Is the Brain Gendered?: The Debate

good evening breehn owners multitaskers and map readers empathizes and systemize errs possibly even Martians and Phoenicians there are few absolute certainties in science but I feel I'm on safe enough grounds to state that everyone here has a brain what I'm going to try to convince you in the next 15 minutes is that your brain is special it is unique and different from your neighbors not because you're female and he's male or the other way around but because even if your neighbor happens to me your identical twin I don't know if there are any identical twins here this evening you will have lived a different life from your neighbor have had different experiences and encountered different attitudes and this will be reflected in the brain you're currently hosting in your head and will continue to be reflected in that brain until the end of your life so is this something I can move on with it yeah okay right the motion before us includes two of the most commonly used labels we use to describe ourselves male and female I think everyone in this room will believe that they have a clear idea of what that means and I hope to show that even with what feels like that one secure bit of knowledge about ourselves things are a bit more complicated than that so this wasn't actually the first slide but we'll go with the one that we've got here this is a pictorial representation of what we're talking about the chain of argument that informs the title of today's debate that there are two types of bodies male and female determined by genetic factors and thus two types of brains so this aspect of the argument is the basis of the essential claim in tonight's matter of debate we need to pause and think what do we mean by essential one definition of an essential belief is that all members of a category share fundamental or qualities or essences that make them what they are essentialist thinking involves beliefs that the basis of such is natural unchangeable and grounded in deep-seated biological factors so the reason I'm drawing your attention to this particular link here is that this is a belief that there is a firm chain between the bodies that we have and the brains that we have and I think this really is what the debate is about tonight that two bodied two different types of bodies two different types of brains this thin results it is claimed in two different portfolios of skills aptitudes personalities don't know if you can see those but it's a kind of representation of claims that men don't listen and when women can't read maps men are empathic men and system eise's etc having been the rounds of various studios today I'm constantly being told so what is this about men not being able to show their emotions and women being multitaskers and men being map readers so we all have clear views of what this means what this chain of argument is and there are also issues about the kind of roles that people play and in order to illustrate this I've taken quotes from Simon's book the way in which they so we have this link here a firm claim which he does qualify late and I'll come back to that the female brain is predominantly hardwired for empathy and the male brain is predominantly hardwired for understanding and building systems and the consequence of that is a range of different skills and we probably won't have much chance until we have questions and answers to get into that aspect because we're really interested in that part there primarily this is a debate about differences where they come from what they mean and crucially how fixed and unchangeable they are perhaps we could even call them strong and stable so there's three points that I want you to think about in making up your mind on this issue first of all the science this is a science debate and we need to start by looking at the story that science is telling us our men's and women's brains different now I should begin by clarifying to all that I'm not a sex difference denier as I have been described a bit like a climate change denier presumably with the same consequences for civilization I am aware that there are profound anatomical differences between males and females helpfully pointed out by various trolls who like to send me JPEGs I would also acknowledge that there are gender gaps in the world in achievement in all spheres especially science it's I'll touch on but also in mental health problems such as depression self-harm eating disorders and in the field that both Simon and I work in in autism so there are differences that we need to explain but will we find the explanation by looking at brains now as a neuro imager I'm of course aware of innumerable studies that having divided their cohort of images and two groups male and female hitting sex as the independent variable in their analysis package you can find some differences in some brains between some men and some women in fact the next half hour could be taken up with Simon and I what I call human brain studies poker where we swap example studies that have found differences counter them with studies that haven't having had a sneak preview courtesy of the Tate Today program this morning I could guess that Simon might offer a recent study on a human bio bank data which reported clear differences in gray matter volume and brain structures such as the hippocampus near medulla I could then see his bio Bank study perhaps on route pointing out that the average raid age of the participants was over 60 and you might like to wonder what different life experiences had done to those brains but I could anyway raise him to other studies reporting no such differences I could also note the scientific publishing currently focuses on publishing studies where differences are found we don't get to hear so much about those where no differences between the sexes are found so rather than drag you through lots and lots of different papers what kind of conclusion do I feel that we can draw from these studies Simon way well disagree the key thing is that there's no one aspect of the brain in in key structures or gray white matter ratios and patterns of connectivity whatever you like to look at that has yet been found that will reliably differentiate the brain of a woman from the brain of a man apart from one on average men's brains are bigger but men are on average and that is a phrase we'll come back to bigger than women their hearts lungs livers and kidneys are bigger than women's and I don't think the Royal Institution is likely to be having a debate on that difference anytime soon once you correct for those size differences almost all the alleged sex differences that had earlier been found actually tend to disappear the same is also true of baby brains which of course is something where we should really be looking if we believe these are innate differences and they're something that starts right at the beginning you can in the same way and I did review lots of studies for the book that I've just written find one lab which will report quite strong sexual dimorphism in a baby brain between boys brains and girls brains they're usually very small cohort cohort so we have to be careful with the conclusions we draw but even the same labs three years later we'll run a different set of babies through the same kind of studies and find no differences I went to a conference recently where there was supposed to which unsurprisingly attracted my attention it's called time to dump the dimorphism males and female brains are far more similar than different across multiple measures of structure and function is there a typical at least a typical male brain or female brain some kind of template that we might compare things - well recent work by Daphne Joel and her team in Tel Aviv was looked for this very issue looked at over a hundred different structures it's quite difficult hopefully you'll get an impression of what we're looking at here 100 different structures some more typical in brains from men and much some more typical in brains from women looking at over a thousand different brains and found that brains are in fact a mosaic of different features less than 6 percent of those thousand brains had predominantly male or predominantly female features and none had all male or female so I think that this is a really good pictorial representation that every brain is different from every other brain regardless of whether they're from men or women there is another caveat which I'm sure Simon will agree with that even we know scientists have to confess that we don't really know what any of these differences mean we might find bigger amygdala smaller hippocampus bigger bridge of fibers between the two different brains but it is quite a big jump to say what this means in terms of behavior so even if we do find these structures we don't really know if that explains the kind of behaviors that we're interested in that we're looking at that is in fact the basis of this whole debate men and women are different so they must have different brains if we don't know that link it's important to bear that in mind so the human brain pink blue 50 shades of grey matter we really cannot currently claim that men's and women's brains are consistently and distinctly different there is another aspect of brains that I will touch on but I will acknowledge Simon's expertise in this area so I only mention it briefly and that is hormones a key difference in male and female fetuses is that before birth male babies are marinated in higher levels of testosterone than female babies with resultant differences in their reproductive hardware but does this also result in differences in their brains very powerful lobby would claim yes but where are we looking if we haven't found