Gender and the Brain

take science add the age of equality and the age of gender equality plus the idea of a male and female nature the notion that there's a male and female brain is not only not obvious but it's considered downright objectionable by many who think that gender differences are born and not created by systemic societal rules and sexism in tonight's contribution to TVO's special mysteries of the mind series we're examining what science tells us about gender differences are we getting closer to the answer about the nature of our nature are we shaped by our beliefs about gender or by our gendered hormones TVO will air the BBC documentary is your brain male or female right after this program first to help us with these tricky questions and guide through the thicket of science and statistics we welcome in Tel Aviv Israel via Skype Daphna Joel chair of the psycho biology graduate program at Tel Aviv University in Baltimore Maryland margaret mccarthy chair of the department of pharmacology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and with us here in studio Jordan Petersen clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and as I welcome our three guests to tonight's discussion I ask you off the top just to get comfortable because we are going to play an excerpt from the BBC documentary that I just mentioned and then we're going to list six differences between men or women as selected by Steven Pinker so all of that still to come mr. director if you would let's roll that clip first men and women for centuries people have argued ferociously about whether or not we are born with different brains different roles in life I think that's why our brains are wired differently men are definitely better at navigation and map reading women panic a little bit more some experience no now it seems we're getting close to an answer I thought there must be a mistake I'm not used to results of studies coming out as as clean as this one with new technology scientists have recently identified subtle differences in the brains of men and women differences that could help explain perceived strengths and weaknesses I was surprised that there was so significantly different but the research is controversial and raises difficult questions funny this he's completely uninterested in the dog our brain differences innate or are they shapes by the world around us the rest of the documentary right after we get off the air here on the agenda now here is the Montreal born Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker with his six differences between men and women and they are men care more about status number one men value things and rules women value people that's number two men take greater risks number three men are better at spatial visualization four men score better at mathematical reasoning women score better at calculation that's five and the last one men do better and worse on all tests of math space and science let's get into whether or not this is more nature or nurture Margaret why don't you start us off in Baltimore which of these from this list strike you as more nature than nurture well I would say the very last one was it's a combination of nature and nurture in that he's dr. ping Curtis correct and that males do populate the extremes of abilities when we think about something such as mathematical ability they score a higher percentage of the worst scores and a higher very small higher percentage of the highest scores however it used to be back in about the 90 1990s that the ratio of gifted mathematically gifted individuals was twelve to one boys to girls however in the intervening decades with interventions early interventions to identify girls who were mathematically gifted and to nurture them along in the process that ratio has dropped to four to one so that obviously showed that there was a lot going on culturally that was setting up that strong bias in male favor the question now is is that four to one truly biological or do we still just have a ways to go on the cultural end but again his statement was rather broad and that it said in all scientific tests and I think that's a that's not well grounded in any data I know of science is very broad and includes things like plant biology genetics Anatomy biology ornithology ma'am ecology etc and and I would certainly say that that was a rather bombastic statement some great ideas there which we shall unpack over the course of the program Daphna Joel how do you come down on that issue of what's nature and what's nurture from that list I want to start with a comment about the the list itself which is very male biased so we have four that is only related to men and not to think that in which he relates both to males and female but I think it's a interesting gender effect but he has this you know what he thinks about gender it is about what men are different than women and about the things that men are good at and I gotta grounding the question of nature versus nurture I don't think we can actually tell answer this question in humans there is no way to disentangle them and I think the more interesting question is why I'm so obsessed with this question of whether this is nature or nurture because if we think one of these things on the list is important for men or for women then it's important for humans and then regardless of whether the difference is because of nature or nurture we should cancel this difference so we should do whatever we can do with the environment to cancel it out and so I don't know why we are looking to justify these differences by claiming that this is nature Jordan let me follow up on that issue of gender bias which Daphna joel has suggested and as you look at the list the list goes men care men value men take men are better is there a bias in Steven Pinker's list to begin with well there's a bias in the use of gender related pronouns apparently whether the bias makes men look more favorable than women I think is a more important issue and it isn't self-evident to me that it does the fact that men for example appear to be more interested in things than people could be viewed either way as positive or negative I think many people would view it as negative the idea that men take more risks well that can make them heroes or prison inmates and you know that is often what happens so I think if you're trying to discuss gender differences in a forum that's going to be public whether it's written or spoken you have to be careful about the terminology that you use because otherwise you tangle up the debate or the discussion in in issues that are probably less directly relevant okay in which case nature versus nurture as you look at the list which where do you more often than not come down well the things versus people