The Gendered Brain

"It’s a sizzling response to the ongoing intensity of need, in society and some scientific enclaves, to ‘sex’ the brain. That is an issue the psychologist Cordelia Fine, among others, has explored in studies such as Delusions of Gender . But we need to revisit it, Gina Rippon argues: myths and misconceptions persist. She accordingly debunks a great deal of bad science and received wisdom, while also constructing a realistic picture of the brain within its environmental context. Rippon, a cognitive neuroscientist, reminds us that everything from careers to clothing are still viewed by millions through gender-tinted glasses. Newborns are still swathed in pink or blue. And these insistent stereotypes extend to our thinking about the brain. That’s gone on, with alarming regularity, from the rise of proto-anthropology in the 18th century, when women were routinely viewed as unstable, neuronally defective weaklings. She examines each stage in the development of this sexist trope. Relative size, for instance: on average, men’s brains are bigger, as are their brain structures. Yet there is significant uncertainty over the relationship between brain structures per se and expressions of behaviours they may putatively be involved in. Hormones? She reminds us that while key in determining the development of genitalia (for instance), hormones are much harder to defend as shapers of brains and, ultimately, behaviours. She also looks at psychology, particularly how data is collected: what is being asked, how it’s asked, and why. Contextual bias lingers in scientific practice, as Criado Perez revealed so exhaustively in Invisible Women . Rippon also delves into controversial claims made on the basis of neuroimaging (her specialism). The methodology has led to a larderful of neurobaloney, she argues. She takes us back, for instance, to the overly heady days of early fMRI scanning in the early 1990s, when patches of brain ‘lighting up’ in response to, say, the thought of chocolate, were misconstrued, massaged and extended until the brain was seen as biological proof of almost any kind of behaviour. And all the time, the idea of gendered brains simmered on. This analysis of how so much has gone wrong occupies only part of the book, however. Rippon also lays out a more reality-tempered picture of what we know. She reminds us, for instance, of neurological plasticity — that “brains reflect the lives they have lived”, that brain and world have a two-way relationship. She explores in depth the science of the ‘social’ brain – our continual referencing of what others are thinking or feeling – that reflexively reminds us of self-identity. Add in the predilections and preconceptions of parents, teachers, coworkers and others, and we begin to see “how entangled our brain is with its environment”, as she puts it. “She examines each stage in the development of this sexist trope.” Rippon explores the infant brain at length. She shows, for instance, how extensive research by psychologists Paul Bloom, Karen Wynn and Kiley Hamlin on moral evaluation skills in five- and eight-month-olds reports no sex differences. Studies with older babies and children, however, do show them. Is that biological development, or internalised social expectations and gender signalling at work? One chapter looks at the differing ‘guidance rules’ doled out to boys and girls, which may activate an ‘inner critic’, with links to brain systems in the anterior cingulate cortex. In that context, Rippon quotes the lawyer and founder of tech organisation Girls Who Code, Reshma Saujani: “We’re raising our girls to be perfect, and our boys to be brave.” Throughout, Rippon is nuanced — for instance, critically examining binary thinking in relation to gender identity. I left this book amazed at how gender essentialism has so often been slapped onto the fatty mass within our skulls. As Angela Saini among others have made clear, the drive to find difference too often seeds a bid to ‘prove’ superiority. Rippon doesn’t ‘deny’ biology. She sees it as meshed with variables: our brains, she argues, are essentially mosaics “of past events and future possibilities”."