any key differences in brains of men and the brains of women where should we be looking for the differences that this testosterone causes so it's different difficult to establish a brain biology behavior link a lot of the research in this areas carried out on animals which is probably not an appropriate group to be looking at but often what researchers do when they're working with humans is they go straight from hormones to behavior bypassing brains all together but inferring differences if they find behavior differences but all too often the behavior they're looking at or rather how they describe it reveals something about the particular take they have on this this research so we have measures of gender appropriate behavior to match to varying levels of prenatal testosterone we have a tomboy index to investigate the behavioral consequences and girls of being exposed prenatally to too much testosterone so there does seem to be a strong element to begging the question here which we should probably bear in mind now remember we're looking at differences which is supposedly fixed and unchangeable and I did have lots of wonderful slides of taxi-drivers brains changing as they learned the knowledge and people learned to juggle and I came across this this wonderful picture by a six year old which actually sums it up really nicely a breakthrough in the 21st century is our brains err attached to the world which has profound differences on those brains and that our brains are very flexible they actually change throughout our lives in a way that we never realized we used to think we had your brain baby brains developed and they became fixed and we trundled on through life with very much the kind of brain that we were born with and that biology had determined but we now know that the world to which our brains are traveling has a consistent and lifelong impact on our brains our brains can change as a function of the education we receive the experiences the occupations the hobbies we have the sports we play for example a study of spatial skills in males and females are supposedly really robust brain based sex difference showed that those sex differences were actually due to video game experience women with the same level of such experience were as good as men at tests of those of spatial understanding and manipulation so we need to think very carefully we need to think that if we're looking at a brain that has been functioning in a world coming back to the biobanks OD 60 year-old brains we need to remember that our brains are plastic our brains are also wired to be social we are a hugely socially influenced species indeed it's claimed that that's the secret of our success so when studying brain structures or function it's virtually impossible to tease apart what's come from the world and what's come from biology and this does start very early babies brains are tuned from birth possibly even before to pick up social skills so nature is not separate from nurture or an alternative to it it system separately tight entangled with it which must undermine the conclusions we come to about tonight's motion so that's the science I would briefly like to say that this is a debate not just about science but about the communication of that science which is appropriate given that we're talking in the Royal Institution the science communication center above all we need to consider not just what scientists are saying particularly in this kind of debate but how they say it and what their audiences readers or other science communicators are hearing let's take the phrase men's and women's brains are on average significantly different well if we look at the kind of distribution we're talking about just let's say here we've got the data from two particular measures in this particular one it's the height of men and the height of women if you plot out the data you get you get this kind of overlapping camel humps you can see that there is a difference on average between those populations but there's also quite a lot of overlap so knowing that somebody's a man or somebody as a woman might not be very informative but that's quite a marked difference in height the kind of difference is that sex differences we're talking about are actually very small they're of that area so yes there are little differences here but if you look at the differences within the groups and the overlap between them they're quite dramatic and of course if we're focusing on the male-female difference we focus on that little difference we don't focus on the big difference in the two groups if those two groups are supposedly biologically homogeneous then why have we got that that difference and I popped in the corner the kind of difference that's from that UK biobank study again sorry Simon to show that the claimed difference in the hippocampus between males and females has that similar kind of of overlap in popular parlance the term different implies distinct distinguishable reliably distinct all the characters we now know are not true of men's and women's brains significant implies meaningful and it would be hard to know that where a man or a woman might score on any of those kind of sex difference studies it's also the case essential implies absolutely necessary and extremely important which is perhaps why this debate becomes so vitriolic at points to tie this up I just like to throw into the mix the uses to a male and female you probably believe that when we talk about male and female brains we mean the brains from men or the brains from women Simon himself is rather muddied the water on that one having made his firm's statement about male and female brains the opening lines of his book he later qualifies it with what I find a rather stock sink of yet that and I quote your sex does not dictate your brain type not all men have the male brain not all women have the female brain I think I'll leave you to puzzle it out and Simon to clarify it later to finish them briefly this really matters this is not just a scientific debate this is a stereotype about males and females which informs how males and females feel about themselves it works as a filter and research the very field that Simon and I work in in autism spectrum disorders long been described as a male disorder and more recently we're starting to realize that that means that there are large numbers of females on the spectrum who've been missed who are not diagnosed do not inform research so thinking of brains or other categories as male or female however defined is limiting and misleading I'll very briefly show you some consequences of beliefs that women and men at women and men have different brains of course you'd think this is something that way back in the 19th century neurologists looking for differences believing that men and women are inferior all of these were quotations about why women shouldn't be doing science because they don't have the right kind of brain so we have the Google memo we have Larry Summers the then head of of Harvard we have the Google memo author we have Alessandra Streamy oh the physics professor in in CERN all of them claiming that women's brains were different not suited for science so science shouldn't be wasting its time on on educating women so I think it's not just an academic debate we're having here it's a debate which is really important it's a debate which informs what people feel about themselves and what other people believe so brain owners the choice is yours you could support me in my bid to show that men's and women's brains are not essentially different are we really looking at this inevitable evolution of a brain born small and tiny perhaps slightly different one goes down a nicely gendered blue channel becomes armored resilient can become a leader of man whereas the others a bit pink and marshmallowy lands up a bit princessy and a bit emotional so that is what we say if we think men's and brains are essentially different or do we believe that everybody's brain is attached to the world every brain is different from every other wherever the brain and that's what's important so hopefully you'll vote for me and go with our six-year-old picture thank you very much thank you very very much thank you and now Simon if you'd like to take to the podium for your 20 minutes thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] first of all Thank You Gina and I listened with interest to all your points I think although this debate is set up in a very binary way I think we're going to find that we agree more than we disagree but let's see so my argument is going to be really is there any role for biology when we're thinking about sex differences in the mind in the brain Gina's book largely argues that differences are the result of living in a gendered world and that there are no essential differences as in differences that would predate living in a gendered culture I'm going to argue that the role of culture is no doubt important so on that we agree that we can't really do juice much about nature and nurture from the studies of children and adults because they have had a lot of postnatal experience but there might be a role for biology and particularly if we look at newborn babies before they've been exposed to culture and prenatal factors so there we go so um Gina has already made this point that I think no serious scientist would be making claims about sex differences whether it's in from the neck up words as it the mind or the brain or the rest of the body as being binary rather they are average differences when you compare groups of males and groups of females there's the example of height if we if we just take groups of males and females we find a roughly five and a half inch difference but you're always