difference is pretty solid I think the best evidence that that's not culturally conditioned is the fact that the biggest difference is in occupational preference in the world now are in the Scandinavian countries and one of the places where that gender difference is biggest is choice between engineering and nursing so it's 20 to 1 male to female and engineering and 20 to 1 female to male at nursing and that's despite a fair bit of effort on the Scandinavians part two to equalize that the the risk-taking and status is more complex I think women are very status oriented but I don't believe that female dominance hierarchies have the same criteria that male dominance hierarchies have so males might be more physically aggressive in pursuing their status I think there's there's no doubt about that the rate of murder between men for example especially young men is it absolutely swamps it overwhelms the murder rate between young women for example which is virtually non-existent must be nature as opposed to turn your view well I I do yes I think it's probably nature it's common among so many males males of of so many species you know and you have to think about people from a biological perspective I think it's important to think about people from a biological perspective when you're having a discussion like this Margaret McCarthy anything you hear there that you want to come back on well so I my research program focuses on animals so I can exclude the impacts of nature and culture and so I can really hone in on the biological influences and I think there we can get insight into things like male aggression and he's absolutely right that the males are more aggressive across the board and most species but again aggression is always context dependent so in our research on rodents everybody knows that if you want the most aggressive animal possible you get a female who's got pups that she's a lactating so it's that that maternal aggression is is the most intense so again it's context dependent but that is still an important biological difference females aren't hyper aggressive when they're not defending their pups males are aggressive when they're defending their territory and things of that sort so that the the behavior might be the same but the factors that are regulating it are quite different and again are based in evolutionary origins for protecting one's reproductive resources Daphna Joel I saw your TED talk in which you assert that the differences between a male brain and a female brain so-called are really almost non-existent and that you you prefer instead to think of it as a and I forget the term you that you use but it's basically both genders in one brain together could you make that case for our viewers please yeah so it's a little more complex than this so there are differences between the brains of males and brains of females and group differences and you can see many differences actually and you see them but what you can't see is the typical male friend and a typical female friend interact in actually you will bill so there is no person that has only male characteristics or only favorite autistics each one of us has both totalistic that are more prevalent or prevalent in males and critics that are more prevalent in females in this sense there are no male friends and female brains although everyone has a brain and what did you call it when you see both of us was right mosaic so each one is a individual mosaic of both features that are more prevalent in males and feature that are more prevalent in humans now I gather this is a fairly controversial thing to assert so when you when you put that out there what kind of feedback are you getting well you can ask a professor McCarthy but this was actually based on the animal data some four million McCarthy's lab in others and they will recently shown this also in the human brain but this hasn't be published yet I hope it will be published soon and the feedback usually people are surprised because no one is thinking about this in this way so usually we just list sex differences and we assume that sex differences add up so the more differences we found we believe that the sexes are more and more different and what we've seen and no one has looked at it before is that the sex differences are not consistent so you can be highly extremely on the male side or some features and extremely on the female side on other features all right I think this said I would maybe people to comment with this because they this is derived from her studies also mystery box let me take you up on your advice and go to Professor McCarthy and ask her what she thinks of your theory yeah I I think very highly of it obviously since says Daphna said dr. Joel said it's based on some of my own data and actually what I find is that when people hear the notion it actually is sort of an AHA of course it's kind of intuitively obvious that there's no such thing as a male brain or a female brain that all of us possess varying degrees of what we would call masculine and feminine traits and that's why so some some men are you know very tender-hearted about some things and very hard-hearted about others justice are women some women are high risk takers and and very aggressive about some things but not about others again each one of us and and if you think about it again coming back to an evolutionary basis for this the the reason that that would be a good thing is that makes us all much more variable right and much more adaptive to our environment and able to respond to challenges so when we drilled down to the the biological basis of what makes for neuroanatomical and neurophysiological the sex differences we find that the the mechanisms that evolution has used to create these differences varies for every single brain region that we look at and that means that there's many many more things to be acted upon by genetic variation environmental experiences mutations insults hormones etc and so so really it kind of intuitively makes sense that it would be foolish to have only all the brains to be half male and all the brains to be female I don't think we'd be as successful of species as we are if that were the case Jordan before I get you to comment let's take another look at an excerpt from the documentary which may help you formulate your response Sydney if you would let's roll it the team of scientists in Philadelphia has mapped the microscopic connections within male and female brains and what they found is astonishing the study indicates that those connections between the two hemispheres are much stronger and more prevalent in women than in men and from here we can conclude that the ability to use those the verbal analytic and the emotional information is enhanced in women the neural pathways in male