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[–][deleted] 18 insightful - 1 fun18 insightful - 0 fun19 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

The differences of male and female brain anatomy are well documented. They are different physically, in their size, composition, and distribution.

"Males and females differ in some aspects of their brains, notably the overall difference in size, with men having larger brains on average (between 8% and 13% larger when not corrected for body size)"

I'm just going off the scientific journalism here.

“If you correct for height weight body mass index, then you find the structural differences you think you found will disappear,” she says. “Men also have bigger hearts, livers and kidneys but we don’t currently have a big industry researching that.”

This article https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00677-x talks about some of your other points while discussing her work.

As Rippon shows, the hunt for proof of women’s inferiority has more recently elided into the hunt for proof of male–female ‘complementarity’. So, this line goes, women are not really less intelligent than men, just ‘different’ in a way that happens to coincide with biblical teachings and the status quo of gender roles. Thus, women’s brains are said to be wired for empathy and intuition, whereas male brains are supposed to be optimized for reason and action.

This was how researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia framed a highly touted 2014 MRI study that seared into the public imagination a picture of men’s and women’s brains as diametrically opposed subway maps: the connections in women are mostly between hemispheres, and those in men within them (M. Ingalhalikar et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, 823–828; 2014). However, the map omits the vast majority of connections that did not differ between the study’s adolescent participants; nor did it control for puberty-related maturation or, once again, for brain size, all of which reduces apparent male–female difference.

And

Neurosexism

The history of sex-difference research is rife with innumeracy, misinterpretation, publication bias, weak statistical power, inadequate controls and worse. Rippon, a leading voice against the bad neuroscience of sex differences, uncovers so many examples in this ambitious book that she uses a whack-a-mole metaphor to evoke the eternal cycle. A brain study purports to discover a difference between men and women; it is publicized as, ‘At last, the truth!’, taunting political correctness; other researchers expose some hyped extrapolation or fatal design flaw; and, with luck, the faulty claim fades away — until the next post hoc analysis produces another ‘Aha!’ moment and the cycle repeats. As Rippon shows, this hunt for brain differences “has been vigorously pursued down the ages with all the techniques that science could muster”. And it has exploded in the past three decades, since MRI research joined the fray.

Yet, as The Gendered Brain reveals, conclusive findings about sex-linked brain differences have failed to materialize. Beyond the “missing five ounces” of female brain — gloated about since the nineteenth century — modern neuroscientists have identified no decisive, category-defining differences between the brains of men and women. In women’s brains, language-processing is not spread any more evenly across the hemispheres than it is in men’s, as a small 1995 Nature study proclaimed but a large 2008 meta-analysis disproved (B. A. Shaywitz et al. Nature 373, 607–609 (1995) and I. E. Sommer et al. Brain Res. 1206, 76–88; 2008). Brain size increases with body size, and certain features, such as the ratio of grey to white matter or the cross-sectional area of a nerve tract called the corpus callosum, scale slightly non-linearly with brain size. But these are differences in degree, not kind. As Rippon notes, they are not seen when we compare small-headed men to large-headed women, and have no relationship to differences in hobbies or take-home pay.

[–]ANIKAHirsch 3 insightful - 5 fun3 insightful - 4 fun4 insightful - 5 fun -  (2 children)

Are men and women different, or not?

Say all you want about the particulars of those differences.

10% is a significant difference in size. Point is, it will show up on a brain scan. As will the differences in composition and distribution. So what this article says is not true.

A doctor would never argue that there are no differences between male and female heart, lungs, or kidneys. It is well accepted that men and women must be treated differently in a medical environment, due to their differences.

Gina Rippon obviously has prior-held beliefs on this subject, and is only doing the research to confirm those. He is not a neutral observer here.

[–]just_lesbian_things 17 insightful - 2 fun17 insightful - 1 fun18 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

10% is a significant difference in size. Point is, it will show up on a brain scan.

Men are taller than women on average, but it doesn't mean everyone under 6 ft is a woman. Men have larger feet but there isn't a given "male foot". I'm sure if I showed you a severed foot, you would struggle to identify the sex of the owner just by looking at it.

[–]luckystar 17 insightful - 2 fun17 insightful - 1 fun18 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

The height analogy always made the most sense to me. Like yes, if somebody is 6 ft tall, they are overwhelmingly likely to be male, but that doesn't mean we need to go schedule the entire WNBA for double mastectomies because "tall bodies are male bodies".

There's also the fact that if there were such a thing as "male brains" and "female brains", the occurrence of men with "female brains" and vice versa would disprove their existence, as they would no longer be "male brains" or "female brains" any more than 6 ft is a "male height".

Then there's the fact that even if somebody's brain did more closely match the opposite sex -- so what? The determination of sex, in terms of biology, which applies to wayyyyyy more organisms than just humans, relates to gamete size, nothing more, nothing less. Brains can have correlations with each sex but they are not any part of determining sex -- there are literally plants that are male or female, and they don't have brains at all. This is the same reason why the "sex is a spectrum" logic is flawed -- you can't be more female or less female: you might have more traits typically associated with producers of large immobile gametes, but having, say, a PCOS beard doesn't mean you're somehow "less female", it just means you have one body trait more commonly found in ejaculators.