you done the work? Are you competent? Great. Welcome. See for example Jeri Ellsworth, Roberta Williams, Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin, the colleague of mine who wrote code for a nuclear reactor... It's because the barriers to entry include years of lonely study. Men are quite happy to shut themselves off from everything for years to learn something. Women generally aren't. We're wired differently.
drocer88 5y ago
From the paper ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421000804?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976342... ) [we sought to integrate findings from a wide survey of the extant literature on s/g effects in human structural and functional brain imaging, using the search terms “sex” and “gender” in lieu of “sex difference” and “gender difference.” ] So they excluded studies that found differences.
- The_rationalist 5y ago
  State of the art mediocrity here
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  The terms sex difference and gender difference contain the terms sex and gender.
amachefe 5y ago
This is like saying no much difference between human and ape DNA. The issue is exactly those differences
- smitty1e 5y ago
  Sure, but if one wants to argue that everything on Earth is composed of the same elements, then we are "the same" as rock, and "...this finally ends the “debate” about biology, brains and female representation once and for all."
- hanklazard 5y ago
  Agreed and most of the data presented is from post-mortem and fMRI studies of the volumes of large brain structures. To make the strong claim of “no difference here” on such a basic analysis is a major red flag.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    But to make the weak claim that we've detected no difference is fine, and should make people question their desperation to find one. I guarantee that this study is not claiming to have disproved the theory that women's brains were blessed by pink fairies and men's brains were blessed by blue fairies - but until we figure out a way to communicate with fairies, we should concentrate on the observable and material differences in the upbringing of men and women to explain their observable and material outcomes.
nprateem 5y ago
It'd be nice to see some research on whether the genders have different preferences for different tasks. I'm capable of lots of things I don't do because I don't enjoy them...
- lawnchair_larry 5y ago
  There is a mountain of research on that, and they do.
JoshTko 5y ago
I don't know how a claim like this be made while we have such a limited understanding of how the brain actually works.
- ardit33 5y ago
  it is the new science, has to be woke or it is not valid.... I honestly stopped paying attention to any social studies that are coming from the US. They are extremely politicized with an agenda behind them. When I see studies coming from Europe, (especially the UK, and Nordic Countries, which tend to be a step ahead), it has more credibility on my books.
- kaitai 5y ago
  The paper is about neuroimaging studies -- reading the start of the paper itself is much more useful than reading the linked article.
chestertn 5y ago
> 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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  "But just as taller people aren’t any more intelligent than shorter people" Yeah, that sounds a bit suspicious, if we do not make a distinction between "naturally" shorter people and people whose growth was stunted by lack of nutrients in their childhood. For example, growing during periods of famine or war.
  - dwaltrip 5y ago
    Surely that was implied.
caddemon 5y ago
I'm extremely skeptical of the claim that male aggression is purely environmental. Higher aggression in males is seen in many species of animals, and it is seen even in mouse models where they are kept in an extremely controlled environment with little socialization. There are plenty of mouse studies out there showing significant differences in brain development between the mouse sexes as well. This article is clearly presenting a single sided perspective on a complicated issue. It is also not a simple "do less harm" sort of thing - in order to one day understand issues like Fibromyalgia it will be critical to study diseases from a female perspective. If one can't acknowledge biological differences (which I have seen in some circles of scientists even), it will only hurt clinical research.
- financialize 5y ago
  The article is about biological differences in the brain not everywhere else and it's unlikely brain wiring is specific to genders. Brains are adaptive sensory fusion organs and if there were any gender differences it would not be because of the brain but hormonal profiles. Furthermore, the starting point of all humans is female, that's why men have nipples so even men start with "female" brains.
- jayd16 5y ago
  A simple explanation is hormonal differences might not cause brain differences.
  - caddemon 5y ago
    I'm sure the original research article treats it with more nuance, but that's not at all what the linked article is implying: "a gendered world creates a gendered brain, and not the brain itself". Further, there are plenty of studies showing sex differences actually in the brain in mice. How impactful those differences are to behavior is not well known yet, and obviously it is difficult to say exactly how that translates to humans anyway. But there are still differences that are pretty well established, for example in glial cell development. Staci Bilbo is one up and coming PI at Harvard working on glial cell research, and one of her focuses has been sex differences. Some of her work is actually on how hormones interact with these systems: https://www.icon.mgh.harvard.edu/collaborators/staci-bilbo https://www.icon.mgh.harvard.edu/collaborators/staci-bilbo Neuroimmunology in general is pretty wild and I think we will find some gendered differences there. Certain maternal immune activation mouse models of Autism only show abnormal behavior in the males. More generally I think it's accepted that there are gender differences in the immune system: https://www.nature.com/articles/nri.2016.90 https://www.nature.com/articles/nri.2016.90
temp8964 5y ago
Very weak report, Lawrence Summers statement was based on variance, not average. Even if male and female have exactly the same brains on average, it doesn't mean the variances are exactly the same. "Meaningful difference" on average, is not the same as meaningful difference on the tails. Also, evolution is not a woke algorithm, it doesn't just stop working on sex.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  "it doesn't just stop working on sex." Or above the neck. This is one of the things that baffles me most about people who claim to respect science. If there are meaningful differences about human populations in all sorts of physical characteristics, why should our mental faculties be precisely averaged out on the same gauge across almost 8 billion individuals? That would be extraordinary to say the least. Now I can understand that we yet do not understand the nature/nurture balance when it comes to the capabilities of our brains and we cannot easily draw conclusions. But to claim that all the observable differences are due to cultural traits, oppression or privilege, sounds as a radically non-scientific opinion to me.
