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Gender and the Brain: Are There Differences?
20 Plays27 days ago
Episode 12 of Neuroblast! challenges the myth that gender differences in the brain determine intelligence or abilities. Hosts Athena and Tracey explore its historical roots, reveal how modern neuroscience shows more similarities than differences, and discuss how outdated beliefs reinforce stereotypes. They advocate for focusing on individual potential, not gender-based assumptions.
Original music by: Julian Starr
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Transcript
Introduction of Guests and Topic
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello and welcome to NeuroBlast! I'm Athena Stevens, actor, writer, and woman with a brain here with Dr. Tracey Tokuhama Espinosa, which I think after six months of working with her, have I finally managed to say your name right?
00:00:38
Speaker
Perfect. That was just perfect. And I am an international educational consultant. Hey, as much as it takes fine motor tuning to say Dr. Tracey's name right,
00:00:54
Speaker
Today is going to be a subject that we need to use a scalpel and not a hammer. Because today we are talking about are - - gender differences in the brain?
00:01:11
Speaker
Tracey, I'm having serious deja vu here, and yet I know that this is a hot-button topic. So, are there even gendered brains? Let's start there.
Similarities in Male and Female Brains
00:01:26
Speaker
That is a wonderful question and really a great summary of this whole debate about differences between in brain structure based on gender have been around for centuries. But some of the best research that sort summarizes all of this comes from Cordelia Fine's work, who actually looked at all studies about gender and the brain and tried to come up with, okay, what what is there any there, there? - What is the information really telling us?
00:01:56
Speaker
And to make this ah you know really short synopsis of her bigger findings, she, she did some amazing research. But if you were to draw um a Venn diagram, two circles where they intersect in the middle, right? And you were to call ah the left-hand one um male and the right-hand one female, um what she found is that there are far greater differences between *all* female brains and *all* male brains ... More differences there than there are between male and female brains.
00:02:31
Speaker
This is going to be a very detailed conversation, but basically if you take it into numbers is is it that the standard deviation between men is greater with in men and the standard - deviation in between women is greater within women than - - - -
Challenging Historical Brain Size Assumptions
00:02:57
Speaker
It is - between the genders, is that it? So, historically speaking, there's always this vision that men and women's brains were different because if you look at a man, you look at a woman from the outside, you sort of say, okay, they look kind of different on the outside, so they must be different on the inside. So, these all these presumptions about the brain.
00:03:17
Speaker
And then we had a second presumption that, you know, size is everything and men tended to have bigger brains than women. And so that's because they had bigger bodies. And so they're slightly larger bodies in- inside slightly larger brains, but it turns out that size isn't everything. It turns out that basically it's all the connections that you make between these
Hormones vs. Genetic Makeup in Behavior
00:03:39
Speaker
parts of the brain. And so when we talk about gender and we talk about men and women,
00:03:44
Speaker
Um, we can talk about things that relate to genes, but we can also talk about genetic makeup that influences the levels of different neurotransmitters, only to find what Cordelia Fine's studies were pointing to is that there's this huge range amongst women and amongst men. You have women that have very, very, you know, strong emotional feelings, but they also have strong rationale, right? And same thing with men - and women. So they just cross over at this midsection here in this Venn diagram, where in the middle you have a lot of men and women who may be acting as social norms would not.
00:04:22
Speaker
suggest that they act, but this has to do with levels of hormones. So here's something that a lot of people don't know. Do men and women have the same hormones? Yes, they do.
00:04:34
Speaker
They just have them in different quantities. And so hormones do influence behavior. You know, people, you you talk about people acting, ah you know, out or - well, that has to do with the chemical
Physical Brain Differences and Behavior Impact
00:04:47
Speaker
exchanges in your brain. So it's not, um yes, genetics plays into this, but when we look at real differences, if you want to measure differences in certain behaviors, they can be traced much more easily to differences in neurotransmitters or neurochemical exchanges or other hormonal exchanges, much more so than they can to the physical structure of the brain. There's nothing physical in the brain that's telling you that these guys should be different.
00:05:13
Speaker
In fact, Fein's work found that there's only about five physical differences in the brain, very slight, right? The men's, I believe it's the right amygdala is slightly larger than you know women proportionally speaking.