going to find females who are atypical for their gender who were taller and males who are atypical for their gender who was shorter so they chart at the bottom there the idea that men and women boys and girls are distinct to use Gina's term I think is the wrong way of thinking about it we've already talked about the UK biobank for those of you who don't know what that is that's a collection of tens of thousands of individuals who are not only having brain scans but they're also giving DNA and it's going to be a fantastic resource it's already proving to be a fantastic resource for scientists Gina's absolutely right that they tend to be older individuals who volunteered and I think the eligibility is over 40 but it may well be that the average is even older than that this is the first release just last year of some of that data just on 5216 participants we've all had a brain scan what we're looking at is white matter in the brain so these are the major tracts or highways in the brain and on top area are white matter tracts which are larger in males and females males than females on average at the bottom those that are larger in females than males two different types of measures you can see the details there but certainly evidence of average group differences this slide is also just as we saw with with Gina's slide telling us that there are overlapping differences in total brain volume total gray matter volume and total white matter volume and these are found even after you control for things like total surface area height cortical thickness and so forth so the differences are there but this kind of study won't tell us where they've come from if you look at specific brain regions gene has already mentioned some of these like the hippocampus you can see that's one of the regions where you see a sex difference you also see it in the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens I've just picked out those three hippocampus very much involved in memory particularly spatial memory amygdala very much involved in emotions and threat detection and the nucleus accumbens part of the reward circuitry of the brain the brain develops in complexity from birth through childhood so you can see here that in the first two years of life if we just look at on the Left we see neurons really not showing much complexity but even in the first few months you can see a growth in complexity as there are more neurons group growing and more connections between neurons growing and if we look at the post mortem studies of boys and girls males and females right across life when you get down to those that individual neuronal count you can see differences so on average females have 19 point 3 billion neurons but on average males have 22 point eight billion neurons this is a 16% difference in the number of nerve cells in the brain so there are these differences but none of this tells us where the differences have come from was it the result of growing up in a gendered world which it could easily be or other other factors at play we've looked at psychological processes like empathy in this study we had 80,000 people take part about 44,000 women 43,000 men and you can see that on average shown in green there women were scoring higher on this test of empathy where you have to look at someone's face but particularly the eye region of the face and say which of those four words best describes what the person in the photo is thinking or feeling I've been talking for a minute whilst you've been looking at that photo and the correct answer is dispirited or a bit sad so if you got that right you did say really on the basis of quite minimal information of emotional expression around the eye region of the face and we observe sex differences in brain activity whilst people are trying to decode facial expressions with women showing more activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus whilst they're looking at emotional expressions like that but again where do these differences come from it could easily be the result of post natal experience we've also looked at what Gina referred to as systemizing being able to analyze a system which usually involves focusing in on parts within wholes to understand how the system works here we find a sex difference of a different kind that on average males are faster at finding that cube hidden in the overall abstract design then our women so males are taking on average 46 seconds women on average 66 seconds and again you see a difference in brain activity now in the back part of the brain the parietal cortex the visual cortex with with women showing more activity in posterior parietal cortex whilst they're searching for the part within the whole just average differences it's not true of all males and all females but the group differences do emerge most recently just last year we published a paper testing over half a million people on tests of empathy systemising and autistic traits these were short questionnaires that people could take part in and the sample also included 36,000 autistic people so very big data and what we found again shown in this slide is that they the axes are not coming out as as written but both on the amp the empathy quotient on the top left the systemizing quotient on the top right and the autism spectrum quotient a measure of autistic traits we found sex differences on average so lot of overlap and this is where we are in agreement more similar than different but are those differences of interest to scientists and where might they be coming from so in my work I found it useful to plot some of this data from psychology along two independent axes empathy along the vertical axis systemising along the horizontal axis finding that if you if you were to summarize the studies more females are showing a difference in favor of their empathy over systemising that's to say they're scoring higher on empathy than they are on systemising which would be shown in the light blue zone of that graph and more males are showing a discrepancy in the opposite direction they're scoring higher on measures of measures of systemising or understanding systems compared to their scores on measures of empathy so that's the kind of model of course there are plenty of people in the population that show no difference in their empathy or their systemising so they'd be in the white zone on that graph and in terms of autism what we've postulated is that people with autism might be below average on tests of empathy but might be anywhere from average to superior on tests of systemising so a larger discrepancy between the two and you'd expect them to be in the red zone of that chart and that's sort of what we find when we go out into the population including very large populations like that half a million sample but you see you can plot each individual in terms of their score on empathy and systemising and if you just look with the naked eye at these each person represented by a dart the yellow ones are females in the population the green ones are males in the population and the red and purple ones are autistic so you can see that the clouds do overlap but they do tend to be more yellow dots at the top left-hand quadrant more green dots in the middle there and more red and purple at the bottom right and actually if we do a account sorry that this is jumped out of alignment you can see that males and females are showing that they occupy different spaces in that chart so if we looked at individuals who are type II their empathy is higher than their systemising some forty percent of females show that profile we call them brain type and if you looked at Type S individuals whether systemizing is higher than their empathy about forty percent of males to show that profile so none of these findings are true of all males and all females and I do hope that we're going to end up agreeing on that point but we are seeing the sexes diverging in interesting ways when we do really large populations that is so now we get down to the kind of nub of it which is what might be causing these sex differences I would argue that there's going to be a mix of factors and I think I heard Gina say that nature and nurture can't really be separated that they do they are very much in to enter twined and in her book she argues predominantly for the first two factors experience our parents may be giving their sons and daughters different types of experiences because we live in a gendered world that might be true from our teachers and other kinds of social interactions culture is the other important source of influence in what Gina calls very plastic brains and I agree our brains are indeed very malleable very plastic missing from at least in her book is any serious consideration of biological factors and I'm going to really pick out hormones but particularly prenatal hormones which can change your brain development genetic effects some of which may be as on the sex chromosomes some of which may be scattered across the genome in terms of evidence from heritability and of course there may be other aspects of biology in the environment such as exposure to physical hazards which may which the two sexes may react to differently I'm going to just focus on on a couple of those as case studies newborn babies first and then prenatal hormones second and then I'll stop so in terms of are their sex differences at birth which would be awkward for the gender experience hypothesis what is found is that there are indeed differences in overall intra cranial volume it's about a six percent difference males being larger than females on average but also a higher number of cortical neurons in males than females so we saw that across in studies of children and adults but that difference is