  - ralusek 5y ago
    Right. The argument against racism or sexism, for me, has never been founded on the belief that all populations are guaranteed to be exactly the same with their capabilities. The argument against racism/sexism to which I subscribe is that individuals within all populations vary so dramatically between one another, and individuals from every population seem to be capable of manifesting virtually any set of characteristics, that evaluating people as individuals rather than assuming traits from their respective populations is far less error prone. On the flip side, I'm also not asserting that populations are not the same when it comes to their capabilities; it just makes no difference. As stated, the variance between individuals is sufficient that I'd just as soon deal with the individual, rather than treating them as an avatar for some arbitrary collective. It makes no difference to me if less women are inherently interested in engineering, or if exactly as many women are inherently interested in engineering, it matters to me if an individual, woman or not, is not treated/evaluated in accordance with her own characteristics. "In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere." - Ratatouille
xupybd 5y ago
I don't think James Damore argued Women lacked the competence to become engineer's. I understood he was arguing the lacked the desire. That the best way to increase the number of women in the industry was to remove barriers to desire.
deleted 5y ago
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zug_zug 5y ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/add_user.shtml https://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/add_user.shtml An interactive test that can ascertain your gender simply based on a variety of tests (e.g. rotation of objects in 3d space vs remember locations). It's been around for over a decade and was right on n=5 people I know who have done it. [Sadly requires flash]
torstenvl 5y ago
This is laughably poor reporting on laughably poor science.
throwaway29303 5y ago
This article came off a bit like "nothing to see here, move along." If there's substance I wasn't able to grasp it. I was expecting a bit more. Also, James Damore never claimed few women went into science because, well, they just weren’t inherently good at it. “Issues of intrinsic aptitude,” ... “overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability” kept many women out of the field. The author ought to read his memo[0] ... Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. ... Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions. ... Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things ... Women on average are more cooperative ... Women on average are more prone to anxiety ... Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average ... The male gender role is currently inflexible Etc... It's an interesting read. Also, I'm very _very_ curious to know what the transgender community thinks about this new study. Somehow I feel a new storm is a-brewing. [0] - https://www.scribd.com/embeds/355823379/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-D7uQiYlGZPuxGzzrj0X2&show_recommendations=true https://www.scribd.com/embeds/355823379/content?start_page=1...
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > This article came off a bit like "nothing to see here, move along." If there's substance I wasn't able to grasp it. I was expecting a bit more. It's a metaanalysis of brain studies, which have never consistently found significant differences between female and male brains that were unrelated to size. It's not saying anything new. There's nothing to see here.
MikeUt 5y ago
Related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge... I worry that Hyde’s analysis plays the same trick. She does a wonderful job finding that men and women have minimal differences in eg “likelihood of smiling when not being observed”, “interpersonal leadership style”, et cetera. But if you ask the man on the street “Are men and women different?”, he’s likely to say something like “Yeah, men are more aggressive and women are more sensitive”. And in fact, Hyde found that men were indeed definitely more aggressive, and women indeed definitely more sensitive. But throw in a hundred other effects nobody cares about like “likelihood of smiling when not observed”, and you can report that “78% of gender differences are small or zero”. Hyde found moderate or large gender differences in (and here I’m paraphrasing very scientific-sounding constructs into more understandable terms) aggressiveness, horniness, language abilities, mechanical abilities, visuospatial skills, mechanical ability, tendermindness, assertiveness, comfort with body, various physical abilities, and computer skills.
nitwit005 5y ago
I could see their being no significant high level brain differences (although it suggests a number of about %1), but the idea that there should be no sex related disease differences seems unlikely.
The_rationalist 5y ago
No Meaningful Differences in Male and Female Brains This is a pathetic contra-science claim. I have no idea whether women brains have on average a advantage or a disadvantage at scientific/engineering cognitive tasks. However it is clear that there are meaningful differences in specific tasks, see -> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition There are also many known empirical results (that are not necessarily caused by brain difference but could very well be) study2 of samples of university students, in which we found that the average IQ of men is 4.6 points higher than that of women Women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and the prevalence of anxiety disorders is significantly higher for women (23.4 percent) than men (14.3 percent). Males are generally more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than females, with a male to female ratio of approximately 4:1 in community samples. About twice as many women as men experience depression. Globally, death by suicide occurred about 1.8 times more often among males than among females in 2008, and 1.7 times in 2015.[4][5][6] In the western world, males die by suicide three to four times more often than do females.[4] A way to determine if some of those effects are causative would be to monitor cognitive performance alterations in trans people. To me the greatest possible advantage of a woman brain would be a higher verbal fluency. If hormone changes could make someone's brain win some of the advantage from one gender to another, then he could periodically in its life by changing gender be more optimal at certain cognitive tasks. (of course I don't recommend doing that lol)
