The key point here is that although there are sex differences in brain and behavior, when you move away from group-level differences in single features and focus at the level of the individual brain or person, you find that the differences, regardless of their origins, usually “mix up” rather than “add up.” (The reason for this mixing-up of characteristics is that the genetic and hormonal effects of sex on brain and behavior depend on, and interact with, many other factors.) This yields many types of brain and behavior, which neither fall into a “male” and a “female” type, nor line up tidily along a male-female continuum. Even when you home in on only two psychological characteristics, people don’t fall in line on a continuum from, say, extreme systemizer or “things-oriented” — supposedly the “male” pole — to extreme empathizer or “people-oriented”— the “female” pole. Rather, as recent studies have shown, people’s self-reported tendency to empathize tells you almost nothing about their self-reported tendency to systemize, and people may be highly oriented toward both things and people, to mainly one of these, or to neither. The notion of fundamentally female and male brains or natures is a misconception. Brains and behavior are the product of the combined, continuous interactions of innumerable causal influences, that include, but go well beyond, sex-linked factors. The claim that science tells us that the possibility of greater merging of gender roles is unlikely because of “natural” differences between the sexes, focuses on average sex differences in the population — often in combination with the implicit assumption that whatever we think men are “more” of, is what is most valuable for male-dominated roles. (Why else would organizations offer confidence workshops for women, rather than modesty training for men?) But the world is inhabited by individuals whose unique mosaics of characteristics can’t be predicted on the basis of their sex. So let’s keep working on overcoming gender stereotypes, bias, discrimination, and structural barriers before concluding that sex, despite being a poor guide to our brains and psychological characteristics, is a strong determinant of social structure.
Daphna Joel and Cordelia Fine, Can We Finally Stop Talking About ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ Brains?
