Though only surprising or outrageous if you denied obvious signs for political reasons. There are biological differences starting from conception, and it would have been surprising if that didn't manifest in the brain.
No it's not. It is however obvious that you're a fan of Simon Baron-Cohen. It's also obvious that you're trying to downplay the holes in his research.
"Why do so many scientific studies highlight gender differences?
When science journalist Angela Saini was on book tour, a man approached her from the audience. He stuck his face right up in hers and backed her body into a corner. All this to spit out: “Women just aren't as good at science as men are. They've been shown to be less intelligent.” Saini listed names of celebrated female scientists and cited a few studies, but he wouldn’t budge. "In the end," she admits, "I gave up. There was nothing I could say for him to think of me as his equal."
Earlier this year, Saini published the book that man should have been reading instead of denigrating women in STEM. It's called 'Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story'.
'Inferior' is "a set of scientific arguments...to reinforce that equality isn’t just a political ideal but every woman’s natural, biological right," Saini writes in her introduction. Through 100+ years of biology, anthropology, and neuroscience research, she illustrates that many studies on hard-wired gender differences have been debunked, exaggerated, or misinterpreted by the press. Few of these studies have been successfully replicated. Female scientists have even conducted research with different results, only to find their male counterparts were unwilling to acknowledge them. Scientific journals looking for cutting-edge research don't showcase the majority of gender difference experiments, which reveal that there aren't many differences at all -- at least not statistically significant ones.
Worst of all, these dubious "facts" are perpetuating myths on gender that still haunt women today. Over the next three Sundays, I’ll be sharing three scientific studies that Saini dissects in Inferior. I hope these give you counterarguments whenever somebody tries to tell you how your female brain works.
[...]
SIMON BARON-COHEN & "SYSTEMATIZING-EMPATHIZING" BRAINS
Remember Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard who insisted women's brains are worse at grappling with STEM subjects? The study used to defend his remarks was an experiment done on infants, testing the hypothesis that girls are born as empathizers and boys are born as systematizers. Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Cambridge University, led the charge. [...]
“Its basic message,” Saini writes, “is that the “female” brain is hardwired for empathy, while the “male” brain is built for analyzing and building systems, like cars and computers.” Baron-Cohen's reasoning is that male fetuses are exposed to more testosterone in the womb, which he links to systemizing behavior. Girl babies, with their lack of testosterone, are left behind.
Suffice it to say that there are problems with the Baron-Cohen experiment. Since its findings were published in 2000, other scientists have not only discovered multiple errors in the experiment design, but have failed to replicate the results. They’ve even conducted new experiments with results contradicting Baron-Cohen’s conclusions."
I don't know who this guy you're talking about is but you can look at the grade distributions men and women have in school and see a pretty obvious difference.
You could argue there's an environmental reason men have a more shallow (wider variance) distribution while women tend to have a narrower one with a higher mean but I haven't heard a good argument for it.
At the end of the day this of course says very little about individuals, I think that's the mistake people make looking at these sorts of statistics and ideas (and why everyone gets so hung up on the idea that there are mental differences between the sexes.) Even individual performance academically says almost nothing about their ability to perform professionally IMO.
Male/Female gaze/attention experiments in infants has been reproduced many times. Some scientists say the differences aren't big enough to make a difference (lets say, in behaviour), but I'd argue we have no idea what a large enough difference would be if we saw it - all we know is the difference exists.
I am extremely dubious about most supposed differences between the brains of men and women — given how much my own psyche can be changed by the hormonal boost from exercise, or all the research showing that things as simple as “being taller”[0] or “handling money”[1] can influence us, there’s a lot of noise compared to signal.
However, if there were no differences at all, everyone would be equally attracted to men as to women, and nobody would be trans.
That’s pretty much the limit of what I can argue, given I’m software developer not a biology PhD.