fxtentacle 5y ago
This reads like propaganda, not science. Also, I don't get it. "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." Are you saying that aggression is not related to the brain?
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  It's certainly possible it's primarily hormonally driven where any biological mechanism exists, and there are certainly hormonal mechanisms that are not run by the brain.
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    My understanding is that aggression is driven by 3 neurotransmitters inside the brain. (dopamine, GABA, serotonin) That would make it highly likely that differences in aggression are related to differences in receivers for those transmitters in the brain.
    - jayd16 5y ago
      Why is that more likely when men have more testosterone and taking too much testosterone causes aggressive behavior?
- jayd16 5y ago
  I think its about brain structure, not necessarily brain chemistry.
- kaitai 5y ago
  They're talking about brain structure ("Males’ brains are larger than females’ from birth, stabilizing around 11 % in adults. This size difference accounts for other reproducible findings: higher white/gray matter ratio, intra- versus interhemispheric connectivity, and regional cortical and subcortical volumes in males. But when structural and lateralization differences are present independent of size, sex/gender explains only about 1% of total variance." -- from the abstract.) So this paper is in some sense about the "hardware" component, rather than the hormones or the programming. I'm not surprised. There's not really much evolutionary sense in building different brain hardware when you can dynamically manipulate so much with hormones and social pressure. Why are people so devoted to the idea that there must be a big structural or anatomical difference? It simply doesn't make sense to me, from observing children before & after puberty -- unless I think of the societal benefits of enforcing belief in structural difference in the brain. It makes division of labor easier and keeps divide & conquer going if you can exploit genders against each other rather than thinking they've got a common interest against another economic class.
lawnchair_larry 5y ago
Awful article with false and slanderous allegations. The study would be interesting, but this blogger’s agenda overshadowing it is not. Can’t believe they are still pushing lies about James Damore. Skip this nonsense and read the actual study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421000804?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976342...
hanklazard 5y ago
Here’s a full list of her publications: https://www.rosalindfranklin.edu/academics/faculty/lise-eliot/#Publications https://www.rosalindfranklin.edu/academics/faculty/lise-elio... Most seem to be pop-science editorials from the past 15 years which make the same basic claim. Certainly one can have a hypothesis, but after this many years, I expect a scientist to actually pursue the question further than just “the weights of these two structures are about the same in men and women”. Where’s the molecular work? This looks more like activism.
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LatteLazy 5y ago
They should have read this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969295/#!po=0.354610 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969295/#!po=0.... Men's brains are 8 to 13% bigger depending on age. It doesn't seem to lead to higher IQ (itself a terrible measure), though men (boys) are a lot more likely to be diagnosed with a bunch of issues like autism...
- kaitai 5y ago
  "Males’ brains are larger than females’ from birth, stabilizing around 11 % in adults. This size difference accounts for other reproducible findings: higher white/gray matter ratio, intra- versus interhemispheric connectivity, and regional cortical and subcortical volumes in males. But when structural and lateralization differences are present independent of size, sex/gender explains only about 1% of total variance." -- the abstract
  - LatteLazy 5y ago
    Sorry, I feel like I'm missing your point. Per your comment male brains are bigger and different in other ways. You can argue about whether a male brain is bigger because it is male, or because it has higher white/grey ratio because its male. Either way, male -> bigger. Again, I'm not saying bigger is better or smarter or whatever. I'm just pointing out that submitted article seems to be unaware of other (well reproduced) work that disagrees with its conclusions...
- The_rationalist 5y ago
  Note that brain size can be as much affected by gender than by country of birth.
  - LatteLazy 5y ago
    I didn't know that, but I am happy to accept it as long as someone has done the research. Given how little brain size actually matters (it's not like blue whales are the dominant species and they win the size race), I don't get why people have such a problem with these stats...
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SamReidHughes 5y ago
A lack of meaningful difference in male and female brains actually supports Summers's explanation of greater male variability. Because of X chromosome mosaicism being one looming factor decreasing female variability (see photographs here: [1]), female brains would have to "catch up" in terms of variance through some other sex differences in how brains function. Obviously, some difference in programming, via "hormones" or whatever, could do it by using different sets of information at the time the brain is constructed. The article is stating that we lack one form of evidence of this. I'd guess it would also be extra difficult for sex-specific brain differences in high-level structure to evolve when X chromosome inactivation happens quasi-randomly. But nature can surprise you... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/science/seeing-x-chromosomes-in-a-new-light.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/science/seeing-x-chromoso...
mbrodersen 5y ago
It is interesting to see that in the most egalitarian countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland) you still find that almost all engineers are male, and almost all nurses are female. Not because of lack of STEM skills (woman in general do as well as men in math) but because of differences in interests. In those countries, When free to choose, woman and men in general make different choices.

