Psychology

918 vol 29 no 12 december 2016

Ainsworth, C. (2015). Sex redefined.
Nature, 518, 288–291.

Bennett, C.M., Baird, A.A., Miller, M.B. &
Wolford, G.L. (2011). Neural
correlates of interspecies perspective
taking in the post-mortem atlantic
salmon. Journal of Serendipitous and
Unexpected Results, 1, 1–5.

Biswal, B.B., Mennes, M., Zuo, X.N. et al.
(2010). Toward discovery science of
human brain function. Proceedings of

the National Academy of Sciences,
107(10), 4734–4739.

Brescoll, V. & LaFrance, M. (2004). The
correlates and consequences of
newspaper reports of research on
sex differences. Psychological
Science, 15(8), 515–520.

Carothers, B.J. & Reis, H.T. (2013). Men
and women are from Earth:
Examining the latent structure of
gender. Journal of Personality and

Social Psychology, 104(2), 385.
Cohen J. (1988). Statistical power analysis

for the behavioral sciences. New York:
Routledge Academic.

Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000). Sexing the
body: Gender politics and the
construction of sexuality. New York:
Basic Books.

Fine, C. (2010). Delusions of gender: How
our minds, society, and neurosexism
create difference. New York: Norton.

Fine, C. (2013). Is there neurosexism in
functional neuroimaging
investigations of sex differences?
Neuroethics, 6(2), 369–409.

Fine, C., Jordan-Young, R., Kaiser, A. &
Rippon, G. (2013). Plasticity, plasticity,
plasticity… and the rigid problem of
sex. Trends in Cognitive Sciences,
17(11), 550–551.

Gianaros, P.J., Horenstein, J.A., Cohen, S.
et al. (2007). Perigenual anterior

The global gender gap across health,
education, economic opportunity and
politics has closed by only 4 per cent
in the past 10 years, with the
economic gap closing by just 3 per
cent, suggesting it will take another
118 years to close this gap
completely. (World Economic Forum,
Global Gender Gap Report 2015)

Despite continued efforts, the under-representation of women in manykey areas of global power and
influence is evident. This is, of course,
not a new issue. Earlier versions of
gender gaps associated them with
women’s biological, social and intellectual
inferiority (as an 18th-century given) or
with women’s ‘natural’ roles as carers,
mothers, ‘womanly companions of men’
(as in the 19th-century ‘complementarity’
agenda). ‘Blame the brain’ was the mantra
underpinning these essentialist
justifications of the status quo – the
biologically determined differences
between men’s and women’s brains were
viewed as the cause of these imbalances,
and, most significantly, these differences
were seen as ‘hard wired’, fixed and
unchangeable.

A key breakthrough in our knowledge
of the brain in this century, fuelled by the
stunning technological advances in
research, is that brain structure and
function is not fixed and unchangeable,
and not the same irrespective of context
or culture. It is, in fact, exquisitely
plastic, mouldable by experience
throughout life. It is also ‘permeable’,

responding to social attitudes and
expectations, as is shown by brain-
imaging studies of stereotype threat
(Wraga et al., 2006).

Additionally, there is a challenge to
the very concept of considering males
and females as belonging to two separate,
often ‘opposite’ categories. The accepted
binary concept of sex needs revisiting.
At all levels, biological and behavioural,

males and females do not fall into two
neat, separable categories, so the quest for
differences between them could at best be
uninformative and certainly misleading.

You might think that the possibilities
offered by these breakthroughs would be
seized on as ‘game-changers’ in the arena
of research into sex differences and the
brain. The development of powerful and
sensitive techniques for studying the
brain, paired with a new understanding of
how the brain reflects the world in which
it develops, should be revolutionising the
research agenda and galvanising
discussion in media outlets. Would that
it were so!

My argument in this article is not
just that there is a continued emphasis
on ‘essentialist’, brain-based explanations
in both public communication of, and
research into, many forms of gender
imbalance (although the appetite for this
and the evident ‘confirmation’ bias is part

re
fe
re
nc
es

Where populist media and research findings support the notion that gender gaps arise from
fixed, brain-based factors, there is greater endorsement of gender stereotypes

A
R
TI
CL
E

The trouble with girls?
Gina Rippon asks why plastic brains aren’t breaking through glass ceilings

psy 12_16 p918_923 rippon_Layout 1 04/11/2016 15:33 Page 918

of the problem: see Maney, 2014). The
key difficulty is that this essentialist
approach remains rooted in the
deterministic past, with little or no
acknowledgment of the significance that
our emerging awareness of brain plasticity
could and should have for the
understanding of any differences between
the sexes. This problem is magnified by
a similar backward focus on historical
beliefs in stereotyped sex differences,
with little or no acknowledgement that
previously accepted differences are being
shown to be diminishing or disappearing
with time (itself a challenge to a
biological determinist perspective), or
actually not to be differences at all.