brains follow a strikingly different pattern what we see in males is stronger connections between the back and the front of the brain the back of the brain processes the information and sends it forward to the brain and the front of the brain decides what puts it all together and decides what to do about it so it indicates males have stronger ability to connect between what they see and what they do which is essentially what you need to do if you are a hunter you see something you need to respond right away although the scientists identified stark differences in men and women's neural pathways they didn't find those differences in children the differences only seem to develop in the teenage years which means they could be the result of social pressure rather than innate okay that's what the documentary asserts you've heard what Daphne Joel and Margaret McCarthy have to say where do you come down on this issue of a male brain versus a female brain versus a mosaic brain well I think if you're trying to address a question scientifically that you have to drill down to a fairly high resolution level of detail so you start asking about different behaviors and traits and attributes and look at the gender differences in each of them and then you also try to see how those might clump together and so I think that's the right level of analysis it's its trait and property by property analysis having said that though and in relationship to the to the documentary cut there is a pretty good evidence I think that prenatal influences on brain development are very very powerful and do produce differences important differences in brain structure and behavior before birth I think the evidence for that is actually overwhelming partly because we know that testosterone actually transforms the fetus into a male so that's the research I think that's most powerfully indicative of the idea that there are important differences in brain structure and function that first of all that exists and that can't be attributed to socialization and we also shouldn't confuse differences in function with differences in in evident brain anatomy because there are parts of the brain especially in places like the hypothalamus which controls basic instincts which are very very small and in that area populations of several hundred thousand neurons which is no neurons at all compared to all the neurons you have in your brain can make a substantial difference in your function like massive differences in your function so it's the size and magnitude issue is a tricky one Daphna Joel can I return to something you said a few moments ago which was we seem to be obsessed with this notion of male brain versus female brain we seem to need to have an answer to this issue of nature versus nurture do you think we should not be obsessed by this question well I think it we should not be obsessed by the question are we obsessed but the question whether there is a essential difference between people with light skin color and dark skin color are we obsessed with this this is not politically determined to even ask this question is it so why is it legitimate to ask the question whether males and females are fundamentally different and I think the only reason to ask this question and this is why we are obsessed with it is we want to say that there are in natural differences because this justified the different treatment of males and females in our society and so this is a problem and I think it may be important for some things like for example for psychopathology or medicine but when we talk about behavior there is no reason to look for the reason for the differences because we don't need to justify them so let's say there are differences and let's say even we have a basic biological basis for this so let's say we find that males are indeed human men sir I did tend to be more aggressive than females so what should we do this with this fact if we find it there is no evidence for this in humans but let's say it is true so should we let men be violent towards other men and towards women or should we actually educate men better not to be violent maybe we should just look in the population people that have the high tendency to be violent males or females even the exam or males like this and just you know give them special treatment not to be violent because violence is not good in our society and in fact this is what we do so we do not the aggression of course is not how we look at any animal if it is disturbed its aggressive but all our society is built not to allow this natural question to be produced so we educate our kids from a very young age although we have policemen of course we have prisons everything we do is against our nature but then we come to sex differences and then we look for nature or for guidance and we look for nature to allow these differences or to justify them when in fact even there if there are a biological basis for these differences we should act against these differences so if we think that empathy is an important quality in our human behavior then if men are by nature less empathic we should treat them to be empathic and if assertion the ability to be assertive is important then God gets to be assertive too this is why I think we are obsessed in this question just because we want to justify these differences this is a political issue it's not a biological marker McCarthy can I get your reaction to that well I can't argue with anything that daftness said in terms of that you know that's one interpretation but it's also so the reason that I study biological sex differences in the brain is there's two reasons one is that it's a tremendous tool for learning how the brain develops normally to return to the idea that early hormones prenatal or early postnatal impact how the brains develops we cannot understand something as complex as brain development if we don't understand it in both sexes because we're finding that in some brain regions such as the hypothalamus it is profoundly different and we discover new ways that nature has created to build a brain and we would never have discovered them if we didn't compare males and females now you say well that so that's interesting just from a very very basic science point of view but then as dr. Joel referred to it does then tremendously illuminate what we're doing in biomedicine it helps us to understand why males and females respond differently to some drugs it's not just that their liver metabolizes them differently sometimes it's because their brain has a different circuitry or a different phenotype of receptors in one particular area might use a different signal transduction pathway so that's just for normal healthy individuals who might need some kind of medication but more importantly is the