00:05:29
Speaker
But what's interesting is that there are very, very, very very few, if any, studies that actually correlate that to behavioral things. So the five little differences women have typically proportionately speaking larger corpus callosium, the span of fibers that links the left and and right hemispheres, slightly larger than men. But there's very few studies that would ever point to behavioral differences due to that, right? And so um that leads to, for example, those ah very interesting, another neuromyth about multitasking. Oh, if they have a bigger corpus callosium, they can link things in different sides of their brains, and therefore they're better at multitasking.
00:06:09
Speaker
Well, that's wrong too. So the little information that we have and the, uh, the few, the handful of studies that we do have that are actually, um, a greater analysis of all the body of work like Cordelia Fines work do point to very little differences, uh, between men and
Debunking Gender Myths and Social Influence
00:06:28
Speaker
women's brains.
00:06:28
Speaker
Yes, we are all different obviously, but, um, blaming things on gender, um - - And, um, blaming things ah about gender and behavior onto the brain is probably less productive than looking at all the other social factors that go into expectations about how men and women behave.
00:06:48
Speaker
So, for example, multitasking, which is also going to be a whole other episode in a - few weeks, but presumably women are socialized to multitask to some extent.
00:07:06
Speaker
And that is exactly the big, big, big, big stick in the ground that people like Nora Newcombe have sort of placed in the ground and said, look it.
Socialization's Role in Academic Performance
00:07:17
Speaker
Yes, there are differences. For example, um women typically get better grades throughout their lifespan. If you go to, if you look at any comparative studies from kindergarten through PhDs, women tend to have a higher GPA. if They just get better grades.
00:07:30
Speaker
That can be for a ton of different reasons. What's so interesting then, if you were if you presume that, you think that their brains were sort of equipped for school or something in ah in a different kind of way. That's just not not really where we're we we want to take the conversation because it is not really true. What she's found is that there's such a huge um aspect to the way kids are socialized that changes their outputs, their outcomes.
00:07:59
Speaker
And the coolest thing that she found um is that of all the different grades that men and women get throughout school, there's one blip on the radar. They don't do as well in things of- in, in tests of spatial reasoning.
00:08:12
Speaker
And so what she figured is, okay, what's going on between, if it was a general thing, girls should be generally good at all things, you know, superior in all aspects of mathematical reasoning and all these other things. And she found that, you know, typically they did come out on top.
Gendered Toys and Spatial Reasoning Skills
00:08:28
Speaker
What she then looked at was the bigger question of how is it that things that are unrelated to your genetic makeup, or to determining your your sex or your gender, how is it that things in the social context change your ability to do well in school?
00:08:47
Speaker
And she looked at, for example, the toys that we give children. And she spent a lot of time trying to understand what is it? Why would it be in this one space of spatial reasoning that boys are so much better than girls?
00:09:03
Speaker
And if you look at what we do typically in a little, you know, ah little girls and little boys, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, as they're growing up, what kinds of toys do we typically give them?
00:09:17
Speaker
And she found that boys received a lot more toys that really pushed them to have a strong sense of spatial reasoning. Um, car building, car tracks, or railroad tracks or Legos or things that actually required a lot more spatial reasoning.
00:09:35
Speaker
So they basically rehearsed that a lot more than the girls did. So in her experiments, some of them are really fascinating, but some of them just basically take um little girls and give them spatial reasoning toys and let them play with them for a couple of rounds. And then after that, they're equal or better to the boys. And so basically she's pointing out to a lot of things we do in societal structures, um societal expectations, of what is a girl toy or a boy toy or whatever, um, and how that changes our ability, our brain's abilities in the long run.
00:10:08
Speaker
I think this links back to something you said earlier in the episode, which I think is imortant as we're in this maelstrom about sex and gender, and that is when you meet a brain, you're meeting that individual's unique brain.
Emphasizing Individual Brain Uniqueness
00:10:32
Speaker
You're not meeting a male brain or a female brain. You're meeting Tracy's brain or Athena's brain or you know, Pedro's brain.
00:10:47
Speaker
and I think that all of that means, to some degree or another, each brain, there's these generalizable things, and yet each brain is individualized to that individual's experience, environment, ah the unique hormones, chemicals, all of it.
00:11:14
Speaker
So it really is about the neuroscience of you, the individual, and figuring out how your brain works. That's a great summary.
00:11:25
Speaker
And that's exactly true. I think that the real big points that we have is that people, number one, we should accept that - our, our brains are more alike than they are different, right? That typically human brains, you know, are more alike than they are different.