An additional concern is that this
sustained emphasis on an old-fashioned
biological determinist argument can be
a self-fulfilling prophecy. Where populist
media and research findings support the
notion that gender gaps arise from fixed,
brain-based factors, there is greater
endorsement of gender stereotypes,
increased tolerance of the status quo,
and belief in the impossibility of change
(Brescoll & La France, 2004). It also
reinforces the power of stereotype threat,
which can itself change brain function
(Wraga et al., 2006) but may also drive
educational and occupational choices,
thereby maintaining gender gaps,
undermining determined initiatives to
address them.

Let’s look at how those breakthroughs
which should be contributing to this
revolution in our understanding of sex
differences are currently limited, for a
range of reasons including basic
misunderstanding of the technology,
poor public communication of research,
questionable scientific practice and the
‘confirmation bias’ that renders
entrenched beliefs hard to shift.

Brain-imaging breakthroughs
A key aspect in untangling the arguments
about male and female brains is to have
reliable and valid ways of providing
accurate answers to the questions being

asked. We need to move
on from merely measuring
differences in the size of
structures or areas of
activation, mapping them
on to some kind of
neophrenological template,
feeding misleading concepts
such as ‘right-brainedness’
or ‘brainsex’. We need to
understand not differences
in brains per se, but their
role in those behavioural,
temperamental, or cognitive
differences between men and
women that might contribute
to imbalances in achievement.

Contemporary techniques
do allow a much more detailed
characterisation of what is
going on in the brain,
including tracking of structural
pathways or connections, and
identifying the comings and
goings of networked patterns
of activity in millisecond
timescales (Sporns et al.,
2005). Access to pooled
datasets from many labs means
there are participant cohorts
of many hundreds if not
thousands (Poldrack &
Gorgolewski, 2014). Together
with more complex approaches
to modelling patterns of brain
activity, these advances should
allow detailed examination of
the claims and counter claims
in cognitive neuroscience
research, increasing our
understanding of the true
nature of links between brain
and behaviour, and possibly
also dispelling many brain-
based myths (Jarrett, 2014).

However, the public representation
of findings from such techniques is
not always accurate. ‘Neurotrash’ is
a light-hearted term applied to the
sometimes bizarre representations (or
misrepresentations) of brain-imaging
findings that can be found in the popular

press. They mainly arise from a
journalistic lack of awareness of the
complexities and the limitations of
brain-imaging techniques, famously
characterised in the ‘dead salmon’ study
(Bennett et al., 2011), and from a
tendency to succumb to the ‘seductive
allure’ of the brain images themselves

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk 919

neuroscience and gender

cingulate morphology covaries with
perceived social standing. Social
Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience,
2(3), 161–173.

Gray, J. (1992). Men are from Mars,
women are from Venus. New York:
HarperCollins.

Hackman, D.A. & Farah, M.J. (2009).
Socioeconomic status and the
developing brain. Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 13(2), 65–73.

Hyde, J.S. (2014). Gender similarities and
differences. Annual Review of
Psychology, 65, 373–398.

Ingalhalikar, M., Smith, A., Parker, D., et
al (2014). Sex differences in the
structural connectome of the human
brain. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, 111(2), 823–828.

Jarrett, C. (2014). Great myths of the
brain. Chichester: Wiley.

Jarrett, C. (2015). Yes, men’s and

women’s brains do function
differently – but it’s a tiny difference
[Blog post]. Science of Us. Retrieved
21 September 2016 from
tinyurl.com/zvjta9n

Joel, D., Berman, Z., Tavor, I. et al. (2015).
Sex beyond the genitalia: The human
brain mosaic. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, 112(50),
15468–15473.

Joel, D. & Fausto-Sterling, A. (2016).

Beyond sex differences. Philosophical.
Transactions of the Royal Society B.
doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0451.