there even at birth and that exists even after you control for factors like birth weight where there's been the opportunity to look at brain differences in newborn babies in terms of volume of different brain regions again what you can see is differences appear sometimes larger in males sometimes larger in females according to the region you look at so medial temporal cortex which is involved in sensory pressing processing but particularly auditory processing that area is larger in boys on average dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex very much involved in self-control sometimes called executive function is a region that's larger in females and a particular part of the temporal parietal Junction just where the temporal lobe meets the parietal lobe again that is larger in female and has been associated with social processing particularly following other people's faces and trying to figure out other people's intentions so the fact that these differences are present at birth means that whatever the role of culture later on there must also be some element of prenatal biology we did a study looking at newborn babies who were 24 hours old I'm sure we'll discuss this in a bit more detail but we asked we asked the mothers for their consent for babies to take part and we presented the babies with either a social stimulus which was the human face or a non social stimulus that geometric pattern and simply filmed the baby for how long they looked at each type of stimulus what you can see is that there are some children who looked equally long at both but what I've graphed for you is those babies who looked longer at one type of stimulus or the other so more girls looked longer at the human face compared to boys and more boys looked longer at the geometric design compared to girls the fact that this is happening at 24 hours old suggests that whatever we are doing as parents that might shape our sons and daughters differently or whatever the media is doing the toy industry and schools and so forth there must be some element of prenatal biology now hard critics would say 24 hours is quite a long time for for culture to be shaping these sex differences and indeed in Gina's book she takes me to task about this experiment did we do the experiment right might there have been some biases or confounds in the experiment which questioned the validity of the study I would simply insert here some the the plea for accurate reporting of this single study first of all Gina says why didn't we present both stimuli at the same time which is one way of testing newborn babies it's called preferential looking rather than one and then the other they're both valid methods of testing babies the key thing is if you just present one and then the other you have to counter balance or randomize the order so that if some babies are getting sleepy you're not getting order effects and that's what we did the second critique that Gina launches in her book about this study is that the scientists were not blind to the baby's gender well actually we took a lot of effort to remain blind we told we asked the mothers not to tell us the gender of their baby we had judges looking just at where the baby was looking at the face or the non or the non social stimulus but then we took the precaution to get a second set of judges just to look at the videotapes or the baby's eye movements not in the maternity ward but back in the lab so that there was no chance of the experiment of being inadvertently biased by knowing the baby's gender so all of these details I've highlighted them here are important they're technical issues but the case stands on the findings Gina had pointed out in her book that a good percentage of both males and females and females at 24 hours old showed no preference and that's absolutely right but if you looked at those who showed a preference for the face or the mobile this geometric object you do see the sexes diverging and that's again a sign of difference and the fact that it's there so early suggests that prenatal biology may be playing a role here's my last bit sorry Hannah which is I wanted to to talk about hormones we've tried to want to figure out a way to look at the influence of hormones like testosterone in ethical way in humans in animals you could experimentally manipulate the amount of the hormone that the animal is exposed to depending on your perspective on animal experimentation but in humans that would be totally unethical so what we've done instead is to ask women who are having amniocentesis where a needle is introduced into that fluid in the amniotic sac around the baby if we if they're having that clinical procedure anyway can we analyze it for the hormone testosterone you can see that on average male fetuses are producing more of this hormone testosterone then females are they're just average differences some overlap the reason we're doing this is because from animal research we know that if you take a female rat and expose her to extra testosterone it does change her brain so this is a brain region called the SDN POA sexually dimorphic nucleus of the preoptic area it's part of the hippocampus and on the left you see the neuronal complexity in this area in a typical female in this case Mouse and on the right you see that's that same animal when she's been treated with extra estradiol one of the estrogens which itself is synthesized from testosterone you can see a quite a visible change in complexity the number of neurons the number of connections between neurons and that change resembles much more the typical male mouse or rat brain in that brain region so the hormone seems to be masculinizing neuronal development so what did we find when these children whose mothers had an amniocentesis and who we had managed to measure the hormone during pregnancy testosterone when these children were eight years old we gave them that empathy test what we found was that the higher the child's prenatal testosterone levels the more difficulty they were having in reading faces in terms of what the person might be thinking or feeling here the person in the picture is interested in something equally we found that at eight years old if we asked them to find that triangle hidden in the overall design we found that the higher their prenatal testosterone the quicker and more accurate they were at finding the part within the whole so the hormone seems to which is prenatal seems to be showing a correlation that's the strongest we can put it just a correlation with performance on later tasks which we know show sex differences we also ask the children to climb into the MRI scanner so we could look at gray matter and particular regions of the brain which are sexually dimorphic show average sex differences and we look to see whether the hormone levels prenatally in testosterone correlated with the size of those regions in in the brain at age date and you can find a whole set of regions did show correlations I'll just pick out two of them the Planum temporally which is a language area was correlated and so was the right temporal parietal junction which is a social region involved in monitoring phases to find out what other people are interested in so prenatal hormones in humans just as in other species seem to be having an association with sex differences on average in different brain regions before I finish I want to unpack the terms male and female because they lie at the heart of our debate and argue that actually there are many different ways that we can use the terms male and female I've counted at least 7 different ways that we can use these terms we can talk about somebody's chromosomal sacks as in do you have two X chromosomes or an X in the Y you can talk about someone's genital sex as in what how do they appear when they're born in terms of their body and you can talk about what gender are they assigned at birth you can talk about their current gender identity and they identify you can talk about their gendered behavior what do they show in their behavior you can talk about their sexual orientation and as I've argued you can also talk about brain sex for example do they have a type II or type s brain and in brackets I've mentioned some of the medical conditions that allow us to understand that each of these levels can be independent of each other so for example if you looked at chromosomal sex and at the medical condition of androgen insensitivity syndrome a is these are individuals who have an XY chromosomal makeup so their chromosomal email genitally they look female and they're given girls names they're raised from birth as female and it's only later usually at puberty that it's understood that actually these are males who didn't weren't able to make use of androgens like testosterone so that their bodies remained in the default state of being female equally you can look at medical conditions like congenital adrenal hyperplasia CAH girls who are exposed to higher levels of testosterone again prenatally because they have a genetic mutation and their behavior in terms of their their gender identity they're much more likely to identify as as being male so these are examples of medical conditions from prenatal biology that can change the body probably the mind and the brain but we just need to be open to these biological factors and I've talked about brain sex just and giving the example of autism that what we find is both males and females with autism are likely to have a type s brain where their systemizing is at a higher level than their empathy and again autism has a genetic component it also involves a prenatal hormonal component here are my conclusions that there are sex differences in the both the brain and the mind and of course these and