Are Male and Female Brains Biologically Different?
① Pop neuroscience has long been fascinated with uncovering secret biological differences between male and female brains. The question of whether men and women have innately different brains rarely fails to get people riled up.
② But Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School says that anyone who goes searching for innate differences between the sexes won't find them. "People say men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but the brain is a unisex organ," she said.
③ A study found that "averaged across many people, sex differences in brain structure do exist, but an individual brain is likely to be just that: individual, with a mix of features," as New Scientist reported in 2015.
④ Eliot blames academia and the media in part for the cycle that leads to the ongoing argument over biological brain differences. Because most scholars know that any small statistical difference between men and women will make headlines, academics, desperate for funding and attention, often focus studies on gender disparities.