Maney, D.L. (2014). Just Like a circus:
The public consumption of sex
differences. In G. Lee, J. Illes & F.
Ohl (Eds.) Ethical issues in behavioral
neuroscience (pp.279–296). Berlin:
Springer.

Maney, D.L. (2016). Perils and pitfalls of
reporting sex differences.

Meet the author
‘Alongside my work on the more basic aspects of brain
imaging, I have always been interested in what used to
be called “biological politics” and has now morphed into
“critical neuroscience”. A key focus was critiquing
research into sex differences and social inequality and
psychology’s contributions (positive and negative) to that
debate. My main interests were in women’s mental
health, and at that stage I was influenced by researchers
such as Janet Sayers and Stephanie Shields.

‘In 2010 I was asked to review the contribution of
newly emerging brain-imaging techniques to the concept
of the male and the female brain. Exchanging ideas with
colleagues such as Cordelia Fine and Rebecca Jordan-
Young, it became clear that there were major problems
in this field. There were too many examples of the sort
of irresponsible reporting that characterises the
neurotrash and neurononsense I’m writing about here.
21st-century gender stereotypes about what females
and males can and can’t do seem to be more rigid and
prescriptive than ever before, much enhanced by the
power of many forms of media. Misunderstanding and
misrepresentation of brain imaging findings feed into
the kind of “blame the brain” beliefs that underpin many
such stereotypes and stop people from achieving their
potential (or even trying in the first place). Hopefully,
this article will alert readers to some of the myths and
misconceptions in the area and help them fight back
against such negative thinking.’

Gina Rippon
is Chair of Cognitive
Neuroimaging at Aston
University
g.rippon@aston.ac.uk

psy 12_16 p918_923 rippon_Layout 1 04/11/2016 15:33 Page 919

920 vol 29 no 12 december 2016

neuroscience and gender

(McCabe & Castel, 2008; Rhodes et al.,
2014). The impression given that imaging
techniques offer instantaneous, real-time
access to our brains that can be ‘read
back’ by researchers leads to over-hyped
claims about the links between brains
and just about anything from being a
Republican to designing a kitchen. Such
‘neuroflapdoodle’ pieces are often cleverly
critiqued within neuroscience circles (e.g.
tinyurl.com/9lboz24), but the wider
public sense is that imaging insights are
continuing to offer support for existing
beliefs about the causal links between
brain and behaviour.

One of the areas where this problem
manifests itself most powerfully is in the
reporting of neuroimaging studies of sex
differences. There appears to be an
insatiable appetite for ‘at last, the truth
will out’ stories: research has finally
solved the centuries old conundrum of
why ‘women can’t read maps and men
can’t cry’ (Maney, 2014, 2016). For
example, Daily Mail coverage of a recent
report on sex differences in brain
connectivity (Ingalhalikar et al., 2014)
had the headline ‘Men’s and women’s
brains: The truth’ and claimed that
researchers had shown that ‘differences
between the sexes are profound’. ‘Men
generally have more connections within
each hemisphere (which) means men are
more logical and better at coordination’,
the newspaper announced, concluding
that ‘the differences between the genders
were so profound that men and women
might almost be separate species’. As has
subsequently been widely reported, there
were problems with the research paper
itself, including failures to report the
(very small) effect sizes in the
comparisons they made, but in a detailed
science communication case study,
tracking reports of this study through
press releases, online comments and
blogs, it is clear that the take-home
message from coverage of the study
was of strong support for a biologically
determinist perspective (O’Connor &
Joffe, 2014).

The media may also ‘insert’ such a

perspective where none exists. A recent
survey of gender differences in various
cognitive skills over different times and
places showed some evidence of increased
gender differences favouring women in
some cognitive functions (like episodic
memory) and decreases or elimination
of gender differences in other cognitive
abilities (Weber et al., 2014). This is what
the authors focused on: ‘Our results
suggest that these changes take place as
a result of women gaining more than men
from societal improvements over time,
thereby increasing their general cognitive
ability more than men.’ There was also
evidence of a sustained but diminishing
gender gap in favour of males in
numeracy. It was the existence of this gap
(and not its diminution) that the Daily
Mail focused on. The headline read:
‘Female brains really ARE different to
male minds with women possessing
better recall and men excelling at maths’.
Assuming that their readers might not
make it back to the original study, they
helpfully interpreted this particular
finding: ‘It is thought the differing
strengths can be explained by differences

in the biology of the brain as well as in
the way the sexes are treated by society.’
A quick scan of the original text reveals
that neither the word ‘brain’ nor the word
‘biology’ appears.

