Science Says ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ Brains Don’t Exist
You know that guy who loves to rain on your gender equality parade by telling you that men’s and women’s brains are fundamentally different? Now you can tell him that science says he’s wrong.
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined thousands of brain scans and concluded that the differences between men’s and women’s brains are pretty minimal. While there are individual brain structures that are more common in men or women, the vast majority of brains can’t be categorized as predominantly ‘male’ or ‘female.’ Instead, most people’s brains have a mixture of ‘male’ and ‘female’ structures.
The study is believed to be the first to analyze gender differences using the whole brain and not just isolated parts of it. As one of the researchers noted, the findings have “important implications for social debates on long-standing issues such as the desirability of single-sex education and the meaning of sex/gender as a social category.”
About the Author
Julianne Helinek is Take The Lead's blog editor and writer of the newsletter Take The Lead This Week. She thinks the women she knows are too talented not to be running the world, and she’s especially interested in bringing more men into the gender equality conversation. Julianne is an MBA student at NYU’s Stern School of Business. For more on feminism in the business school world, follow her on Twitter at @thefeministmba.