Do Men and Women Have Different Brains?

For starters, the law must treat men and women with absolute equality. But it is foolish to believe their brains are inherently identical, even from the outset. Certain behaviors - motherly closeness toward infants, for example - are exhibited far more by most women than most men in nearly all cultures, which suggests there's something bigger than culture going on. Gendered behavior is also found among all mammals that I know of. For example, National Geographic once put out a video showing a female leopard finding an infant baboon clinging to the mom baboon it had just killed. A male leopard would have treated it as an hors d'oeuvre. The female carried gently up a tree, attempted to mother it, protect it and save its life. This one instance is proof of nothing, but female mammals in general (like birds) display far more of what we might call empathy toward their young. It looks very hard-wired. I can't imagine why humans would be uniquely different from other mammals.

Anyone observing both genders know full well that there are biological differences in toddlers. Little boys and little girls will exhibit different reactions to stimuli to which they have never before been introduced. As we know, in almost every case, every cell, in every body organ, the boys will have the XY Chromosome, while the girls will have the XX Chromosome. Whether it is the obvious brain differences, or the equally obvious Chromosomal differences, the idea of "learned" gender differences is simply a hilarious matter of logically "putting the cart before the horse. I have raised babies of both genders. I set up many experiments with the children at home. Since they were young enough, it was *easy to expose them to stimuli never before encountered. Three Boys and Two Girls. The boys would almost uniformly respond with "XYZ", and the girls with "ABC". I found as a male parent that I had to develop two *entirely different strategies FOR successfully dealing with the two genders. The differences are *innate, not "learned". The same applies in the animal kingdom. Whether differences are located in the brain, the sex hormones, the genes, or the epigenetics, they do NOT manifest due to "learned" experiences. We now know, via studies on supposed "racial" genetics, that there is *less genetic difference between any two males from any culture world wide than there are between *any male, and *any female from any culture. Not "better", just "different".

In general, it is known that there is more variation between individual woman (or individual men) than there is commonality across a group of women (or men). So given an individual woman's brain and compare it to an individual man's brain, you may find that the given woman might be more what we socially think of as masculine, and the given man might be more what we think of as feminine. But across a population, all men might be more like most men and all women might be more like most women... and *everyone* might be more like humans than men are like men and women are like women... and lacking the social cues which we ASSUME are nature--but are really nurture--both sexes might act in completely different ways which are just plain human but which we *think* are gendered. In short, nothing is exactly what it seems. We make a lot of assumptions based on biased ideas of what *should* be.

At age 83, it makes me realize that at age 25 I was just getting used to standing in front of a beautiful woman without babbling or blushing. Then into my 30s I thought that I could stand up to any woman until I realized that women dodn't come from this planet and that for a male to contend in polite confusion that he thought would win her over was absurd. And then in my 40s I just surrendered to the thing that women brought to the table and the bedroom that I could never meet that match. Which is why I now live in peaceful solitude.

With regard to gender from birth experience, how does B.F. Skinner's work with his own daughter relate to this new research?

Given how much we are learning about gender fluidity, this book seems out of date.

New York Times BestSeller The Female Brain by Dr. Louann Brizendine highlights the details that make the premise of this article hard to believe

I believe it is accepted evolutionary science that the ancestors of humans were able to use tools and perform other intellectually driven tasks only because their brains got big enough. Therefore,the size of a modern person's brain must also correlate to some degree with task mastery. Thus,with larger brains,men are superior to women in at least that way.

Janet Newcastle's supposition that hormonal differences between men and women must lead to sex differences has been disproved by a variety of studies. Three surveys of these studies are: Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences (2011); Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference (2011) and Anglea Saini, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong-and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story (2018), It's puzzling that the Times Book Review chose an economist to review a book on the scientific basis (or lack of scientific basis) for sex differences. Someone who had worked in this field, like the writers cited above, would have been able to write a more informed and definitive review, comparing Rippon's work to the research of others.

Does the author consider that perhaps our brains are the same but since our hormones are markedly different men and women will never be the same.

It would be interesting to see how the claims in this book mesh with the claims of those who argue that transgender people feel a mismatch between their assigned gender, based on their biological sex, and the gender their mind tells them is correct, often from a very young age. Current thinking seems to explain this as due to differences between male brains and female brains (nature not nurture). https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/gender-when-body-and-brain-disagree If brain plasticity is the real story of the differences between "male" and "female" brains (nurture not nature) this explanation for transgenderism may have to be revised. Science marches on. No doubt everything is more complicated than it seems.

Maybe we all are “non-binary”.

For one thing, this work shows that the notion of male and female brains is mostly nonsense, and that what functional differences do exist are largely the product of nature as opposed to nurture. It does a lot to undermine claims around gender essentialism (particularly evolutionary psychology) and gender identity.