Yes, there really are differences between men and women’s brains:
While there are essentially no disparities in general intelligence between the sexes, a UC Irvine study has found significant differences in brain areas where males and females manifest their intelligence.
The study shows women having more white matter and men more gray matter related to intellectual skill, revealing that no single neuroanatomical structure determines general intelligence and that different types of brain designs are capable of producing equivalent intellectual performance.
[…] In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of ? or connections between ? these processing centers.
This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author of the study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests.
Hmmm. Aren’t statements like that — noting differences in the cognitive bents of male and females — what got the President of Harvard in such deep water over the last week?
It’s an interesting conundrum. We know that male and female physiology are different (and vive le difference!), and even go so far as to acknowledge it in physical sports (which usually have different male and female categories), but given past prejudice against women, we’ve, societally, lashed out at any suggestion that such difference might extend to mental faculties as well.
Which is kind of goofy, because it’s like saying that both Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong are great athletes but not being willing to admit that Lance is probably better at cycling and Tiger is probably better at golf. It seems legitimate to say that male vs. female brains (just like the rest of their bodies) are designed/adapted around different biological tasks, and so are going to have certain advantages on average in certain pursuits (or certain ways of doing certain pursuits), and that it’s not all just “nurture” that is responsible for behavioral and cognitive differences — and to say that without saying “and the guys are better than the gals” or even “and this is universally true in every case.”
After all, I can point toward women who are stronger than me, and some who are smarter, and some who are better at certain things than I am. “Different” does not necessarily mean “better” or “worse,” either as an overall evaluation or in particular instances. Which is why the article above falls all over itself to keep noting that differences in specific cognitive excellence still balance out in overall cognitive ability.
My measure of comfort with comments about such differences between men and women is whether the comment also discusses the size of the difference relative to the overall range of ability. For example, men perform better than women in cycling races. But the range of ability within men is huge. Lance Armstrong is going to beat you by way more than you beat me*. The variation within the group is much larger than the variation between the group (where men and women form separate groups). And when it comes to intelligence, the difference between the groups becomes even smaller in comparison to the difference within the groups.
Too often, that point is left out, and people think that the information that there are differences between men and womens’ brains can be generalised and they think that it tells them more than it really does.
*I’d suggest that I might even beat you and that at a mid-level of ability gender is not a very useful predictor of who will win the race, if I wasn’t completely incapable of riding a bike at all. In a race I wouldn’t so much be riding as repeatedly falling off in the direction of the line.
That’s part of what I was getting at in my comment about “universally true.” There are any number of women who can golf better than I can — both from training but also, I suspect, from innate ability. That the top male golfers can, by and large, outperform *them* (because of upper body strength) doesn’t mean I can say that “men are better golfers than women” — I stand as a stark counter-example.
The problem is that it’s almost impossible to talk about this stuff in a meaningful way (or outside studies like this), because of very real and pernicious (and falsely premised) prejudice in the past. It becomes difficult to look at the actual range of physiological (and related mental/cognitive/emotional) differences between genders (or between other population groups), and compare them to the ranges within groups (or try to factor the influence of socialization) without coming under fire for being a bigot.
In aggregate, people are people. Treating any group of them as generally inferior is certainly an overgeneralization, with plenty of counter-examples from both inside and outside of the group. Whether in specific areas there are broad strengths or weaknesses, and how broadly spread those are within those groups, is another question — and *still* is dangerous to draw generalizations from (even while it’s dangerous to ignore).