How about posting some sources and the important statistical parameters that can help tell whether an average difference between two groups is meaningful for discussing individual behavior? How do the differences in averages compare to the standard deviations for instance?
Really? I thought I did a pretty good job of couching my language in understanding I was speaking about averages and that the differences were only if we were looking at things in a very simplistic sense. Regardless, I did some google-fu for you.
I could probably JSTOR you some publications if you have access. Brain differences between the genders aren’t particularly controversial and pretty widely accepted at this point.
They were not complaining about potential fraud or p-hacking. They were complaining about what would amount to professional incompetence. Because I related one anecdote rather than her entire body of work they assumed the researcher had a sample size of one pair.
I like to think that the University of Chicago, when overseeing her work, would raise a flag if her research consisted of a sample size of a single pair after years of work.
There is a statistically significant difference between the average male brain and the average female brain but rather than describing it as “large differences”, I would explain it as “there is a whole lot of variation between different male brains and also between different female brains; when male and female brains are compared for statistical sex differences, they turn out to be much smaller than the range of differences found within each sex.”
Scientific bias can also creep in without any malice. Suppose, for instance, that you’re measuring some physical constant like Newton’s constant. If you do your experiment and it comes out very different from the previously-accepted value, you’re going to go through your work with a fine-toothed comb looking for mistakes. And you’re likely to find them, because there are always mistakes in everything people do. So then you fix those mistakes, and publish. But if you do your experiment and it comes out to close to what you expect, then you’re not going to look as hard for those mistakes, even though there probably are still some, and you publish with the mistakes. And so all of the published values are biased towards what the researchers expected.
The point is that even if one acknowledges that these are averages and could explain differences in average behaviour, as long as one neglect including some measures of variability and spread, the impression one is left with is potentially very misleading.
Not a single of the linked articles do anything to remedy that, the closest they do is note that the differences are “significant”, which means one thing when analyzing data, and a different thing when talking about how men as a group and women as a group differ overall.
We still don’t know who the researcher is, or what she’s published. All we know is that what you chose to share was a worthless anecdote. We attacked your post, not this unnamed researcher’s life’s work.
But even small differences at the mean typically imply large differences at the extreme. If men are on average, say, 10% stronger that women, that certainly is much less than the range of strength between weakest and strongest man.
But then if you look at the, say, 100,000 strongest humans alive, you’ll find that something like 99% of them are male.
There is no evidence that the most {insert any adjective here} of male brains are a lot more {same adjective} than the most {same adjective} female brains. There’s very little structural difference, but not “none”. Neither transgender people nor the mainstream divergence of male and female experiences can be confidently explained as being due to built in differences in the brain. It could be so but it should definitely not be assumed to be so.
In the case of gender diffs overall, and gender-variance such as you see with genderqueer and transgender people, I’ve given my argument here.
I shared the anecdote because I thought her approach to studying the topic was interesting and (maybe) even unique (comparing men and women with the same brain injuries). It might prompt someone who is interested to Google for more information on it. I just did a simple search and sure enough, there is information to be had on it. I consider that a worthwhile post.
For my money it is you, given your responses to me and others, who has unreasonable expectations from a public message board that is not dedicated to medicine. There are probably boards out there dedicated to researchers who will find your stringent requirements refreshing.
The fact that discussions on the difference in “male” and “female” brains exaggerate the differences and ignore the massive overlaps is a persistent and real problem. Your anecdote represented what would, if it applied beyond a single case study, be a truly dramatic difference between males and females.
The first page of links from your source show differences in men and women after traumatic brain injuries, yes, but it’s about averages in recovery time, severity and cause of injury, etc. Mainly for concussions, and in part explained by sociological factors, such as tendency to keep playing football after a hard knock or knowing less about the symptoms of concussions due to lower incidence among ones peers.
Interesting, sure, but nowhere near the type of difference your anecdote represented.
I want to resurrect this thread to add that I just finished reading the book recommended here, The Female Brain. And really, most of the differences between male and female behavior are attributed to the effect hormones have on the brain in the book. There is an introduction in the beginning, where it mentions actual physical differences in the brain (like how the male brain is bigger and the female brain has more space dedicated to communication), but after the introduction, it seems to mainly be talking about the brain “marinating” in estrogen or other hormones(seriously, the author loves to use the word marinate), and how the changes in hormone levels affects things.
In addition to that very important point, there’s also the issue of cause and effect. Human brains have a degree of configurability - does anyone know that gendered socialisation (which exists from birth or even from before birth) has no effect on brain structure, that the relatively minor average differences between men’s brains and women’s brains (which, to emphasise the key point, are smaller than the variations from person to person) are totally innate and not created to any extent?
A lot of people have a lot invested in the idea that male people and female people are absolutely and fundamentally completely different things, that the entirety of humanity consists of two utterly different group entities and not billions of individuals. I’m very suspicious of anything that “confirms” that position.
I looked over the methodology of that study, and though it’s been awhile since I’ve taken a stats class, it immediately didn’t pass the smell test. Their conclusions seemed only to make sense from a very narrow perspective.
There are four letters in response to the article on the same National Academy of Sciences site criticizing the conclusions Joel et al draw. Three of them focus on the statistical methods employed:
So, it appears they’re saying that they were looking to investigate whether male/female brains were different in the way that penises are not vaginas. I don’t think any reasonable person thought that male brains and female brains were so different as to be entirely different organs.
From my non-neurologist point of view, it appears the current science says that there are differences between the average female brain and the average male brain.
There are also differences between an average sub-Saharan African human skull, an average north African human skull and an average human skull from elsewhere in the world. Someone with the relevant knowledge can differentiate them with a high degree of accuracy even just by looking at them. That doesn’t mean that the differences have any significance or that there are 3 distinct types of human skulls.