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[–]Realwoman 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

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Despite well-documented innate structural brain differences and the sex-specific early socialisation under which the brain plastically develops, males and females show an extraordinarily large overlap in psychological traits and cognitive types (empathic vs. systemic e.g. (Greenberg, Warrier et al. 2018)). In terms of cognitive abilities, psychology and behavioural expression, studies show that there are no clear male or female brains. One such study conducted in almost half a million people endeavoured to track brain-type differences and the signature of autism by scoring empathy (emotion), sensorial perception and systemizing (analytical) quotients using a simple questionnaire. Despite the complete overlap in the score distribution between male and female controls for these three parameters, the study found a small difference in the sex-specific averages and proceeded to conclude that there are typical female (empathic) and male (analytical) brains. However, what the data truly show is that the distributions are almost identical between men and women, with only a small difference in the modes (score reached by the highest number of people) of these 3 parameters between males and females. This means that the majority of men and women share the same score distribution for these parameters with a slightly increased number of men scoring marginally higher on the systematic quotient and lower on the empathic quotient compared to women. In addition, the finding that females score slightly higher on average for empathy for instance could be due to two factors: 1) the study relies on subjective responses to a coarse questionnaire, therefore the answers are subjective and can be influenced by internalised social expectations and 2) the alleged greater empathy displayed by women on average may be due entirely to socialisation in a world that often expects women to assume caring (empathetic) roles. The empathic- and systemic-type brains exist in both males and females including in their extreme manifestation and the variability observed within a sex is much greater than the average difference between sexes. (Baron-Cohen, Richler et al. 2003, Greenberg, Warrier et al. 2018)