Male and female brains aren’t wired differently
New research, published in October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that despite size discrepancy, there’s no functional difference between men’s and women’s brains. “Male” brains and “female” brains simply don’t exist. In fact, there’s significant overlap.
This study had 1400 people in it… Remember that sample size matters. remember this when someone tries to rebuke this with a study that has 80 participants. Be as scientifically literate as possible so that we can debunk this nonsense one step at a time.
ALSO FOLLOW-UP.
I’m just gonna post the abstract of the paper (link) because there is no way in hell anyone should trust mic.com to get this right:
Whereas a categorical difference in the genitals has always been acknowledged, the question of how far these categories extend into human biology is still not resolved. Documented sex/gender differences in the brain are often taken as support of a sexually dimorphic view of human brains (“female brain” or “male brain”). However, such a distinction would be possible only if sex/gender differences in brain features were highly dimorphic (i.e., little overlap between the forms of these features in males and females) and internally consistent (i.e., a brain has only “male” or only “female” features). Here, analysis of MRIs of more than 1,400 human brains from four datasets reveals extensive overlap between the distributions of females and males for all gray matter, white matter, and connections assessed. Moreover, analyses of internal consistency reveal that brains with features that are consistently at one end of the “maleness-femaleness” continuum are rare. Rather, most brains are comprised of unique “mosaics” of features, some more common in females compared with males, some more common in males compared with females, and some common in both females and males. Our findings are robust across sample, age, type of MRI, and method of analysis. These findings are corroborated by a similar analysis of personality traits, attitudes, interests, and behaviors of more than 5,500 individuals, which reveals that internal consistency is extremely rare. Our study demonstrates that, although there are sex/gender differences in the brain, human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain/female brain.
Quick summary of abstract: brains are very complicated and have many different features. Some features are more common in men, others more common in women, and some are equally common in men and women.
No one is ever going to have a brain with all the male-correlated features and none of the female-correlated ones, or vice-versa.
(Source: mic.com)