I'm sure there are, but I'm not sure this approach can correctly identify them. There's a well known size difference in brains between the genders, but obviously within the genders as well. Common MRI practice is to map each brain onto a standard shape; otherwise the regions can differ too much. They've done that here too, it would seem. But that involves distorting areas, and I didn't see that they could exclude that as a reason for the difference. So there's a difference, but to me it's not clear where they come from. Perhaps someone who's more experienced in diffusion tensor imaging knows.
There is a measurable size difference in that statistically male humans have slightly larger brains than female humans but there is not a measurable distinction of mass thereby indicating female brains comprise higher density brain tissue. To my knowledge there isn’t a correlation in that sex density difference to observed performance measures.
I've always understood the average difference in brain mass is in the order of 15%.
> observed performance measures
I only know of higher variation in male performance. But since we can't even define intelligence beyond some coarse and hard to quantify concepts, I don't think there's a sufficiently firm conclusion to reach from small differences in average intelligence in relation to brain size or mass (which seem to only reach an r^2 of 0.1).
Chromosomes. But I'm sure different ways of socializing also have an effect on the brain, although it might not be so easy to find a physical correlate of it.
I've been the Guardian so I am pretty certain that there are zero biological differences between the sexes, this resarch is clearly conducted by the alt right
I think part of the problem is the history of misogyny in science and how some of these types of studies have reinforced that.
Having said that, I think there are real uses for this type of experiment and potential conclusions, if they can be separated from the ideological issues.
But also looking at those charts, it feels like the degree of difference might not be as great as some may assume.
And, there is nothing in this study about the occupations or hobbies of the subjects, which I believe could significantly affect the brain structure.
Are you accusing a convolutional neural network of being misogynistic? Despite frequent attempts to muddy the waters by certain self-promoting parties, machine learning is probably the closest to an unbiased system imperfect humans can construct!
Admittedly, it's still vulnerable to Garbage In, Garbage Out as all computer programs are. You have to be careful you're asking the right question, and interpreting the answer correctly, which isn't always as easy as it seems. But to immediately discount the study because it might disagree with your ideology seems like a poor approach (if an all too human one).
Anyway, even in the current hyper-polarized climate, I don't see this study as saying anything particularly controversial unless you're VERY far on the fringe. Male and female brains are different enough physically, especially in certain areas, for a CNN to tell them apart with 90-ish percent accuracy. There's some discussion of what the implications of this might be, but only barely. Given that male and female biology is clearly distinct in any number of other ways, both dramatic and subtle, this is more or less what you'd expect.
Men and women don’t have to be exactly the same for them to have equal rights. Maybe certain people aren’t smart enough to separate those two concepts, but that doesn’t mean we should be at their mercy regarding what we can publicly admit is true. We don’t have to dumb ourselves down like this.
21 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 50.7 ms ] threadNo it's not. It is however obvious that you're a fan of Simon Baron-Cohen. It's also obvious that you're trying to downplay the holes in his research.
"Why do so many scientific studies highlight gender differences?
When science journalist Angela Saini was on book tour, a man approached her from the audience. He stuck his face right up in hers and backed her body into a corner. All this to spit out: “Women just aren't as good at science as men are. They've been shown to be less intelligent.” Saini listed names of celebrated female scientists and cited a few studies, but he wouldn’t budge. "In the end," she admits, "I gave up. There was nothing I could say for him to think of me as his equal."
Earlier this year, Saini published the book that man should have been reading instead of denigrating women in STEM. It's called 'Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story'.
'Inferior' is "a set of scientific arguments...to reinforce that equality isn’t just a political ideal but every woman’s natural, biological right," Saini writes in her introduction. Through 100+ years of biology, anthropology, and neuroscience research, she illustrates that many studies on hard-wired gender differences have been debunked, exaggerated, or misinterpreted by the press. Few of these studies have been successfully replicated. Female scientists have even conducted research with different results, only to find their male counterparts were unwilling to acknowledge them. Scientific journals looking for cutting-edge research don't showcase the majority of gender difference experiments, which reveal that there aren't many differences at all -- at least not statistically significant ones.