38 points by leephillips 5y ago

fallingfrog 5y ago

Guys... With all due respect. The reason there aren’t more women in IT and the sciences is you. It’s all of you.

botwriter 5y ago
you're probably right there!!
fortran77 5y ago
No! It's Antonio García Martínez's fault. Fortunately he's been sent to a re-education camp.
dominicjj 5y ago
Naah. IT and the sciences are merit based, always have been and always will be. No one cares about your race, gender or whatever. Have you done the work? Are you competent? Great. Welcome. See for example Jeri Ellsworth, Roberta Williams, Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin, the colleague of mine who wrote code for a nuclear reactor... It's because the barriers to entry include years of lonely study. Men are quite happy to shut themselves off from everything for years to learn something. Women generally aren't. We're wired differently.

drocer88 5y ago

From the paper ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421000804?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976342... ) [we sought to integrate findings from a wide survey of the extant literature on s/g effects in human structural and functional brain imaging, using the search terms “sex” and “gender” in lieu of “sex difference” and “gender difference.” ] So they excluded studies that found differences.

The_rationalist 5y ago
State of the art mediocrity here
pseudalopex 5y ago
The terms sex difference and gender difference contain the terms sex and gender.

amachefe 5y ago

This is like saying no much difference between human and ape DNA. The issue is exactly those differences

smitty1e 5y ago
Sure, but if one wants to argue that everything on Earth is composed of the same elements, then we are "the same" as rock, and "...this finally ends the “debate” about biology, brains and female representation once and for all."
hanklazard 5y ago
Agreed and most of the data presented is from post-mortem and fMRI studies of the volumes of large brain structures. To make the strong claim of “no difference here” on such a basic analysis is a major red flag.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  But to make the weak claim that we've detected no difference is fine, and should make people question their desperation to find one. I guarantee that this study is not claiming to have disproved the theory that women's brains were blessed by pink fairies and men's brains were blessed by blue fairies - but until we figure out a way to communicate with fairies, we should concentrate on the observable and material differences in the upbringing of men and women to explain their observable and material outcomes.

nprateem 5y ago

It'd be nice to see some research on whether the genders have different preferences for different tasks. I'm capable of lots of things I don't do because I don't enjoy them...

lawnchair_larry 5y ago
There is a mountain of research on that, and they do.

