The title says all, this is a book about brains, about trying to understand the difference between the female and the male brain. And a multitude of studies has been accomplished on the subject. Starting with the size of the brain, the size of the white and grey matter and how to compare these sizes, with still no real harmony on this question. Then arrived the possibility of pictures of the brain with MRI, trying to see with coloured zones how males and females use a different part of the brain. But this doesn’t take into account the question of nature and nurture. So slowly slowly arrived a few studies on babies showing little difference between females and males and studies on the influence of our strongly gendered environments, beliefs and behaviours. The answer to the question is in fact : are we asking ourselves the right question ? Maybe this is a non a binary issue but a continuum, and we must understand and correct the elements that make the females feel like pale copies of the other gender. It also shows how engrained the beliefs are that even when studies show the contrary, there is no way of making people change their minds. This book is a tough read with loads of information and references. Fascinating and frightening. The road seems so long.
“This is another of those Whac-a-Mole themes that seem to characterise sex difference research. It refers to the claim that if you look at the upper and lower ends of any distribution of measures of intellectual ability, you will find more men: more male geniuses, more male idiots. This idea was first proposed in psychology circles by Havelock Ellis in 1894: noting larger numbers of men than women in homes for the mentally deficient, and much larger numbers of men in the spheres of eminence and high achievement, he concluded that there was a greater innate “variational tendency” in males. (You might notice that this rather overlooks the possibility that the greater eminence at one end might have reflected greater opportunities, and the higher rates of institutionalisation at the other end could have reflected different levels of available social support networks.)”