they exist on average and these may well reflect being brought up in a gendered culture these sex differences on average show overlap between the sexes that they're not binary but that culture which is very likely to be having an influence interacts with our prenatal biology because and that the biological factors exert their effects before culture can shape us so I'm really arguing for an interactionist view when I'm arguing for essentialism I'm saying let's keep in mind there are some essential factors or biological factors that interact with cultural factors and I think that the position of arguing for purely cultural factors which I think Gina's book does do but I think tonight we may be meeting in the middle or purely biological factors are actually quite extreme positions that today in 2019 the interactionist position is much more moderate and lastly that when we think about the terms sex and gender male and female we need to think about it in a much more nuanced way across at least those seven levels of meaning thank you very much [Music] we'll probably leave that there for there for the next for their next because they have the chance now thank you both very very much we'll call you on in a moment thank you both very very much for that I can see that Gina's been scribbling away you say you agree a lot but there's clearly a great amount of disagreement too so it's now now your chance to to fight back against that for around five minutes so Gina if you could go back to this I was actually screw bleeding down ideas for the next book which I think Simon and I ought to write together right well one of the things that sound and I talked about beforehand is that our experience of these events is that very often it's the questions were asked from the audience which really bring out the issues and therefore suggested that we wouldn't take the four five minutes and given the amount of time we've already spent then I probably won't take the four five minutes but I will just draw attention to some key issues that came out in in in Simon's discussion and perhaps elaboration on some of the things I said I didn't actually think when we first proposed this debate that I might be going second and I chiefly thought to myself I'm gonna count the number of times Simon Says on average and actually that's what I was writing absolutely right we must be very careful to establish that we are talking about differences which are on average I was intrigued with some of the great data he showed I'd really like to see in some more of them the overlap of the distribution of the data and some reporting of the effect size I showed you how overlapping data can result in very tiny differences which were reported as significantly different but are almost meaningless in terms of telling you much about the two groups who are being compared and I think that's important to bear in mind so that when you're reading research in this area check very carefully that the scientists concerned are talking of knowledge that they're talking on average differences of course what happens very often is that you present a sort of fairly dense arcane paper into an even denser more arcane journal which earnestly gets read by very few people perhaps the other people with papers in the journal but what then happens is because as universities we're supposed to describe the impact of our research the marketing team has a look at the paper picks out a few choice phrases gets rid of things which they think would be a bit boring like on average and then you get a kind of Chinese whispers type effect where the very careful presentation of data which Simon has demonstrated just demonstrated actually gets diluted and the message that is conveyed and received and then of course feeds into the very stereotyped culture that I'm claiming is is affecting the brain it is changed and so I think that's that's something I would bear in mind and certainly I cannot in any way criticize the care with which Simon presented those data but I would say that there should be a kind of government health warning sometimes associated with it the baby study the Connellan study as he said I did criticize I'm not the only person who's criticized that there are lots of methodological differences in these different studies which sometimes people who are really interested in so what is the answer they didn't want to know actually we use this kind of titration or that kind of brain imaging or we use that kind of statistical procedure they want to know the answer and very often the answer is if this is a robust effect then let's see it replicated so I'd love to see the 20 the the study with babies 24 hours old replicated because I think it's really important to Simon said and and it would be great to look at the robustness the strong and stable not effect I was intrigued to see that the early study he reported from Gilmore's lab in 2018 did report differences because that in fact the lab I mentioned earlier where they'd reported quite strong differences then three years later using the same kind of techniques the differences have disappeared it's the same lab so it's very interesting that even within the same lab this isn't a consistent report that's coming out and I think that's important to remember because again people have a very fixed belief about they've got a male brain and a female brain and you will get statements decades of neuroscience research has proved that men's brains are different from women's brains they don't say on average and the different the message that that difference is conveying is sometimes lost so I think I think what Simon has said great data be careful of the message that's getting out there some really very intriguing findings of genetics and hormones which will really push the story forward but I would come back to the very flexibility of the terms male and female which he himself I would suggest perhaps got was confused about in the beginning and has acknowledged the fact that those terms mean different things in different contexts and because that term male and female actually conveys something different to different people maybe we should think about it quite carefully and and be really clear that are we talking about the brains from men or are we talking about male brains and acknowledging that that might be different so I think that's important to note the only other thing I would say that still the idea that we're looking at sex differences can be very limiting quite recently last three years or so funders of research in the states have insisted that for example looking at a very basic research into pharmacology drug effects in individuals previously have only been demonstrated to developed on male what we call animal models or males females are complicated and therefore let's just focus on males there was a difference for the particular drug which appeared to cause quite strong side effects in in females because they appear to be overdosing because there hadn't been any allowance obviously developing this drug on on male models for that difference and therefore we're now being mandated funders in the state's that sex is a biological variable should be part of anybody's research unless they've got a very good reason for that not to happen I'm just mentioning that because the idea that sex is a biological variable only a biological variable could well be confusing and it could well introduce some of the confusing confusions that Simon and I generally agree on but sometimes disagree on I would point out with that study that it was assumed that there was the difference between males and females in the washout rate of the drug well she actually then tanned and that had a knock-on effect on that on the prescription levels being given to male and females it then turned out that actually it was effect of brain of body weight and of blood volume and therefore actually a third of the men whose were being tested were also overdosing on the drug so this is an idea that an idea that this is a male female difference when he looked at it with a different variable in mind that difference disappeared and the difference that did appear as significant was actually more important to remember so I think again the aspect of the male and female is something we need to remember something we need to be careful about and be careful that it's not limiting us it's kind of spotlight effect where we're looking for differences we hone in on differences we find differences we report differences and around all the data that we've got there are all sorts of other interesting things going on which we might miss but I think Simon's certainly gave you lots and lots to think about gave me lots to think about and we'll see what it did to your voting tendencies thank you [Music] thank you very much as I'm gonna keep you to a strict five minutes so that we can make sure we get to questions of your chance to so we're I again want to agree with Gina is in her statement that we are all different and it's not a function of our sex or our gender and many of you will have heard of the term neurodiversity which is a term widely used now in the autism community but I think we can expand it out to the general population we are all different in our brain structure our brain function and our development and as some of the profiles that we've seen that I was talking about just illustrate some of that diversity the second thing is about stereotyping you know some of the findings that come out of our lab I think argue against stereotyping because you can have males that's to say chromosomally male who have a female profile which is that's to say their empathy is at a higher level than their systemizing and you can have females who