huge gender bias and neural at Rick disorders and so if we just break down the neuropsychiatric disorders along those that either have developmental origins or are diagnosed in development those would be autism early onset schizophrenia dyslexia stuttering not that those are neuropsychiatric disorders I'm just saying those are just neurologically based events Tourette's syndrome and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder all of those have tremendous male biases autism is now five to one more frequently diagnosed in boys to girls ADHD is ten to one and granted that might have some cultural origins because we're less tolerant of busy little boys but nonetheless all of the developmental or we don't have a single developmental neuropsychiatric or neurological disorder that has a female bias but if we look at the adult onset disorders depressive anxiety obsession compulsion anorexia anorexia bulimia all the feeding disorders those are all biased in the female direction and importantly in all of these cases these hold worldwide they are not it's not just true for Western societies or something like so so we can't say that that these are also a cultural bias they seem to have a biological origin so I think there is a good reason to understand the biological basis of things such as aggression which is a social behavior and there are social behavior deficits in schizophrenia and autism just as it's important to understand the the biological basis of anxiety of feeding etc and if we understand them in males and females we have a whole wedge a whole new searchlight at which to look for new therapies and new treatments Jordan let me get you to take us right back to the beginning of a person's life and I want you to tell us about a study done by Simon baron-cohen Borat's cousin right okay Sasha's cousin in which one day old infants are observed on how they react to objects and faces what does the study tell us well boys don't react to faces as much as girls do and they seem to be more attracted to to move and according to baron-cohen that's an example of testosterone prenatal testosterone induced differences in people versus thing processing or he calls it actually empathizing versus sympathizing and his body of research is quite powerful because he looks at prenatal testosterone levels in fetuses and then later after they're born correlates those levels with a variety of observable behaviors one of them is eye gaze but there are others so for example the high that increased testosterone is increased with is associated with increased light for rough-and-tumble play that's another one so and the effects are actually quite large so the importance of this study is that it's very difficult to associate that particular effect with a socialization explanation I wanted to make the comment quickly on the issue of whether or not gender differences and racial differences for that matter are politically legitimate domains of inquiry first of all I don't think there are politically illegitimate domains of scientific inquiry there's just scientific inquiry I mean with racial differences for example it's the case that the causes of elevated blood pressure for example in black Americans versus white Americans are not the same black Americans tend to be more salt sensitive than white Americans and that actually happens to be an important thing if you're a black American with high blood pressure and their other debt differences in disease propensity as well so for example Jewish people especially the European Jews have a tendency towards increased propensity of certain kinds of neurological diseases and so sex yeah you can't there's no reason to ignore those the question is what do you do with the findings and that's the moral issue but part of the reason you want to get it right is because people take their guesses about gender differences which are usually ideologically informed and and so they're they're global and not specified and usually not based on any data and then they make political decisions that are predicated on and so for in Scandinavia the presumption has always been that the reason that there are more female nurses than male nurses is because of socialization differences and then the consequences you might say so what but the consequence of that is that there are continual movements by people who are obsessed with equality of outcome to ensure that that stops being the case and and you can think of that as a form of coercion so I get you I'm gonna leave the political discussion aside for the moment because I do I really do want to follow up on the first thing you said and go to deafen on that because presumably if you're a day old child you haven't had the opportunity yet to be dramatically nurtured in the way to think or react or be so all of the things that Jordan Peterson just said would seem to point to nature would they not well if the study was conducted better maybe with a result that specific was not since and/or in phases it was one phase of the experiment there was a woman and News the sex of the baby so we don't know whether maybe she reacted differently because she knew the baby the babies and she was really was it a picture of her and the other was a mobile of faces parts of her face so this wasn't so it's only one type of stimulus for each and the other thing is that there was no significant difference between the time the baby is a male female babies looks at the faces the significant difference was between the time the male and female babies looked at the object at the mobile so there was no difference between the babies in the time to look at the faces and now the other thing was that girls ten percent of the time they looked at something else which we don't know what it was and this is a side of the difference between the time they looked at the object the boys and mating female babies so this study although it was highly cited and although his title and abstract everything is highly misleading because it depicts the results not observe well it does not show what it's supposed to be shown and so I can't say much about the study and in addition what I can say that also in this study is in or every other studies we know humans was you Joe Bala between the distributions of males and females even in the feature that showed a sex difference that is how long they looked at the mobile so also here we see some babies exposed to the stas neuron in the uterus that is maize but they have a look at lots a long time on the already faces in the shop and on the object and vice versa and this is idea of the mosaic the Muslim doesn't say that there are no sex differences but so it ignores the reason for the detective inside because I don't think they are important but what it says that even