https://medium.com/s/meghan-daum/male-and-female-brains-are-different-should-it-matter-6db82ead5e20
http://archive.is/28s5z
Male and Female Brains Are Different
Neuroscientist Larry Cahill on the great ‘neurosexism’ debate
In a major policy change implemented in early 2016, the National Institutes of Health made clear its expectation that researchers seeking grants "consider sex as a biological variable in all stages of research"
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"Can We Finally Stop Talking About ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ Brains?" went the headline of a 2018 New York Times op-ed by two prominent figures on the anti-sex difference side of the debate. The journal Nature, which less than a decade ago was routinely publishing articles that acknowledged the presence of genetic sex differences in the brain and other organs, ran an article in its February 27, 2019, issue entitled "Neurosexism: The Myth That Men and Women Have Different Brains." The piece was a book review of The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain by Gina Rippon, a professor of cognitive neuroimaging in the U.K.
When neuroscientist Larry Cahill read the article, his first response was, "You’ve got to be kidding me."
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Cahill doesn’t do a lot of writing for lay publications. But on March 29, he published an article in Quillette entitled "Denying the Neuroscience of Sex Differences." In it, he laid out some of the history of the field (it’s a short history, he says, since until about two decades ago, few people even thought to study the differences) and pointed out the inherent fallacy of equating such research with neurosexism. "By constantly denying and trivializing and even vilifying research into biologically-based sex influences on the brain," he wrote, "[the anti-sex difference contingent is] in fact advocating for biomedical research to retain its male subject-dominated status quo so disproportionately harmful to women.
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You say in the article that, for decades, neuroscientists-yourself included-used only male research subjects because they assumed females were identical.
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Why was this the case, and what changed?
Like everyone else in neuroscience, I used to fully believe that there weren’t any sex differences or influences on brain function, with the exception of little-bitty brain parts explicitly associated with sex and sex hormones and sex parts. Those parts are different in males and females-okay, fine. But when you move beyond those little-bitty regions at the base of the brain, all of us, myself included, assumed that there were not fundamental sex differences, that they didn’t exist. This was the case no matter what we were studying: amygdala and emotion, the hippocampus and memory, the prefrontal cortex and working memory, vision-you name it. That’s precisely why we all studied males. The view was that if you want to understand the female, then, ironically, the best way to understand the female was to study the male. For most neuroscientists, the rationale was not a sexist rationale. It was the opposite. The rationale was there aren’t any differences between males and females, so you avoid the unnecessarily complicated feature of the female hormonal cycle and study the male.
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