Accept it, feminists – women’s and men’s brains simply aren’t the same

Sep 26, 2017 by Jill

by Julie Lynn, TCW:

In November 2016 an article in The Times reported a claim by scientists that researchers had been ignoring gender differences in the brain for fear of being labelled sexist. Neurobiologist Prof Larry Cahill, as guest editor of the Journal of Neuroscience Research, said: ‘The heart of the resistance is the view that if neuroscience shows males and females are not the same in brain function, we are showing they are not equal. That is false.’ He went on to add that the practice of studying male brains and then extrapolating those findings to female brains led to generalisations that put men’s health at risk when it came to the development of drugs, for instance in Alzheimer’s research.

In April this year another article, this time in the US publication Science, reported on how the largest brain imaging study of its kind had found sex-specific patterns in the brain. It was careful to point out immediately that ‘overall there were more similarities than differences’ but that the work did raise ‘new questions about how brain differences between the sexes may influence intelligence and behaviour.’ There was mention of how cortices were thicker in women and how this was associated with higher scores in a variety of cognitive and intelligence tests, and it stated also that men had higher brain volume than women in every subcortical region they looked at. These included the hippocampus (broad roles in memory and spatial awareness), the amygdala (emotions, memory, decision-making), striatum (learning, inhibition and reward processing) and thalamus (processing and relaying sensory information to other parts of the brain).

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