JoshTko 5y ago

I don't know how a claim like this be made while we have such a limited understanding of how the brain actually works.

ardit33 5y ago
it is the new science, has to be woke or it is not valid.... I honestly stopped paying attention to any social studies that are coming from the US. They are extremely politicized with an agenda behind them. When I see studies coming from Europe, (especially the UK, and Nordic Countries, which tend to be a step ahead), it has more credibility on my books.
kaitai 5y ago
The paper is about neuroimaging studies -- reading the start of the paper itself is much more useful than reading the linked article.

chestertn 5y ago

> 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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_and_intelligence

inglor_cz 5y ago
"But just as taller people aren’t any more intelligent than shorter people" Yeah, that sounds a bit suspicious, if we do not make a distinction between "naturally" shorter people and people whose growth was stunted by lack of nutrients in their childhood. For example, growing during periods of famine or war.
- dwaltrip 5y ago
  Surely that was implied.

caddemon 5y ago

I'm extremely skeptical of the claim that male aggression is purely environmental. Higher aggression in males is seen in many species of animals, and it is seen even in mouse models where they are kept in an extremely controlled environment with little socialization. There are plenty of mouse studies out there showing significant differences in brain development between the mouse sexes as well. This article is clearly presenting a single sided perspective on a complicated issue. It is also not a simple "do less harm" sort of thing - in order to one day understand issues like Fibromyalgia it will be critical to study diseases from a female perspective. If one can't acknowledge biological differences (which I have seen in some circles of scientists even), it will only hurt clinical research.

financialize 5y ago
The article is about biological differences in the brain not everywhere else and it's unlikely brain wiring is specific to genders. Brains are adaptive sensory fusion organs and if there were any gender differences it would not be because of the brain but hormonal profiles. Furthermore, the starting point of all humans is female, that's why men have nipples so even men start with "female" brains.
jayd16 5y ago
A simple explanation is hormonal differences might not cause brain differences.
- caddemon 5y ago
  I'm sure the original research article treats it with more nuance, but that's not at all what the linked article is implying: "a gendered world creates a gendered brain, and not the brain itself". Further, there are plenty of studies showing sex differences actually in the brain in mice. How impactful those differences are to behavior is not well known yet, and obviously it is difficult to say exactly how that translates to humans anyway. But there are still differences that are pretty well established, for example in glial cell development. Staci Bilbo is one up and coming PI at Harvard working on glial cell research, and one of her focuses has been sex differences. Some of her work is actually on how hormones interact with these systems: https://www.icon.mgh.harvard.edu/collaborators/staci-bilbo https://www.icon.mgh.harvard.edu/collaborators/staci-bilbo Neuroimmunology in general is pretty wild and I think we will find some gendered differences there. Certain maternal immune activation mouse models of Autism only show abnormal behavior in the males. More generally I think it's accepted that there are gender differences in the immune system: https://www.nature.com/articles/nri.2016.90 https://www.nature.com/articles/nri.2016.90

temp8964 5y ago

Very weak report, Lawrence Summers statement was based on variance, not average. Even if male and female have exactly the same brains on average, it doesn't mean the variances are exactly the same. "Meaningful difference" on average, is not the same as meaningful difference on the tails. Also, evolution is not a woke algorithm, it doesn't just stop working on sex.

inglor_cz 5y ago
"it doesn't just stop working on sex." Or above the neck. This is one of the things that baffles me most about people who claim to respect science. If there are meaningful differences about human populations in all sorts of physical characteristics, why should our mental faculties be precisely averaged out on the same gauge across almost 8 billion individuals? That would be extraordinary to say the least. Now I can understand that we yet do not understand the nature/nurture balance when it comes to the capabilities of our brains and we cannot easily draw conclusions. But to claim that all the observable differences are due to cultural traits, oppression or privilege, sounds as a radically non-scientific opinion to me.
- ralusek 5y ago
  Right. The argument against racism or sexism, for me, has never been founded on the belief that all populations are guaranteed to be exactly the same with their capabilities. The argument against racism/sexism to which I subscribe is that individuals within all populations vary so dramatically between one another, and individuals from every population seem to be capable of manifesting virtually any set of characteristics, that evaluating people as individuals rather than assuming traits from their respective populations is far less error prone. On the flip side, I'm also not asserting that populations are not the same when it comes to their capabilities; it just makes no difference. As stated, the variance between individuals is sufficient that I'd just as soon deal with the individual, rather than treating them as an avatar for some arbitrary collective. It makes no difference to me if less women are inherently interested in engineering, or if exactly as many women are inherently interested in engineering, it matters to me if an individual, woman or not, is not treated/evaluated in accordance with her own characteristics. "In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere." - Ratatouille

