 In 2005, Harvard's then president Lawrence Summers theorized that so few women went into science because, well, they just weren't inherently good at it. "Issues of intrinsic aptitude," Summers said, such as "overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability" kept many women out of the field. His remarks caused a firestorm — Summers publicly apologized and a year later he was gone from Harvard — but they're an age old trope that never seems to die. See: Christopher Hitchens (2007); James Damore (2017). According to my research, for hundreds of years, men have been claiming that biology, not sexism was to blame for the lack of women in male-dominated fields. Women just don't have the brains for [insert a lucrative, powerful, male-dominated field], the arguments go.
"I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong," Summers said back in 2005. Well, sixteen years later, it appears his wish came true.
In a new study published in in the June edition of Neuroscience & Behavioral Reviews, Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at Rosalind Franklin University, analyzed 30 years' worth of brain research (mostly fMRIs and postmortem studies) and found no meaningful cognitive differences between men and women.
Men's brains were on average about 11% larger than women's—as were their hearts, lungs and other organs — because brain size is proportional to body size. But just as taller people aren't any more intelligent than shorter people, neither, Eliot and her co-authors found, were men smarter than women. They weren't better at math or worse at language processing, either.
In her paper, Eliot and her co-authors acknowledge that psychological studies have found gendered personality traits (male aggression, for example) but at the brain level those differences don't seem to appear. It's true that more men are diagnosed with autism and women with Alzheimer's, Eliot points out, but those differences may be attributed to factors other than brain makeup. When Hans Asperger first defined what he called "autistic psychopathy," in 1944, for example, he focused only on boys, effectively limiting diagnostic criteria for decades to come.
Eliot's findings echo those of cognitive neuroscientist Gina Rippon, whose 2019 book The Gendered Brain argued that "a gendered world creates a gendered brain," and not the brain itself. Let's hope this finally ends the "debate" about biology, brains and female representation once and for all. —Claire Suddath
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