GENDER BRAINS

Intro: It is often pointed where we differ, but when it comes to our brains, research shows that there are far more similarities than differences

WE are told that men and women are so different, it’s as if they came from separate planets. Martian men are stereotypically target-focused, assertive, and good at navigating; women born on Venus are more empathetic, caring, and expert multitaskers. We are all fascinated by what makes the other sex tick, but back on Earth, when it comes to brains, much of what’s been written about the sex divide is more science fiction than scientific fact.

Websites and news outlets have seeped scientific-sounding theories into common wisdom, such as the idea that women listen with both sides of their brain, whereas men use only one side; or that men and women navigate using “entirely different” brain regions. Some even claim that there is a “male brain” and a “female brain”.

These ideas often have their roots in scientific research, but much of it is based on early experiments in our brains which were either found later to be insignificant, or their results were misinterpreted or misreported.

Scientists are suckers for wanting to tell a story that will be the talk of the town – and the media are willing accomplices. Less headline-grabbing experiments that show little or no difference can get stuffed in the drawer, never to see the light of day.

So, what does the science really say? From the eighth week in the womb, little boys’ and girls’ brains do start to develop slightly differently. Throughout our lives, the sex hormones testosterone, oestrogen, and progesterone mould our individual physical and emotional development. Hormone level differences tweak the dial on characteristics such as aggression, pain threshold, stress response, and parent-child bonding, but each person is so unique that there is often more variation within each sex than there is between them.

Male and female brains don’t differ significantly in size, either. Men’s brains are slightly larger as a consequence of their larger bodies, and thanks to detailed scanning we know that some brain parts differ in proportion between the sexes, but the differences are too small to claim that there is such a thing as a “male brain” or a “female brain”.

Most areas of mental functioning, behaviour and personality are the same in both sexes. What differences there are, such as in aggression levels, are usually driven by the differences in sex hormones such as testosterone after puberty.

Nature or nurture?

Recent research points to the historic sex divide actually being down to society, not science. When the magnifying glass of science reveals the workings of the brain, the accepted male and female stereotypes mostly vanish.

Some scientists now think that what differences there are between male and female brains – such as, say, in map reading – are the result not of biology, but of thousands of years of brain-training. The good news, however, is the brain is brilliant at learning new things – you can adapt and learn many new skills within a lifetime.

So it is logical that, if given the opportunity, men and women can learn skills stereotypical of the other sex very easily. For example, children who are given Lego to play with are likely to mature and have brains which have larger spatial cortexes, regardless of whether they are male or female.