Such claims are associated with
populist literature that harnesses
neuroscience findings to ‘prove’ genuine
differences between men and women and
hand out associated advice (e.g. Gray,
1992; Maney, 2016). And they also
continue to support the ‘blame the brain’
culture by failing to correct misplaced or
outdated beliefs about male and female
brains.

Neurosexism
But this is just the Daily Mail, right?
We can just sigh and move on, patting
ourselves on the back at our own
enlightened ways. No: ‘neurosexism’ is
an even more serious problem. Cordelia
Fine (2010, 2013, and The Psychologist,
November 2010: see tinyurl.com/hpto3bu)
draws attention to specific practices
within the neuroimaging research
community itself that serve to create

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society B. doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0119.

May, A. (2011). Experience-dependent
structural plasticity in the adult
human brain. Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 15(10), 475–482.

McCabe, D.P. & Castel, A.D. (2008).
Seeing is believing. Cognition, 107(1),
343–352.

O’Connor, C. & Joffe, H. (2014). Gender
on the brain. PloS One, 9(10),

e110830.
Poldrack, R.A. & Gorgolewski, K.J.

(2014). Making big data open: Data
sharing in neuroimaging. Nature
Neuroscience, 17(11), 1510–1517.

Reis, H.T. & Carothers, B.J. (2014). Black
and white or shades of gray: Are
gender differences categorical or
dimensional? Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 23(1), 19–26.

Rhodes, R.E., Rodriguez, F. & Shah, P.

(2014). Explaining the alluring
influence of neuroscience
information on scientific reasoning.
Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory, and Cognition,
40(5), 1432–1440.

Rippon, G., Jordan-Young, R., Kaiser, A.
& Fine, C. (2014). Recommendations
for sex/gender neuroimaging
research. Frontiers in Human
Neuroscience, 8, 1–13.

Satterthwaite, T.D., Wolf, D.H., Roalf,
D.R. et al. (2014). Linked sex
differences in cognition and
functional connectivity in youth.
Cerebral Cortex.
doi:10.1093/cercor/bhu036

Shors, T.J. (2016). A trip down memory
lane about sex differences in the
brain. Philosophical Transactions of
the Royal Society B. doi:
10.1098/rstb.2015.0124.

There appears to be an insatiable appetite for ‘at last, the truth will out’ stories: research has
finally solved the centuries old conundrum of why ‘women can’t read maps and men can’t cry’

psy 12_16 p918_923 rippon_Layout 1 04/11/2016 15:33 Page 920

function in the last 40 years or so is the
concept of neuroplasticity – our brains can
and do change, and this remains true
throughout our lives. Where the ‘biology
is destiny’-type arguments have stood in
the way of progress towards
understanding if and why male brains are
different from female brains, new insights
offered by an understanding of how
plastic brains are should bring about
greater attention to the factors in addition
to biology which might determine a
brain’s characteristics.

It has been known for some time that
specific events and exposure to specific
types of learning experiences, such as
taxi-driving, juggling or playing Tetris,
can change both structure and function
in the human brain (May, 2011; Shors,
2016). In addition, there is accumulating
evidence that more intangible
experiences – including exposure to

social attitudes and
expectations such as
‘stereotype threat’ or self-
perceptions of status – can
change brain structure and
function. A study by Wraga
and colleagues (2006)

demonstrated that carrying
out a spatial cognition task under either
negative or positive stereotype threat
conditions resulted in differences not
only in performance but also in brain-
activation patterns. The association
between objectively measured socio-
economic status and brain structure has
been demonstrated (Hackman & Farah,
2009), but it has also been shown that
perceived socio-economic status, or where
you think you are in the pecking order,
can affect brain structure, independently
of other possible variables, such as
ethnicity or psychological health.
(Gianaros et al., 2007).

The significance of these findings is
that they provide powerful evidence of
how ‘entangled’ our brains are with the
world (Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Rippon et
al., 2014). It can take us beyond the old
nature vs. nurture debate and illustrate
the truly interactive nature by which
our brain characteristics are formed
(and can be changed), and how these
characteristics then proceed to affect
how we interact with the world.
Acknowledgment of plasticity has
changed thinking in many spheres
of behavioural biology but has been
strangely slow to feed through into
questions of sex differences in the brain,
the very research arena where the effect
could be powerfully demonstrated (Fine
et al., 2013).

