According to Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School and the author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain, anyone who goes searching for innate differences between the sexes won’t find them.
“. . . the brain is a unisex organ. We have the exact same structures,” There is absolutely no difference between male and female brains. . . . Male and female brains are not much [more] different from each other than male or female hearts or kidneys.”
Eliot said neuroscientists have yet to find a single circuit that’s wired differently between men and women, and that differences between sexes are best explained by nurture, not nature.
“We keep looking for a biological difference, finding it, it inevitably gets discredited, and yet we still seem so eager to find another one,” she said. Eliot blames academia and the media in part for this cycle. 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. “You go back to data, analyze it for sex, and if you find a difference, then guess what: You have another paper,” Eliot said.
She said that even scientifically indisputable differences, such as the oft-cited statistic that male brains are 10 percent bigger than female brains, don’t mean anything. All of men’s organs are bigger on average, but that doesn’t mean they function differently.
Eliot said that it’s important to debunk efforts to prove that female brains are different if we want to disrupt current power structures. If scientists and academics were to begin with the premise that men and women are equally capable, their studies would result in radically different conclusions.
A 1970 study that showed men outperformed women 13 to one on the math portion of the SAT was used to explain why there aren’t more women at the top of stem fields. “People said brilliance in math is a male phenomenon,” Eliot said.
“. . . it turned out women were being discouraged from pursuing STEM. Once more programs were put in place to foster this type of learning, the ratio dropped to 3 to 1, Eliot said, and is now on its way to closing.”