in our society when males and females are exposed to different levels of testosterone in the womb and whereas from the moment we are born both there are gender effects on us still humans do not possess either a male or female brain nor and completely masculine or feminine a character we are everyone is a mosaic has an having both masculine and feminine characteristics boss and behavior and in the brain and I think if you remember this we stopped we can stop treating humans as if they belong to two distinct and different categories we are all one of the huge highly heterogeneous population some people are higher on this feature some on others and I think this is a important thing to understand it's not about whether there are six different cell or not it's about understanding that they do not have up adapt to two distinct systems and they do in genitals only there we can really distinguish between people or divide them into two distinct types those with many Gentiles and all with even genders but it doesn't work for greater behavior Jordan I don't think you made the sale well one of the things first of all there is major overlap in the sex differences the populations of males and females are more similar on all traits than they are different but that's misleading in some cases because some social phenomena are only driven by extremes so for example men are on average more aggressive than women although there's lots of women who are aggressive more aggressive than lots of men and I'm talking about dominance aggression not the kind that's defensive now so imagine that what that means is that because men on average are more aggressive than women if you look at the entire population human beings and then you make the proposition that the most aggressive one in 20 people will be in prison one in a hundred really one in a hundred will be in prison they're all going to be men despite the fact that on generally speaking men and women are quite similar when it comes to aggression and that phenomena occurs in many different domains of behavior where the massive consequence of the difference is only really evident at the extremes so in something like we'll take this as an example assuming the the math genius distribution idea is correct and there's more men that are impaired in mathematical skills and more men who are outright geniuses it's it's the outright geniuses that drive all the innovation even though there's a small number of them so even though the gender differences don't have to be that big on average if they're there at all and they tilt the curves then you can produce a massive effect at the extremes okay let excuse me let me introduce the Darwin Awards you all know what the Darwin Awards are but for our viewers who may not these are bestowed upon individuals who quote eliminate themselves from a gene pool in such an idiotic manner that their action ensures one less idiot will survive here's an example of some people who have won the Darwin Awards there were two men who tried to take selfies with a wild elephant guess what happened the wild elephant of course trampled them to death males make up 89% of the Darwin Award winners this goes back to what Steven Pinker said about males being dramatically more likely to want to take risks margaret Karthi doesn't this say something innate about the male predisposition to engage in risky or even incredibly stupid behavior well I don't know if it says definitively that it's innate but I would agree that it certainly suggests that that so and we can look at risk-taking behavior in non-human primates and in fact see the same thing they are in fact more likely to take risks on average there is a great deal of variability amongst individuals within a rhesus monkey troop or baboons with some individuals being high risk takers and not but it does it fits in with a whole again sort of evolutionary program of of males are driven to to take risks to further their reproductive success by garnering as many resources as possible mating with as many females as possible and again I'm just speaking of the animal kingdom whereas females you know they have to protect their their few precious high investments eggs and and make sure that they don't take high risks because when they do the cost of them outside of death as in Darwin Awards is much greater in terms of the investment they make so it's sort of as if you interpret it in the light of evolution it really makes perfect sense and and within individuals you can correlate testosterone levels and risk-taking interestingly we find that things such as winning in a contest will actually impact on testosterone levels and individuals when one great study everybody likes to quote was world soccer game I think between the Brazilians and the Italians I believe it was and just in the spectators they had them all spit into a cup before the match started and they measured the testosterone that you can measure in saliva and it was equal between the Brazilians and the Italians and this was just actually in a bar not at the stadium and then afterwards they again spit in a cup and and the testosterone of the Brazilians who won had significantly increased and the Italians who had lost had significantly decreased so if you just sort of expand that to winning at a contest that you took a risk act you can see it can become a rewarding behavior so it can be a self-reinforcing phenomenon interesting jordan you know anybody who's won one of these Darwin Awards nobody alive there you go you probably could nominate some people anyway go there's a couple of things about about risk-taking in males I think that are interesting there's a lot of them I mean one is is that risk-taking really starts to differentiate males and females when testosterone kicks in and adolescence and the curves of male risk-taking and by the way also male creative behavior track the testosterone spike pretty intensely and so boys tend to become more delinquent more disobedient more likely to break laws when they hit puberty when when testosterone spikes tremendously and then by the time they're about 26 or 27 they tend to mellow out because the testosterone well there's a variety of reasons but that's but that's one of them now part of the reason that perhaps that men are more likely to take risks than women is because men compete to dominate male dominance hierarchies and the reason they do that is because women preferentially prefer mate with males who are at the top of the dominance hierarchy and the effect is not small so there's a massive correlation between how successful compared to other men by standard measures of success a given man is and how many women he has at his disposal so to speak whereas there's no correlation between a woman's socio-economic position