MEXICO: Your brain is not male or female. It’s a unique mosaic of features.
Some of them are more common in men, some are more common in women. But the number of people who have only ‘mostly-found-in-men’ features or ‘mostly-found-in women’ features is very low indeed – just a couple of per cent.
Even in groups that show highly stereotyped gender-specific behaviour, such as middle-class teenagers, the range of gendered brain features is as wide as would be found anywhere else.
Indeed, the lumps and bumps of grey and white matter inside your skull seem not to correspond at all to the gender-stereotyped behaviour that we exhibit on the outside, according to a new large study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the last 24 hours headlines have essentially screamed neurosexism (the idea that gender differences in our characters are caused by biological variations) is a busted flush, to be consigned to the dustbin of history along with graphology and phrenology.
You might be thinking ‘hang on a second’ – your non-gendered brain fluttering and pinging with confusion – ‘there clearly are differences between men and women’. Even leaving aside the glaring anecdotal evidence that we come across every day, there have been well-conducted studies that truly did find that most women don’t perform as well in spatial reasoning tasks (mentally rotating three-dimensional shapes and the like), but do better when identifying the emotion displayed in photographs of faces.