xupybd 5y ago

I don't think James Damore argued Women lacked the competence to become engineer's. I understood he was arguing the lacked the desire. That the best way to increase the number of women in the industry was to remove barriers to desire.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

zug_zug 5y ago

https://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/add_user.shtml https://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/add_user.shtml An interactive test that can ascertain your gender simply based on a variety of tests (e.g. rotation of objects in 3d space vs remember locations). It's been around for over a decade and was right on n=5 people I know who have done it. [Sadly requires flash]

torstenvl 5y ago

This is laughably poor reporting on laughably poor science.

throwaway29303 5y ago

This article came off a bit like "nothing to see here, move along." If there's substance I wasn't able to grasp it. I was expecting a bit more. Also, James Damore never claimed few women went into science because, well, they just weren’t inherently good at it. “Issues of intrinsic aptitude,” ... “overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability” kept many women out of the field. The author ought to read his memo[0] ... Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don't have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. ... Note, I’m not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways or that these differences are “just.” I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions. ... Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things ... Women on average are more cooperative ... Women on average are more prone to anxiety ... Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average ... The male gender role is currently inflexible Etc... It's an interesting read. Also, I'm very _very_ curious to know what the transgender community thinks about this new study. Somehow I feel a new storm is a-brewing. [0] - https://www.scribd.com/embeds/355823379/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-D7uQiYlGZPuxGzzrj0X2&show_recommendations=true https://www.scribd.com/embeds/355823379/content?start_page=1...

pessimizer 5y ago
> This article came off a bit like "nothing to see here, move along." If there's substance I wasn't able to grasp it. I was expecting a bit more. It's a metaanalysis of brain studies, which have never consistently found significant differences between female and male brains that were unrelated to size. It's not saying anything new. There's nothing to see here.

MikeUt 5y ago

Related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge... I worry that Hyde’s analysis plays the same trick. She does a wonderful job finding that men and women have minimal differences in eg “likelihood of smiling when not being observed”, “interpersonal leadership style”, et cetera. But if you ask the man on the street “Are men and women different?”, he’s likely to say something like “Yeah, men are more aggressive and women are more sensitive”. And in fact, Hyde found that men were indeed definitely more aggressive, and women indeed definitely more sensitive. But throw in a hundred other effects nobody cares about like “likelihood of smiling when not observed”, and you can report that “78% of gender differences are small or zero”. Hyde found moderate or large gender differences in (and here I’m paraphrasing very scientific-sounding constructs into more understandable terms) aggressiveness, horniness, language abilities, mechanical abilities, visuospatial skills, mechanical ability, tendermindness, assertiveness, comfort with body, various physical abilities, and computer skills.

nitwit005 5y ago

I could see their being no significant high level brain differences (although it suggests a number of about %1), but the idea that there should be no sex related disease differences seems unlikely.

The_rationalist 5y ago

No Meaningful Differences in Male and Female Brains This is a pathetic contra-science claim. I have no idea whether women brains have on average a advantage or a disadvantage at scientific/engineering cognitive tasks. However it is clear that there are meaningful differences in specific tasks, see -> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition There are also many known empirical results (that are not necessarily caused by brain difference but could very well be) study2 of samples of university students, in which we found that the average IQ of men is 4.6 points higher than that of women Women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and the prevalence of anxiety disorders is significantly higher for women (23.4 percent) than men (14.3 percent). Males are generally more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than females, with a male to female ratio of approximately 4:1 in community samples. About twice as many women as men experience depression. Globally, death by suicide occurred about 1.8 times more often among males than among females in 2008, and 1.7 times in 2015.[4][5][6] In the western world, males die by suicide three to four times more often than do females.[4] A way to determine if some of those effects are causative would be to monitor cognitive performance alterations in trans people. To me the greatest possible advantage of a woman brain would be a higher verbal fluency. If hormone changes could make someone's brain win some of the advantage from one gender to another, then he could periodically in its life by changing gender be more optimal at certain cognitive tasks. (of course I don't recommend doing that lol)

fxtentacle 5y ago

This reads like propaganda, not science. Also, I don't get it. "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." Are you saying that aggression is not related to the brain?