have a so-called male profile which is psychometrically defined where your systemizing is higher than your empathy so to prejudge an individual on the basis of now chromosomal sex being male or female would be stereotyping you can't you can't infer anything about the male or female candidate that walks into the interview on the basis of their sex or gender you'd have to look at their their unique profile they may be typical or atypical for their sex a second point I'd make is that we are here in an institution for science and so we're asking deep scientific questions of are there differences at birth between males and females on average or even prenatally I think those questions have a place in science and asking those questions doesn't have to have any bearing on the kind of society that we want so when we're thinking about our society in all walks of life we may aspire as I do and I'm sure Gina does and I'm all of you - for a society that's based on equality that we want all of our institutions all of our professions all walks of life to be equal in terms of male and female representation but that's to do with our values our social values and our aspirations and that shouldn't prevent us from asking these interesting scientific questions a third point that Gina made was about the need for replication and science hinges on replication the newborn baby study where you're looking at a face or a geometric design has only been done once it's quite a challenging study to do because you have to be on the maternity ward at 3 o'clock in the morning which is when babies tend to get born and before the mother is discharged by breakfast so we we did that study in 2001 I would love to see it replicated because science hinges on independent replication the fact that it hasn't been replicated doesn't mean that it's invalid we just have to wait for independent groups to come along Gina's last point was that sometimes you find an average sex difference sometimes you don't even in the Gilmore lab and the trick that scientists have to guard against these changing findings is to do what's called meta-analysis you wait til there are enough studies and you look across many many studies sometimes dozens sometimes hundreds to see what emerges from a meta-analysis and in the sex differences literature that has been done and that gives us a bit more confidence that on balance we're seeing average sex differences in certain brain regions even if they're not always popping up in every individual study and often if they don't pop up it's an issue to do with sample size you need big data to see some of these small effects um the last point that Gina made was even if you do find differences are they just meaningless they might be small and meaningless well we just don't know what the meaning of those sex differences are and we should certainly not draw conclusions that one sex is superior or more intelligent none of the data shows that but we might still be seeing differences and we don't know what those differences might mean thank you both very much thank you for removing podiums and I'm sure you you have all got lots of questions I certainly have but it's not my turn to ask them thank you vote given us a huge amount to think about and I hope also I might get the results of the votes when you came in so that I can read those both out at the end so we're waiting for those while you raise your hands high and we've got roving mics so and we'll just start here and as I said can you be quite concise with your questions so that we can get through lots it looks like we've got a lot we've got around them 15 or so minutes to get those in can both speakers please address Jina's contention about the James - more memo and the Larry Summers controversy and that and the potential differences at the extremes of achievement in things like engineering or science and the conclusion Jena made which it seemed to me and others to be a misrepresentation about the conclusions I made thank you thank you very much I think you were talking about that so-called greater male variability hypothesis there's more geniuses and idiots in the male population not my words I promise yeah that's right yes and that's been one of the the focus strangely enough has been on the right hand side let's have a look at the number of increased number of male geniuses and and and then really what what we're saying is that that seems to be a kind of fixed effect in an explanation for why there are so many more male Nobel Prize winners etc etc looking at the kind of big data and meta-analysis that Simon's drawn attention to has demonstrated that that variability has not stood the test of time or the test of large amounts of data analysis it varies in different cultures within cultures across time etc but it's a very strong belief and it's a belief that Larry Summers specifically related to and you know three standard deviations above the mean that you know you were likely to find it at the top end I think again that's very much to do with with with cultural effects as well so just to say the statistical backing of that is not stood the test of time um so I think when individuals make remarks about males and females being more intelligent or you know particularly the physicist at CERN who made that remark there's a very extreme statements and he was quite correctly you know there was a public response and the scientific response was to say that those were not just inappropriate but invalid statements you know I think the science whether you're a social scientist or a biological sciences is simply showing these average differences you know the fact that if you looked at the Fields Medal which is the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in mathematics most of the winners have been male tells us nothing because you know universities many universities didn't even give women the opportunity to study mathematics or physics or some of their STEM subjects until the 1940s my University included say there are you know there are questions but we have to be very cautious in how we interpret some of that evidence thank you I am this is mainly for Simon you encourage nuance so why do you use the terms male and female brain when you said in your book that not all men have a male brain or women have a female brain it's that not reductive to do so ice I've worked in the news media for some time and I'm aware that you know when papers such as yours at the end of last year reported nuance and caveats are lost and as you showed there was a you know quite a wide overlap between emphasizing and systemising brain sure so I mean I'm using the term male brain and female brain to find psychometrically which simply means you take some psychological tests and if the difference between your tests on your score on one test and the other is is a significant difference you're in one category type II or type s and I call this the female or the male brain just because there are more women that show the type II but it's not all women it's about 40% compared to 20% of men exactly so there are lots of people who overlap and that's exactly what we would expect if you're looking at these bell curves where the majority of the population are overlapping what we're looking what we're identifying is small sex differences we can talk about the effect size or how bigger those sex differences and we can talk about terminology I could equally call it type II and type s less controversially but they are associated with differences in the frequency in males and females you might have asked the question for the ladies above you already because they're nodding this lady here and the fifth row and we'll come to you afterwards let's go here sorry just to bounce back on that do people scored differently on e and s throughout their life like I'm thinking maybe once woman has had children maybe she'll be more ething she was before yeah yeah so you know Gina made the point that that we are we have plasticity and I would completely agree our brains are not fixed so it could well be that either under the you know the experience of having children or under the hormonal change of having children we don't know what the relevant variable is there might be changes in how easily you empathize or how strongly you're interested in systems so change across life lifespan is not it is not precluded from this kind of approach let's go to the second row hi Simon you said at the end of your retort that this wasn't clear what it actually meant these differences and I think it's extremely important yeah and I think this hunt for differences between male and female brains as gina has laid out in her book and others have in their books and papers has been going on for centuries you know and if I didn't miss read it in your book you also make some meaning of that by implying that certain professions are more suitable for female brains or male brains and I think that is very consequential sure so if I could reply to that ok so you know if you're going to be working in an occupation that is people centered it would probably be better if you had a type II sort of brain where you're able to pick up on the other person's emotions thoughts and perspectives very easily so that's about the kept the type of profile you have that I call it the brain type that you have but that's nothing to do with whether you're male or female and I've made the point repeatedly not just in the book but tonight you could be male chromosomally with a female brain you might make a fantastic psychotherapist for example because you're easily able to tune into the other person's emotions equally you could be chromosomally female and make a fantastic physicist or car mechanic because you can very