Neuroscientist Gina Rippon describes how and why she tackled the nature–nurture debate in her book The Gendered Brain, and the media furore it caused.
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These stories were often well written and certainly more accessible than arcane journals. They also resonated with people’s experiences. We believed that men and women were different, and here were the scientists saying ‘you’re right, and this is why’.I began my career in the 1980s, and became interested in sex differences in the brain and how different regions could be better configured for various tasks — making me one of the people I subsequently criticized.
At the 2010 British Science Festival, I gave a talk about the so-called differences between women’s and men’s brains, showing that, when you look at the data, they’re not that different after all. I was trying to dispel the stereotypical myths that men are ‘left-brained’ — logical, rational and good at spatial tasks — and women are ‘right-brained’ — emotional, nurturing and good at verbal tasks.
But on the positive side, lots of parents thanked me and invited me to give school talks, which I do on a fairly regular basis. I also became involved in aLooking back at that time, it resembled the game whack-a-mole, in which efforts to resolve a problem result in it appearing in a different form.
The book was well received by those who understood that I was not a sex-difference denier and not arguing for all culture and no biology, and that I wanted to comprehend the entangled relationship between sex and gender. But, unsurprisingly, it was not so well received by those who didn’t understand this.If framed as a scientific argument, then criticism is fine, and in a way is why you do this, because you want to have the conversation.
Sometimes criticism is within the scientific community. Unfortunately, there is perhaps a defensive mentality in people who have spent most of their academic research career looking at sex differences. Often, the research might be in non-human animals, with no assumption that the findings apply to humans. But if they think that someone says their research is irrelevant, people can get quite defensive.
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