Mindwipe 5y ago
It's certainly possible it's primarily hormonally driven where any biological mechanism exists, and there are certainly hormonal mechanisms that are not run by the brain.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  My understanding is that aggression is driven by 3 neurotransmitters inside the brain. (dopamine, GABA, serotonin) That would make it highly likely that differences in aggression are related to differences in receivers for those transmitters in the brain.
  - jayd16 5y ago
    Why is that more likely when men have more testosterone and taking too much testosterone causes aggressive behavior?
jayd16 5y ago
I think its about brain structure, not necessarily brain chemistry.
kaitai 5y ago
They're talking about brain structure ("Males’ brains are larger than females’ from birth, stabilizing around 11 % in adults. This size difference accounts for other reproducible findings: higher white/gray matter ratio, intra- versus interhemispheric connectivity, and regional cortical and subcortical volumes in males. But when structural and lateralization differences are present independent of size, sex/gender explains only about 1% of total variance." -- from the abstract.) So this paper is in some sense about the "hardware" component, rather than the hormones or the programming. I'm not surprised. There's not really much evolutionary sense in building different brain hardware when you can dynamically manipulate so much with hormones and social pressure. Why are people so devoted to the idea that there must be a big structural or anatomical difference? It simply doesn't make sense to me, from observing children before & after puberty -- unless I think of the societal benefits of enforcing belief in structural difference in the brain. It makes division of labor easier and keeps divide & conquer going if you can exploit genders against each other rather than thinking they've got a common interest against another economic class.

lawnchair_larry 5y ago

Awful article with false and slanderous allegations. The study would be interesting, but this blogger’s agenda overshadowing it is not. Can’t believe they are still pushing lies about James Damore. Skip this nonsense and read the actual study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421000804?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976342...

hanklazard 5y ago

Here’s a full list of her publications: https://www.rosalindfranklin.edu/academics/faculty/lise-eliot/#Publications https://www.rosalindfranklin.edu/academics/faculty/lise-elio... Most seem to be pop-science editorials from the past 15 years which make the same basic claim. Certainly one can have a hypothesis, but after this many years, I expect a scientist to actually pursue the question further than just “the weights of these two structures are about the same in men and women”. Where’s the molecular work? This looks more like activism.

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LatteLazy 5y ago

They should have read this study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969295/#!po=0.354610 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969295/#!po=0.... Men's brains are 8 to 13% bigger depending on age. It doesn't seem to lead to higher IQ (itself a terrible measure), though men (boys) are a lot more likely to be diagnosed with a bunch of issues like autism...

kaitai 5y ago
"Males’ brains are larger than females’ from birth, stabilizing around 11 % in adults. This size difference accounts for other reproducible findings: higher white/gray matter ratio, intra- versus interhemispheric connectivity, and regional cortical and subcortical volumes in males. But when structural and lateralization differences are present independent of size, sex/gender explains only about 1% of total variance." -- the abstract
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  Sorry, I feel like I'm missing your point. Per your comment male brains are bigger and different in other ways. You can argue about whether a male brain is bigger because it is male, or because it has higher white/grey ratio because its male. Either way, male -> bigger. Again, I'm not saying bigger is better or smarter or whatever. I'm just pointing out that submitted article seems to be unaware of other (well reproduced) work that disagrees with its conclusions...
The_rationalist 5y ago
Note that brain size can be as much affected by gender than by country of birth.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  I didn't know that, but I am happy to accept it as long as someone has done the research. Given how little brain size actually matters (it's not like blue whales are the dominant species and they win the size race), I don't get why people have such a problem with these stats...

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SamReidHughes 5y ago

A lack of meaningful difference in male and female brains actually supports Summers's explanation of greater male variability. Because of X chromosome mosaicism being one looming factor decreasing female variability (see photographs here: [1]), female brains would have to "catch up" in terms of variance through some other sex differences in how brains function. Obviously, some difference in programming, via "hormones" or whatever, could do it by using different sets of information at the time the brain is constructed. The article is stating that we lack one form of evidence of this. I'd guess it would also be extra difficult for sex-specific brain differences in high-level structure to evolve when X chromosome inactivation happens quasi-randomly. But nature can surprise you... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/science/seeing-x-chromosomes-in-a-new-light.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/science/seeing-x-chromoso...

mbrodersen 5y ago

It is interesting to see that in the most egalitarian countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland) you still find that almost all engineers are male, and almost all nurses are female. Not because of lack of STEM skills (woman in general do as well as men in math) but because of differences in interests. In those countries, When free to choose, woman and men in general make different choices.