quickly understand a system and the fact that you can have one type of brain in another type of body shows how we can use the terms male and female very differently across these seven levels I think I just briefly say to that yes I agree but it comes back to using the terms male and female and the downstream consequences of that for what people believe and I think that you know in a way that intersects with the statements by the Google memo and etc and I think because we get a self-fulfilling prophecy because if you have a belief that you have you're a female and therefore there are things you can't do you won't do those things your brain won't be exposed to those kind of experiences and I think that's where you know the labels are important and what they mean to other people this is why I added in this is not just about the science it's about the communication of the science and we'll come yeah we'll come to the back for the next questions thank you very much request menu for Gina you argued quite a bit against biology playing a major role or those differences being quite small that we see in biology and kind of just implied that the sociological differences or the expectations society would be particularly relevant also in their just your last answer right now I'm aware of a couple of experiments like this where you tell a certain gender that they're worse and one thing and then they actually score worse in this particular task but overall on an aggregate basis across countries one thing that's quite we haven't made quite popular with people like Jordan Pederson is this Nordic gender paradox where you see that in countries like the Nordics you don't see a smaller differences in interests but more larger differences in interests compared to countries maybe like India where you have where women objectively don't have the same opportunities so what gives you comfort in just questioning lots of things in there first of all if I gave the impression that I think biology isn't important that's certainly not the message I meant to give what I was saying is that you know is it always biology in the driving seat or is it biology being driven and I think that's perhaps something the message I'd like to get out the idea about I think you're talking about the gender paradox that's in more gender equal in inverted commas countries for example the gender gap in representation in science is greater and there is it's an interesting how the narratives changed a bit there's you know when women have the choice because economically they don't have to go into high-paying jobs like science then they choose to go off and be painters I think was one of the examples I came across but that of course assumes that for example science is welcoming that science has lots of role models for women that some women can see themselves progressing belonging in science so I think that is an aspect where this the social context of choices which may well affect your biology are important yeah and I would agree agree with you Gina that we need to have more role models of both genders in science we need to I mean we need to take into account and recognize that there are real influences of these stereotypes we need to be very careful about language but that doesn't mean that we should ignore possible differences that exist between males and females on average before culture has had a role very polite debating you do let's go yeah is there a mic okay yeah I I don't know if it's statistically relevant but chromosome or variations is that does that lend anything to the inquiry is it worth sort of seeing what comes out of you know studies in particular for people who don't have the binary xx x/y that's the show I mean probably the best well-studied is Turner's syndrome it's not a medical condition where you just have one X chromosome and a missing second X chromosome and so these these girls can be separated into whether they got their X chromosome from their mother or their father and do show differences later in life on tests of of social understanding so that would imply that genes on the on the sex chromosomes particularly the X chromosome and the parent of origin of that sex chromosome may be having long term effects on your interests by the way the other thing I wanted to mention in all this is about interests rather than aptitudes it's been mentioned you know that the in Nordic countries women may now be showing pursuing careers that reflect their interests the same is true in preschool and in you know play groups and in primary schools but what were what we may be seeing when we see the sexes diverging on average is simply a difference in patterns of interest the newborn baby study wasn't about aptitude but it was what do you choose to look at more a face or a geometric design and when you think about any group of kids in a primary school or in a toddler group you will find some kids making a beeline for objects and playing in a solitary way and other kids are making a beeline for the peer group and playing in small groups and making a lot of eye contact of course autistic children may be an extreme of that where they get over focused on objects and pay very little time to people's faces and these are just reflecting differences in interest I don't put any value judgment on a child who wants to spend all their time with Lego bricks and not at looking at faces or vice-versa they just reflect differences in interests I notice that Simon's very careful not to use the term boys and girls great there's lots of people up here I think jumping around yes keep it quick because then I want to try and 15l trying this video I think Gina's actually already sort of touched upon the point but just curious how you feel about the the list of the causes of sex differences and you said you know kind of sides towards the top and you more towards the bottom that the scientific studies that you publish then inform cultural influences and I've heard them used frequently for justifications of different treatments of people and how you can ever truly prove an essential difference unless your publications aren't published mithoon fluence of them how how can we truly see what the effect of nature versus nurture is well I think I think you're never going to be ever to truly see it unless you can do some kind of weird sort experiment one of the interesting ways that people are now looking at instead of looking for differences is actually looking at dimensions and for example psychological characteristics there's a lovely paper I think it's called are we all from earth or effectively it's taking well-known differences between men and women and say do they actually work better if you put them on a dimension and thinking about the kind of behaviour that we're interested in actually might be better if we get away from this difference argument just a brief response that when I listed the different possible influences on sex differences or brain development and I put the two social ones at the top that wasn't to say that the list is in order of importance parental expectations and gendered expectations and so forth are probably having just as much an effect as some of the biological factors that I listed maybe even more could even be swampy the effects of the biology but we can try at least to measure all of them I'm gonna take one more from you I am firstly thank you so much mr. Knight I've I've conducted academic research on the perceived differences of women in software engineering so I found a lot of these topics and sort of insights really interesting I wondered whether you know of any research that's been done into kind of brain matter differences or hormone level differences in those who identify as non-binary yes do I know of any studies yes if is the answer it's it's an area of intense interest and there are indeed studies but some of the methodological issues the nature of the population the size of the sample that you get the different experiences that individuals will have had can be confounding factors so they're very difficult research to carry out but it has been carried up yeah I can't comment on individual studies of so-called non-binary individuals but I do welcome the term non-binary just to open our minds to the fact that when we've looked at any of these different dimensions very few of them are categorical you might argue chromosomal sex is categorical you either have two x's or an X on the Y but pretty much all the other levels that we were talking about including brain sex are dimensional and so non-binary and you and individuals could end up anywhere on a dimensional spectrum I'm so sorry because I know there are so many questions and that's because these two have given us a huge amount to think about in the last hour and a half but we have to draw it to a close I'm just going to I'm just going to tell you how you voted and as you came in so again the motion was men and women do not have essentially different brains for that were a hundred and nine of you and against that were a hundred and eighteen of you and seventy-four of you didn't know incredibly close and now we get to see as I said very polite but to very altima a fundamentally different arguments here to see whether you've changed your mind so if you are for the arguments men and women do not have essentially different brains and as argued by Gina can you put your hands up really high okay that is looks like okay and if you are against to put your hands up very high it's binary I think I think it'd be fair to say probably still very similar but I think the balance might have been just tipped in favor of four just tell me quickly who changed their minds over the course of evening a very small amount probably self-report