With respect to the study of sex
differences in the brain, acknowledging

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neuroscience and gender

‘a literature biased toward the
presentation of sex differences in
the brain as extensive, functionally
significant, and fixed – and therefore
implicitly supportive of a gender
essentialist perspective’ (Fine, 2013,
p.369). As discussed above, findings from
neuroimaging studies are proving to be
attractive sources of support for
deterministic belief, so it is important not
only that the design and analysis of such
studies are reflective of contemporary
developments in the area, but also that
researchers are sensitive to the potential
public interpretation of what they are
reporting.

If the purpose of the study is to
link the data on sex differences in brain
characteristics with sex differences in
some aspect of human behaviour, then
one would assume that some care would
be taken to ensure the reliability of such
behavioural differences, with an
appropriate choice of task to demonstrate
these. However, there are instances of
brain-imaging studies where the
neuroimaging data are interpreted in
terms of behaviour that was not actually
measured in the scanner (Ingalhalikar et
al., 2014) or at all (Tomasi & Volkow,
2012 ). In the latter study, for example,
findings of some sex differences in resting
state connectivity were interpreted thus:
‘…we hypothesize that the men’s lower
brain connectivity might reflect
optimization of functions that require
specialized processing, such as spatial
orienting, whereas the women’s higher
brain connectivity may optimize
functions that require integration and
synchronization across large cortical
networks such as those supporting
language’ (p.7). It does not appear that
any measures of spatial orienting or
language were obtained from these
participants.

Similarly, where the focus is so firmly
on proving the existence of brain-based
differences as the bases for explaining
gender inequalities, it is important to
quantify the size of these differences and
the extent to which they are meaningful,

(i.e. of sufficient size and stability to
reliably differentiate the two groups). In
a research sphere where the differences
being studied are extremely small and the
distributions of measured variables almost
always closely overlapping, then measures
of effect size must be reported (Cohen,
1988). One of the criticisms of the
Ingalhalikar et al. paper discussed above
was that the ‘profound’ differences
reported were actually rather small. No
effect sizes were reported by the authors
themselves, but subsequent analysis
revealed that the largest effect size was
small to moderate (0.482). It could also
be revealing to report the proportion of
possible comparisons in the data that
were not significant to provide some sort
of context. Jarrett (2015) pointed out that
in another recent study on sex differences
in functional connectivity, only 178 out of
34,716 measures of a particular aspect of
connectivity were
significantly different
between males and
females (effect size
0.32). Yet the authors
refer to ‘prominent’
sex differences in
their abstract
(Satterthwaite et al., 2014).

So we do have the techniques that
could allow us to resolve some of the
arguments in this arena and really
illustrate where any differences, if any, lie,
and what these differences might mean.
But misunderstanding of what these
techniques can do, misuse in a research
context and miscommunication of the
associated findings currently serve to
undermine their potential power to
challenge stereotypical beliefs.

Brain plasticity
Our brains renew themselves
throughout life to an extent previously
thought not possible. (Michael S.
Gazzaniga)

One key breakthrough in our
understanding of brain structure and

“our brains can and do
change, and this remains
true throughout our lives”

Sporns, O., Tononi, G. & Kötter, R. (2005).
The human connectome: A structural
description of the human brain. PLoS
Computational Biology, 1(4), e42.

Tomasi, D. & Volkow, N.D. (2012). Gender
differences in brain functional
connectivity density. Human Brain
Mapping, 33(4), 849–860.

Weber, D., Skirbekk, V., Freund, I. &
Herlitz, A. (2014). The changing face of
cognitive gender differences in

Europe. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, 111(32),
11673–11678.