and power and how many men she has at her disposal to sleep with zero so the difference there's a huge difference in motivation because for men mastering the male dominance hierarchy pays off not only in an increased quality of life in multiple domains and the probability of living longer and having healthier children and all sorts of things but it also makes them far more attractive to women and so that seems under most conditions to be tremendously worth taking a risk for win-win situation yeah well it also increases the probability that they're going to get killed by other young men and that that actually happens a lot in in poor neighborhoods where the probability of climbing up a dominance hierarchy is is is flattened so there's a lot of rich people a few rich people at the top and a lot of poor people at the bottom and you can't climb and then the adolescent males tend to get extremely aggressive and they generally go after each other and generally within race Daphna Joel I should give you a chance to comment on that if you want to yes I think this is very nice stories but there is no good evidence I mean it's very descriptive but it doesn't show that this is nature or biological and if we go and look at our chimpanzees and bonobos which are closest to us genetically then the men Melser calculate with many females but also females calculate with many males and it makes a lot of sense because if no one's known who's the father result so they are all an LP will out with the kids all the babies so that idea that the humans it makes sense for me to mate with many females but it doesn't make sense for him and met with many males it's a nice story and again it explains our society but doesn't mean that it is proved right so again in your evolution I was here to talk about the fact that if you want many your sperm to proceed then you need also it's not enough to have many babies you need to have them grown up and have babies of their own so you should invest time but again I said it's all stories and we don't the fact that there is a difference doesn't mean that it is natural in evolutionary stories to explain it we can also always give a different story from evolution because there are many solutions in evolution to the same problem which is that males experiment based little introducing a baby and females have the egg and prevalence see and then they have to nurse it so they have greater investment but there are many different solutions to this problem in evolution and that I'm assuming that the way our society is partly built is a result of evolution and necessarily only possible result of evolution it's again it's a political argument it's not nothing make it a scientific argument ok Jordan I know you want to come back at this however we're down to 15 minutes to go here I got a bunch more things that I still want to get to for example perhaps the most significant debate of the past 20 years on this issue which happened because the former president of Harvard University had something to say about men and women and math and here's what he said there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means which can be debated there is a difference in the standard deviation and variability of a male and female population that was Lawrence Summers who was of course a former Treasury secretary former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for Barack Obama on on why he thought men were better at math and women and of course when he said that female professors at Harvard were extremely disappointed and upset and I think some walked out on his speech when he said that first of all maybe you could you translate into English what he just said and then we'll go from there well it has to do with the argument I was making earlier differences at the end of a distribution so if if there are more men who are very good at something and more men who are very bad at the same thing it's because the males are more variable and males have a tendency to be more variable in their behavior with regards to failure and success across many species now so there was evidence that the average intelligence related to the to the phenomena that Summers was talking about was the same in men and women but there was more variability in men and that would put more men way out on the extreme that would lead them to go into occupations that require extreme specialization in math and engineering so so there's there's that I I think the evidence is actually better not so much for innate differences in those sorts of abilities although this the his argument may hold it's been taken apart by people like Elizabeth's Pelkey but I think the better arguments are actually interest I think that men and women do seem to be very similar in most cognitive attributes but it is not clear at all that they're interested in the same things and even if a woman is gifted mathematically that doesn't necessarily mean that she's going to want to be a mathematician it's a pretty strange life to be a mathematician you know so and I think Summers got got pilloried unfortunately well murder McCarthy lived I mean let me ask the obvious question is he right in what he said so he's had a number of things he also suggested that perhaps women weren't interested in the hard working conditions that it took to exceed in science and you know the answer to that is try being a mother and a scientist at the same time an 80 hour week is like a vacation so it's it's all you know women if they often will make different choices because they value family life and relationships and things many of the most successful men at that outer extreme they can give up many of the daily life responsibilities by either not marrying or marrying in a situation in which there's not an equal share of the workload and as you know there are studies that show despite many many women entering the workforce there still is an unequal burden at home so that was one of the things that he said I think cause some of the women to walk out what dr. Peterson said it was quite correct that Elizabeth's Pelkey did do a beautiful job of sort of de entangling all of the arguments and debunking many of the arguments about mathematical ability but it the conclusion was the same that often women didn't choose these professions and as he said it could be because it's a strange life and they it just might not be a life that that they are seeking that they value other things and so it's an important distinction between ability and desire and I think that's where the the argument gets really important is if you say that men have the ability and women don't that's not actually well-founded in fact but if you say that men have the desire and women don't that does appear to be true now is that because