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There aren’t many more heated topics than gender and the brain, and whether the differences between men and women are innate or the product of socialisation. It makes people absolutely furious. I am, in fact, honestly nervous writing about it. But here goes.
A new paper, published yesterday in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, appears to find structural brain differences between male and female foetuses. It is being touted as a sort of final answer: after all, if these differences exist before the child is born, it’s hard to see how they could be caused by social expectations. The somewhat overexcitable headline of an otherwise sensible article in The Times proclaimed: ‘Proof at last! Men and women are born to be different’.
Inevitably, the story is both less and more interesting than that. First: this study is not “proof” of anything. What it is, is a weapon in a proxy war.
The research is carried out using functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI. That means that scans are taken of brain activity to see how different parts of the brain are connected: their “functional connectivity”. It found that, as the foetuses’ brains grew, different parts of the brain became more strongly connected in male foetuses than in female foetuses.
There are some things to note. First, fMRI studies are tricky. (I imagine they’re even trickier in foetuses.) They’re expensive, which means that the sample sizes are usually small, and the data is messy: those neat ‘brain area lights up’ pictures you see are usually an oversimplification.
This study used 118 subjects, of which 48 were female and 70 male. It’s quite a big sample by fMRI standards, but by the standards of, say, a genome-wide association study looking at genetic links to physical traits, which would probably look at tens or hundreds of thousands of people, it’s tiny.
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