00:11:38
Speaker
But the differences are dramatic. And they do they do make a difference in the final - learning abilities, outcomes, social interactions that people have. So as we mentioned in another episode, when we talked about nature via nurture, you know, and plus free will, having who you are is influenced by so many of these different factors. And so just talking about gender and saying, oh, because that is a genetic ah determined thing.
00:12:09
Speaker
does not really benefit the conversation because it doesn't advance us to looking at the really nuanced ways that we do become different um through our life experiences and through the habituated actions and through the toys our families choose to give us. It's so fascinating is that it is a combination. We are all this beautiful combination of nature via nurture, um, plus free will. There's a lot of choice involved there as well as we get older, how we choose to - habituate certain kinds of contexts and situations and people and experiences that reinforces the way we are or expands the way we could be. So, all of those things are definitely important. You're absolutely right. So, it seems a bit silly to ask, why this myth persists?
Persistence of Gender Myths in Education
00:12:58
Speaker
Because there are so many reasons for it to do so but-
00:13:05
Speaker
What is convenient about this myth that we hold on to it? Well, it's very, very easy. I'll give you one um illustration that was pretty interesting I had recently where the school, that was a religious school, divided um boys and girls - and, it was a very interesting decision. They said, well, yes, - everybody is together in the early years, but starting around after fourth grade, we separate boys and girls um for the rest of their education.
00:13:40
Speaker
And I said, okay, why do you do that? Because society doesn't do that and you have to walk down the street and be together all the time. So why do you have the division of genders. And they said, well, they learn differently.
00:13:52
Speaker
And I said, actually, that's a really interesting thing. How do you think boys learn? How do you think girls learn? And the - the typical stereotypes started to come out about, you know, that the boys needed more or different kinds of discipline. And, um you know, girls needed much more ah time and loving care and we're never going to reach the same levels and things like math and science. So they needed to be coddled in a different way. And it was a very interesting talk.
00:14:20
Speaker
And their belief systems were, were fascinating - they were very wrong. And I pointed to a lot of the literature that showed that the one true benefit, for example, of separating boys and girls into the middle and high school years, there's only one real advantage, which is pretty interesting.
00:14:37
Speaker
And that's that um girls... stand for more leadership positions in in student councils and stuff like that when there are only girls that they're competing with.
00:14:48
Speaker
But they don't try to, um you know, compete for school, you know, student council things or positions of leadership or the class president or anything like that when there's boys. But that was the only thing.
00:14:59
Speaker
There was no other differences or benefits - to either group - by doing the separation. Now there might be some benefits to a teacher who thinks that they can do things, you know, a little differently with all girls or all boys or whatever, but there, there doesn't seem to be a real huge benefit there. So one of the things is that we have very strong, and in certain societies stronger than others, strong beliefs about what a boy should be or what a girl should be or how people should end up, um,
00:15:28
Speaker
ah performing or behaving. And so when people act differently from those norms or expectations - then we have trouble with that. And so the myths persist because I think it's convenient.
00:15:40
Speaker
It's easier on the teachers to do this division. It's not necessarily - at all - better um or superior in in terms of um student learning outcomes, because that's not the way we live. We live together, so we should learn to always work together. So that's a really difficult one there.
Boys' Maturity and Puberty Onset
00:15:57
Speaker
But, having said all of those things, there is there's some newer and more fascinating research that really gives us a reason to sort of ah take a a little more pity on boys. Um, the newer research from the ABCD studies, ah um Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development, longitudinal studies, is really first labeled that the onset of puberty in girls is between 8 and 11 and boys is between 9 and 12.
00:16:26
Speaker
That's showing that boys are typically a year behind in um the onset of puberty, right? Which we equate in a lot of structures with maturity.
00:16:36
Speaker
And we think of boys having all these behavioral issues and all the rest of it. Well, maybe they're little bit, you know, behind on the social scale of development. So it may very well be that we are mistreating um all boys by actually having them in the same -
00:16:55
Speaker
classrooms with girls who are older, more mature, behave themselves better, you know, do the homework and all the rest of it. In- in comparison, it makes the boys look terrible. And so that's another set of social norms. We've decided that school is by an age, not by maturity level and not by social interaction level and not by other things that may very well influence how well you do in school. And so It's a very interesting thing, you know, how how we work with, um you know, the different genders in in school settings as well, because we are putting boys to a disadvantage in some senses, but then we're putting girls at disadvantages by not treating them equally as far as ah other types of things, like they can do construction sets and boys can, you know, coddle dolls and things like that. - - Those are things that we haven't really gotten used to yet.