cultural conditions make it so difficult for women would women have the desire to have that career if in fact it was true that they wouldn't have to still do the majority of the housework and raise the kids etc I don't know that's an open question and I think an interesting one there is no denying the the biology and I can't believe I'm saying this because as a little girl my father always told me biology is destiny but now that I am a mother of two children I do know that there is a difference between being a mother and being a father and we play very different roles in our children's lives equally important but distinct roles and not many women I know want to play the role of the father and not many fathers I know what to play the role of the mother and some do and then you know there's more and more stay-at-home dads which is a great thing but as a choice I think from the biology of having given birth and nurtured my children I would choose to be the mom so that's how complex it gets really as dr. Joel said in the beginning it is really almost impossible to disentangle nature and nurture on many of these complex questions Daphna Joel if Larry Summers had said what he said not ten years ago but today do you think the outcry would be as strong I don't know especially I have no sense of what's going on in the North America but I do want to comment and honestly if again we can always ask if its nature and if we trust that nature create these differences so why are we are the society reinforce these differences and there has been a very nice study but Israelis comparing the students examine in a regular school spirit exams in mathematics given by international exams and what the exams I read that they put in in the class and they found that many teachers consistently give girls students lower grades compared to the International exam so they are lacking the word and they also showed that girls that went to such a teacher did less good or less readily yet later in mathematics and also wanted to study mathematics at the higher level less because they were they had this decent quality teachers so again maybe by nature males are better in mathematics but then what as a society we drive males to mathematics and drive women against or away from mathematics why don't we just let nature do his sin so the problem is again our social structure which reinforces and creates these differences whether in a gender neutral society we will still have these differences no one knows I don't know maybe there will be differences but why do we care about why are the society we are built to create for to enlarge these so-called natural differences this is my question and keeper I'm keeping a seat but I think this is their main question because this is where we can actually make a difference we cannot make a difference with what is natural you can also make a difference in the environment that we are giving our kids and ourselves I do appreciate that and and one I think pretty prominent example some of our viewers may have seen it on 60 minutes was the example I think from a couple of years ago where the American food and drug administration ordered the makers of this sleep aid called ambien they ordered them to lower the dose in half but only for women apparently the drugs been on the market for 20 years and women were being in some respects over prescribed or overdosed of this drug Margaret McCarthy why do you think it took so long for the FDA to come to that conclusion yeah it took shockingly long and in fact it hasn't been a couple it's only been about six months and it was because the the number of incidences of adverse events involving women kept piling up this is the first time they've ever had a drug in which they gave a gender specific dosing and hopefully it's not going to be the last in the 10 most recent clinical trials that were redrawn from the market due to adverse events that was solely because of adverse events in women an eight out of ten of them some of those were life-threatening adverse events and again it was because the foundational research that was done did not include male and female subjects particularly at the preclinical level meaning in our animal models and there's been a disgraceful ignoring of sex as a biological variable in in what we call translational research clinical research has been required since the early 1990s to have equal representation by gender and race and age etc but it's still women are only represented about 30 to 35 percent in most clinical trials so the FDA is now got a new task force to start looking at gender as a variable in approving different types of drugs but this is just really an example again of why it is important sometimes to understand you might not need to know the mechanism of why it acts differently in males and females or why the dose is different but you need to know if it is and the way one doctor put it to me she says how do you think men would respond if you prescribe them a drug and said to them and by the way this drug so far has only been tested in women we I doubt many men would be willing to take the drug so that's a part of the reasons that we're having a lot of these conversations right now about sort of making sure that our healthcare system is attending to to everyone in the population Jordan it doesn't may be a pretty clear example of sexism in the way that these clinical trials were done there was sort of never it never occurred to anybody that men and women might react differently in different dosages to the same drug fair to say well there's complications there too because one of the things that's unfortunately happened is that the participation of women and drug trials is often complicated by the fact that you have to take menstrual cycle timing into account and so for a variety of practical concerns which may or may not be well-founded given the limitations of scientific funding it's often easier to as men now there are obvious downsides to that one of which we've just heard right yeah of course of course but you know if the thing is if you want scientists to pay more attention to producing representative samples of subjects then you have to give them more money because it's much more expensive to do that okay here's a clip from a Norwegian documentary that we want to play it's called the gender equality paradox and it asks the following question why is it that in Norway which is one of the most of course at Galit Aryan countries anywhere in the world surprisingly large percentages of men and women chose traditionally gendered professions roll the clip please the more you free people in society the more you open opportunities for people to do anything they want the more likely it is that any kind of genetic predisposition they have will