Worst of all, these dubious "facts" are perpetuating myths on gender that still haunt women today. Over the next three Sundays, I’ll be sharing three scientific studies that Saini dissects in Inferior. I hope these give you counterarguments whenever somebody tries to tell you how your female brain works.
[...]
SIMON BARON-COHEN & "SYSTEMATIZING-EMPATHIZING" BRAINS
Remember Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard who insisted women's brains are worse at grappling with STEM subjects? The study used to defend his remarks was an experiment done on infants, testing the hypothesis that girls are born as empathizers and boys are born as systematizers. Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Cambridge University, led the charge. [...]
“Its basic message,” Saini writes, “is that the “female” brain is hardwired for empathy, while the “male” brain is built for analyzing and building systems, like cars and computers.” Baron-Cohen's reasoning is that male fetuses are exposed to more testosterone in the womb, which he links to systemizing behavior. Girl babies, with their lack of testosterone, are left behind.
Suffice it to say that there are problems with the Baron-Cohen experiment. Since its findings were published in 2000, other scientists have not only discovered multiple errors in the experiment design, but have failed to replicate the results. They’ve even conducted new experiments with results contradicting Baron-Cohen’s conclusions."
Source: https://www.writingonglass.com/content/gender-differences-sc...
You could argue there's an environmental reason men have a more shallow (wider variance) distribution while women tend to have a narrower one with a higher mean but I haven't heard a good argument for it.
At the end of the day this of course says very little about individuals, I think that's the mistake people make looking at these sorts of statistics and ideas (and why everyone gets so hung up on the idea that there are mental differences between the sexes.) Even individual performance academically says almost nothing about their ability to perform professionally IMO.
However, if there were no differences at all, everyone would be equally attracted to men as to women, and nobody would be trans.
That’s pretty much the limit of what I can argue, given I’m software developer not a biology PhD.
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/know-your-mind/20140...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2009/08/07/111579154/study-your-brain-th...
He is the cousin of Sacha Baron-Cohen, the actor and comedian playing Borat, Ali G and many other characters.
No political comment, value or agenda whatsoever. Just thought Baron-Cohen is a unique surname and the probability of a coincidence was very low.
There is a measurable size difference in that statistically male humans have slightly larger brains than female humans but there is not a measurable distinction of mass thereby indicating female brains comprise higher density brain tissue. To my knowledge there isn’t a correlation in that sex density difference to observed performance measures.
> observed performance measures
I only know of higher variation in male performance. But since we can't even define intelligence beyond some coarse and hard to quantify concepts, I don't think there's a sufficiently firm conclusion to reach from small differences in average intelligence in relation to brain size or mass (which seem to only reach an r^2 of 0.1).
Does it mean chromosome? Xx, xy, xxy,? Or how one socializes?
Having said that, I think there are real uses for this type of experiment and potential conclusions, if they can be separated from the ideological issues.
But also looking at those charts, it feels like the degree of difference might not be as great as some may assume.
And, there is nothing in this study about the occupations or hobbies of the subjects, which I believe could significantly affect the brain structure.
Admittedly, it's still vulnerable to Garbage In, Garbage Out as all computer programs are. You have to be careful you're asking the right question, and interpreting the answer correctly, which isn't always as easy as it seems. But to immediately discount the study because it might disagree with your ideology seems like a poor approach (if an all too human one).
Anyway, even in the current hyper-polarized climate, I don't see this study as saying anything particularly controversial unless you're VERY far on the fringe. Male and female brains are different enough physically, especially in certain areas, for a CNN to tell them apart with 90-ish percent accuracy. There's some discussion of what the implications of this might be, but only barely. Given that male and female biology is clearly distinct in any number of other ways, both dramatic and subtle, this is more or less what you'd expect.
I said "the history". As in, _other_ studies have been used to reinforce misogyny in the past.
And I did not come close to "immediately discount".
Please read my comment again.