Are male and female brains really that different? Surely, there are better questions to ask | Gina Rippon

Arguments about sex differences in the brain have raged for centuries. As intriguing as they are, it’s time we changed focus

There seems to be an insatiable public appetite for information about sex differences in the human brain, eagerly harnessed by the media in many forms. A paper out this week from a research group at Stanford University made headlines for its innovative contribution to this form: using an AI neural network model to look at brain scans to see if it could “reliably” and “robustly” tell female and male brains apart. In other – more neutral – words, could the algorithm tell whether the brain patterns being looked at were from women or men?

The answer was “yes”, though rather more guarded in the paper itself than in the reports about it. What was interesting about the study was that it seemed to have moved beyond the stereotypical “size matters” agenda – asking whether male or female brains are bigger or smaller in different areas – instead measuring differences in the working brain using a method that looked at differences in blood flow to various brain regions.

Prof Gina Rippon is emeritus professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University, and the author of The Gendered Brain

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