Latest Update: Men And Women's Brains Are 'Wired Differently' Says Study

After making a post on how ”Men And Women's Brains Are 'Wired Differently' Says Study” if you missed it see it here, one of my blog readers – Arthur Gillard (Book editor) shared his view on the post. See his view after the cut….  

 “Very highly recommended article on significant flaws in how studies of supposed brain-based gender differences are conducted and reported. I especially like the author's point about experience-dependent brain plasticity (basically: boys and girls are raised very differently, which causes changes in their brains; typically, this effect is NOT taken into account in brain/gender studies).

<snip> To give a sense of the huge overlap in behaviour between males and females, of the twenty-six possible comparisons, eleven sex differences were either non-existent, or so small that if you were to select a boy and girl at random and compare their scores on a task, the “right” sex would be superior less than 53% of the time.

Even the much-vaunted female advantage in social cognition, and male advantage in spatial processing, was so modest that a randomly chosen boy would outscore a randomly chosen girl on social cognition – and the girl would outscore the boy on spatial processing – over 40% of the time...

Yet the authors describe these differences as “pronounced” and as reflecting “behavioural complementarity” – scientific jargon-speak for “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”. Rather than drawing on their impressively rich data-set to empirically test questions about how brain connectivity characteristics relate to behaviour, the authors instead offer untested stereotype-based speculation. Even though, with such considerable overlap in male/female distributions, biological sex is a dismal guide to psychological ability.

Also missing from the study is any mention of experience-dependent brain plasticity. Why?

As prominent feminist neuroscientists have noted, the social phenomenon of gender means that a person’s biological sex has a significant impact on the experiences (including social, material, physical, and mental) she or he encounters which will, in turn, leave neurological traces.

Yet the researchers do not pay any attention to the gendered experiences (such as hobbies, subjects studied at school or higher education, or participation in sporting activities) of the young males and females in their sample... </snip>”