Wraga M., Helt M., Jacobs E. & Sullivan K.
(2006). Neural basis of stereotype-
induced shifts in women’s mental
rotation performance. Social Cognitive
and Affective Neuroscience. 2, 12–19.

psy 12_16 p918_923 rippon_Layout 1 04/11/2016 15:33 Page 921

neuroplasticity should have significant
consequences for research design and
interpretation. The understanding of the
potent ‘brain-changing’ effects of social
and cultural influences means that a
much wider range of factors should be
accounted for when researching into this
area or when offering explanations for
differences. Educational experience,
occupation and socio-economic status
will need to be measured, or at least
acknowledged as a potential source of
variance. This will, for example, be
important when it comes to looking for
differences in the large neuroimaging
datasets that are becoming available. If
there is only minimal attention paid to
the range of possibly relevant
independent variables (e.g. just
sex and age) in any interrogation
of these data, then misleading
conclusions could be reached.
Currently, examination of many
neuroimaging papers reporting
evidence of sex differences in the
brain shows that little, if any,
attempt has been made to take
account of the potential effects
of neuroplasticity (Biswal et al.,
2010; Rippon et al., 2014). This
means that reports of alleged sex
differences in the brain could
continue to contribute to the
canon of beliefs about the source
of any kind of imbalance between
the sexes.

Sex redefined
Another more fundamental way
of challenging the arguments
about male and female brains is
to stop searching for differences
between two groups that actually
turn out not to be separate
groups at all.

There is emerging evidence
that describing sex as a
dichotomous and internally
consistent category is flawed. Just
thinking in terms of either male
or female, XX or XY, ‘Mars or
Venus’ is simplistic and not
representative of the wider
spectrum. This is claimed to be true even
at the most fundamental biological level
(Ainsworth, 2015) and, most recently, at
the level of the brain itself. In a study
based on the first whole-brain analyses of
‘male/female’ characteristics in structures
and connections, based on over 1400
brains, it is claimed that there is no such
thing as a ‘male’ or a ‘female’ brain. All
brains, regardless of the biological sex of
their owner, are a ‘mosaic’ of different
characteristics (Joel et al., 2015) arising

from a range of ‘brain altering’
experiences (Joel & Fausto-Sterling,
2016). Looking for differences between
brains solely based on the sex of their
owners will mask the true sources of
variability.

This parallels a long-standing message
of previous psychological research
demonstrating that there is much greater
similarity between the sexes, with greatly
overlapping data distributions and tiny
effect sizes, challenging long-standing
certainties about ‘reliable’ differences
between the sexes (Hyde, 2014). More
particularly, it has been shown that in
many categories of behaviour, cognition,
personality and aptitudes that have been
assumed to unfailingly distinguish men

from women, there really are very few
consistent differences between the sexes
and that the patterns of such
characteristics are more accurately
grouped along a single dimension
(Carothers & Reis, 2013; Reis &
Carothers, 2014). This includes measures
such as masculinity/femininity, empathy
and science inclination. To paraphrase the
title of an excellent paper on this very
theme, we are none of us from Mars or
Venus, we are all from Earth.

The claims and counter-claims about
differences between two groups divided
according to their biological sex could
thus be dismissed as founded on a
fundamental misconception about the
very basis of the division. Understanding
differences (a) where they genuinely exist
and (b) where the differences appear to
have negative consequences is clearly
important; it is just that we might need to
be more open-minded about where those
differences came from and not focus
solely on biological sex as their source.

A powerful position
Gender inequality remains a matter of
global concern, in both developed and

emerging economies. In order
to make full use of our human
capital, we need a better
understanding of why there are
still individual differences in
achievement and what we might
do to address them. Social
cognitive neuroscience now
offers potential game-changers
to alter our understanding of the
role of the brain in any kind of
imbalance between groups – in
normal or abnormal behaviour,
ability, aptitude or achievement.
Stunning advances in brain-
imaging techniques offer much
more detailed and accurate
understanding of the role that
brain characteristics might play
in generating and sustaining
inequalities. But the techniques
need to be responsibly harnessed
and their findings reliably
communicated if they are going
to provide any kind of genuine
insights. When comparing
brains, we need to know more
than just the sex of their owners,
we need to know what kind of
brain-altering experiences these
owners have been through. And,
most radical of all, cognitive
neuroscientists have suggested
that the very concept of
differences between the sexes
is not representative of the true

state of affairs. Basing research efforts and
social policy initiatives on two neat,
distinct categories may well be misguided.

We are in a powerful position to
challenge beliefs (spoken or unspoken)
about the ‘essential’ unchangeability of
the human brain and its role in
determining gender inequality. It’s time
to counter self-fulfilling prophecies of
underperformance, to harness the
plasticity of all brains and ensure they
can break through glass ceilings.

922 vol 29 no 12 december 2016

neuroscience and gender

Stop searching for differences between two groups that
actually turn out not to be separate groups at all

psy 12_16 p918_923 rippon_Layout 1 04/11/2016 15:33 Page 922

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