be able to express itself in the in the gender egalitarian countries like Norway you really are free to follow your inclinations you you know in a poor country you're probably worried just about getting a job you just want a job and if if it's computers that are gonna get you that job in India for example you'll go for it even if you're a woman but you know in in gender egalitarian countries North America and Europe I think people feel free or just to pursue what they're truly interested in and my point is men and women are interested in somewhat different things Daphna let me go to you on this for your reaction does this go against your position I think it's surprising yeah but I think that for example in this in the video because I saw the entire video so they say that their women have four hundred and eighty days of vacation of maternity leave and men have sixty that's fast for equality right so if you find later that women stay mall with the kids it is because this is what they want to go this is because the law gives them six times as more days at home with the baby compared to the father so I think again it is surprising I am surprised by the findings there but whether this is a this clearly shows that the still differences whether there are gender differences in sex differences again you will never get for me now than after another answer because it's not in a gender free society it's not the gender free society we can say that this is the effect of sex there is still gender though there are still expectations different expectations of men and women you can also see it by the losses they have and maybe they're women they can quit from the two careers that were current you have to make because what happened is with feminism was very successful in bringing women out of the home but it wasn't successful in bringing men into their home and women were left with two careers so now they have both to have a career and do things outside the house and also to take care of the kids and maybe you know it's to make much for many movement and maybe they have to choose only one that you prefer to choose the kids but maybe if men were also more at home then we can have it both also so we can't really tell what that's that this says because it's not a gender free society we're down to just a few minutes left here so let me get Jordan and Margaret to both comment on this relatively briefly if you don't mind sure Sweden is and the debt Scandinavian countries are the closest to gender free countries that have ever been produced and the consequence of that with regards to certain occupations is precisely and absolutely the opposite of what the social constructionist s-- would have predicted the gender differences have got bigger they're bigger for interest they're bigger for occupational choice and they're bigger for personality why well the woman in the documentary said it properly what happens is that if you flatten out environmental variability you reduce it to zero all that's left is biological variability so it maximizes and one way of thinking about that is that that allows people to follow their innate predispositions and that can't be dismissed as a story there's tens of thousands of people who've participated in these studies and and the most important thing is it precisely contradicts the social constructionist hypothesis margaret mccarthy let me give you the last word on this one well okay my last word would be that this is an end of one it was one experiment one society one set of condition one homogeneous genetically genetic population I think it remains to be seen whether or not this would hold true in other cultures and other societies I agree it's a surprising finding it's a striking finding but for right now it's an ANA one they say though Margaret that toys today are more gender specific than they were 50 years ago which just goes against everything you think the way things ought to be why do you figure I don't think I would agree with that boys today are much more used to having a woman boss they're much more used to seeing women in positions of power and authority I think boys are much more at ease actually also being involved in feminine type activities that they they don't feel quite the need to never cry I never show their emotional side III don't agree with that at all I don't think we see very many John Wayne's around anymore I think boys are much more and I think it's better for boys not to be channeled into such extreme male type behaviors and that they feel that they have more choices and things to do with their lives and Daphna should give you just the last word on this issue which is about kibbutz's you are in a country where you know if you live on a kibbutz it's supposed to be extremely egalitarian without taking gender into a into account at all do you think that's had an effect on the gender differences between men and women who live and/or were raised on kibbutz's it's it's a huge story and lots of think about to say about this so I don't think we can go into this but the myth it was a mystery nature study started the myth of gender equality it wasn't means it wasn't true also in the kibbutz unfortunately and today we don't have any more keep it seemed like we used to so this is out of it anyway also but I want to just to make the point that gender equality equality and gender free it's not the same so it can be equal but doesn't mean it's exchange of three so still have the stirred up of what's appropriate for men and what's appropriate for women and in the Scandinavian countries are not gender free they are just to have equality it's not the same I take your point I want to thank all three of you for joining us on TV Oh tonight not only for this discussion but also to set up the BBC documentary that will follow our broadcast Daphne Joel chair of the psycho biology graduate program at tel aviv university thank you for being there for us on skype from tel aviv israel margaret mccarthy chair of the department of pharmacology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine we thank you for being there from Baltimore Maryland and we wish your city peace going forward and Jordan Peterson clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Jordan as always good to see you again as well help TVO create a better world through the power of learning visit support TV org and make a tax-deductible donation today

Channel: The Agenda with Steve Paikin

Views: 49,974

Rating: 4.8490567 out of 5

Keywords: TVO, TVOntario, The Agenda with Steve Paikin, current affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, science, evolution, gender, mental health, mysteries of the mind

Id: sSIEs1ngNiU

Length: 55min 3sec (3303 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2015