Channel: How To Academy Mindset

Views: 18,922

Rating: 4.7049179 out of 5

Keywords: Simon Baron-Cohen, Gina Rippon, Professor Gina Rippon, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Hannah MacInnes, How to: Academy, How to Academy, Royal Institution, men, women, brains, neuroscience, neurononsense, Autism, Empathy, Empathising, System, Systemitising, systemitizing, empathizing, Type S, Type E, The Essential Difference, The Gendered Brain, Mars, Venus, Cambridge, Aston

Id: kxfaE-gWZ9I

Length: 79min 50sec (4790 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/pontiak404]

Dr. Rippon makes one of her strongest points at 13:42 that one of the things we should do as a whole in science is try to blur out this "nature/nurture" debate. Its a primitive way of thinking about biology and development.

That said, if an aspect of one organism's development is a constant flood of one hormone versus another, you're going to see differences. The distributions among the population will certainly overlap because of a wide range of hormone levels per individual and individual experiences (even prenatally, as she alludes to), but there will still be differences.

That said, the claims made by Dr. Baron-Cohen seem to be pretty well-balanced. Much of the adult data like the fMRI data he shows about brain differences in adults isn't necessarily reinforcing to his point because of all the points about development and cultural influences. His discussion about prenatal hormone influences are some of his strongest points. There is compelling evidence that these prenatal influences are very important.

The fact that Dr. Rippon seemed to outright dismiss animal studies for evidence of these differences, even though these are the best ways a scientist could truly, empirically find these differences independent of "cultural" influences, is a little unsettling, especially as someone who studies behavioral neuroscience with animals.

I say all of this making no generalized claims about what these possible differences mean, since we obviously aren't sure as a whole. I just think dismissing them as a possibility is a mistake.

[u/Stauce52]

I’d like to watch this later but don’t have time right now. Can someone provide a TL;DR for me? I find the topic really interesting (i.e. To what extent purported sex differences observed in neuroimaging are actually a product of gender enculturation via social/environmental factors)

[u/PersephoneIsNotHome]

The SD POA (sexually dimorphic Pre Optic Nucleus) is not in the hippocampus. It is in the hypothalamus.