00:17:47
Speaker
So back - several years ago when I was a spokesperson for the UK 's Women Equality Party, it was specifically for women,
00:18:01
Speaker
women's representation in the media. So how we see women both the news but equally on cleaning ads, on race car ads, all of that. And it's really easy for me to say well, I've got this. It was my job than to talk about um the inequality of how we view men and women and everything in between and how - in gendering these roles we create
00:18:39
Speaker
discrepancy then differences in the brain.
Media Representation and Cognitive Biases
00:18:42
Speaker
But I also know that I am blind to my own cognitive bias, as we all are. I think many of our listeners will be sitting here in this fifteen twenty minute podcast going, well, that's not me.
00:18:59
Speaker
I don't do that. What actionable steps can we do to check ourselves to go when I am meeting human being, I am meeting an individual
00:19:13
Speaker
Brain. Yeah, so how is it that we approach individuals with that, and that is a wonderful question because that is ah definitely something that every individual can do.
00:19:23
Speaker
But I don't think we typically spend a lot of time talking to ourselves or asking ourselves, you know, where is this person from? What are their cultural norms? Why would it, why would that lead them to believe or act this way?
00:19:34
Speaker
Give you another concrete story. When I first went down um and ah met my, my husband's friends and families in, in Ecuador, there was it's typical, and this connects to another podcast we did, to ah humor can be tied to things about race and gender and all those other things, and which is something that is such big taboo in other in other spaces, right? And so cultural norms really...
00:20:00
Speaker
blind us to our ways of being, how it is that we see and and - - look at the world. And so one of the first things that we could actually do is become just more aware of where we come from and what we think we believe, and also then open to looking at other ways of doing things and thinking about things.
00:20:19
Speaker
um I found myself you know really pushed to think about this a lot late recently with all of these um bigger conversations around gender. And, to one extent, I really would love to to return to what you're saying and and just say, you know, why aren't we just talking to individual individuals, like people, um without all of this, the worry of the window dressing of, okay, am I...
00:20:45
Speaker
What are the labels of the of of the gender and and of the race and all of these? Am I being ageist? And what are my own personal biases in these things? But I think that that is a good first stop is to ask ourselves, what are our own unconscious biases that we might have?
00:21:02
Speaker
um that cause us to interact with people and have different social expectations based on things like gender. And that's really hard to do because we're, you know, we've lived with our own brains for so long that we've habituated a way of interacting with people, but beginning to ask ourselves, you know, just what is it that's unique to the table this person is bringing to us? Not not necessarily is that because, they you know, their woman-ness or their manliness or whatever it is can maybe color the way that they interact with their worlds, but how is it that we interpret them should not be biased by our own beliefs about what we expect of those genders.
Self-reflection on Biases and Individuality
00:21:42
Speaker
So it always going back and looking inward and knowing thy self. I think you're absolutely right. It's actually a ah self-reflection to be able to understand what's going on in the outside world. So you know, at the bottom, or, you know, are there gender differences? There are gender differences. Um, but do they really influence whether or not a person can be a great um astronaut or therapist or a good writer or an actor or somebody who's going to be a caring or loving human? Those things are definitely up in the air. It's much more how you have been raised.
00:22:15
Speaker
I think it's much better to look at people at face value of what they bring to the table, as opposed to trying to you know, box pigeonhole them into these little categories we have, which is the way your brain, you know, wants to order things. I want to know what to expect. And therefore I use ah my own past structures to do that. Well, some of those are filled with, - filled with bias and we need to be able to examine ourselves to do that better.
Conclusion and Audience Encouragement
00:22:40
Speaker
I think that is a great place to end it. Thank you so much, Tracey. Thank you to our audience for listening to Neuroblast. If you enjoyed this episode, if it made you think about own - brain and the miracle that it is and the miracle of every single brain that you meet, please like and subscribe and share.
00:23:09
Speaker
this podcast with your friends. It really helps us out. And remember, Neuro blast, is produced by AGEIS productions. This episode going to take a lot of talent to edit and I just want to thank my computer for what I'm about to put it through, but we will get there.
00:23:40
Speaker
Remember, keep those neurons firing and we will see you next time on Neuroblast.