In the wake of total tolerance, it has become indecent to say that male and female brains function and work differently.
Just like judging programming abilities based on gender. However, brain research has proven two things: men's and women's brains do function significantly differently, and according to a California State Polytechnic University study, women are, on average, better coders than men.
Let's figure out what the difference is and whether the researchers tried to tweak the data.
How is the male brain different from the female brain?
Research that is indecent to do
In 1998, fresh Caltech Ph.D. Niaro Shah decided to study brain differences based on gender.
At the time, this was not a very popular idea—the neuroscience community tended to believe that all differences in human behavior were due to cultural differences. Scientists who study animals have rarely taken female rodents for brain research, fearing that cyclical changes in their reproductive hormones would interfere with the maps and influence the findings.
Researchers who tried to prove otherwise were accused of “neurosexism”: they simply fell prey to stereotypes or jumped to conclusions that men are more different from women biologically than culturally.
The researchers countered that evidence from animal studies, cross-cultural studies, natural experiments, and brain studies demonstrated real, if not dramatic, differences in brain structure and that these differences could contribute to differences in behavior and consciousness.
But over the next 15 years, the situation changed dramatically: new technologies appeared that brought a ton of irrefutable evidence of physiologically determined differences in the way male and female brains are structured and work.
It is worth emphasizing that the question is not how much
the brain works well: the existing difference does not mean that someone is smarter or more worthy because of their gender.
It's more a matter of how
.
In 1991, just a few years before Shah began her research, Diana Halpern, PhD and past president of the American Psychological Association, began writing the first edition of her famous academic work Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities.
She noted that animal research papers were steadily producing reports of neuroanatomical and behavioral differences associated with sex, but most of these books were largely collecting dust in university libraries. Social and conventional psychologists have torn to pieces the principle of any fundamental cognitive differences between men and women.
In the preface to the first edition of his book, Halpern writes: “It seemed obvious to me at the time that any differences in thought processes between men and women were the result of socialization, cultural values and research errors, biases and prejudices. … After reading miles of scientific journal articles and countless books … my opinion has changed.”
Findings from animal studies resonate that differences based on gender are very similar to those exhibited by Homo Sapiens.
For example, in a study of 34 macaque monkeys, males preferred cars with wheels, while females liked teddy bears. It's hard to argue that the monkeys' parents bought them the wrong toys and the monkey society encourages boys to play with trucks.
A very recent study found that boys and girls from 9 to 17 months—an age when children show little sign of awareness of their gender or the gender of other children—still showed significant differences in preferences for stereotypical boy and girl toys.
Halper and Shah began cataloging many behavioral differences in behavior.
Their research showed that women:
- Verbal abilities are several times stronger, almost everything except verbal analogies
- Women's ability to perceive and write text on average exceeds men's
- Women outperform men in tests of fine coordination and perceptual speed
- They are more adept at retrieving information from long-term memory
At the same time, men:
- On average, they can remember faster
- They have a much stronger visuospatial ability: they are better able to visualize what will happen if a complex two or three-dimensional object rotates in space
- More precisely determine the angular degree
- Better at tracking a moving object and throwing a projectile at the target
This echoes the behavior exhibited by rats: comparative studies of humans and rats have shown that females tend to rely on pointers, while males tend to rely more on “navigation”: calculating the position of an object by estimating direction and distance traveled, rather than look at the signs.
Keep your brain fit
Regular exercise helps keep your brain in shape by increasing capillaries. And this, in turn, ensures maximum supply of oxygen and glucose to the body. The most effective exercises are those that last at least 30 minutes a day.
The most effective method of developing the brain is considered to be engaging in new, hitherto unfamiliar activities, as well as communicating with people who are superior in intelligence to the interlocutor. The more educated a person is, the less likely it is for brain diseases to occur, because mental activity causes the production of additional tissue that replaces the damaged one.
It's amazing how different our brains are.
Neuroscience has proven that the human brain is an organ that differs between the sexes, with clear anatomical differences in neural structures and accompanying psychological differences in function, says Dr. Larry Cahill, professor of neurobiology and behavior at UCLA. Cahill published his 70th paper in January-February 2021 in the Journal of Neuroscience Research
, the first topic in a neuroscience journal to focus entirely on the effects of gender on the nervous system.
Brain imaging studies have determined that these differences extend well beyond reproduction, Cahill writes. Adjusting for brain size (men's are larger), women's hippocampus, a critical region for learning and memory, is larger than men's and works differently. On the other hand, the amygdala, which is associated with experiencing emotions and remembering emotional experiences, is larger in men. And it also works differently, as Cahill's research has proven.
In 2000, Cahill scanned the brains of men and women who watched different videos, some very aversive and some emotionally neutral. Unpleasant videos were expected to trigger strong negative emotions and hence imprint into the amygdala, a structure resembling an almond seed in the brain's hemisphere. Amygdala activity during viewing predicted subjects' ability to recall the clips they watched, as expected. But for women, this connection was only observed in the left amygdala.
, for men - only
on the right
.
Such discoveries should be a wake-up call for researchers.
If, as is likely, the amygdala is involved in depression and anxiety, any attempt in depression research to analyze only male or female brains to understand their vulnerability to these syndromes is doomed to fail due to a simple misunderstanding of left and right. .
Female brain: more powerful coordination between hemispheres
The two hemispheres of a woman's brain talk to each other much more than the male.
In a 2014 study, University of Pennsylvania researchers observed the brains of 428 young men and 521 young women—an unusually large sample—and found that women's brains regularly showed stronger coordination between hemispheres, while men's brains were more tightly coordinated with local brain regions. This finding confirms the observation that the corpus callosum crosses and connects the hemispheres more in women and women's brains tend to be more symmetrical than men's. Many of these cognitive differences appear quite early. Gender-based differences in spatial visualization ability can be observed as early as 2-3 month olds.
To a significant extent, this difference in the brain should lead to a behavioral difference, says Cahill. Many studies show that this is true, sometimes with significant medical consequences.
Boys are more prone to autism
A 2021 study in JAMA Psychiatry
looked at the brains of 98 people with autism spectrum disorder, ages 8 to 22. Both groups consisted of an equal number of female and male subjects. The result confirmed that the pattern of differences in cortical thickness differed between men and women. But most women with autism had a thickness of the cerebral cortex close to the thickness of the cortex of a healthy boy.
In other words, a typically male brain structure, no matter whether you are a boy or a girl, is a significant risk for developing autism. By definition, this means that more boys' brains have a similar structure, and this helps explain the four to five times greater prevalence of boys with the disorder than girls.
The influence of hormones on brain development
But why are male and female brains different?
There is another reason: throughout life, men and women have very different fuels flowing through their brains: sex steroid hormones. In female mammals, the main supplements are several members of a series of molecules called estrogens, together with another molecule called progesterone; in males, testosterone and a few similar androgens. It is important that a male fetus developing normally in the uterus receives large impacts from a surge of testosterone, which constantly shapes not only its body parts and proportions, but also its brain. Genetic defects that interfere with the influence of testosterone on the development of a boy's cells also make his body more feminine - femininity is our “basic human package”.
In general, parts of the brain that differ in size between men and women (the amygdala and hypothalamus) tend to have particularly high concentrations of sex hormone receptors.
Another key variable comes from the sex chromosomes, of which there are only one pair of the 23 pairs of human chromosomes in each cell. Women have 2 X chromosomes in a pair, while men have one X and one Y. The gene with the Y chromosome is responsible for a cascade of events leading to the development of the brain and body to male characteristics. Several other genes on the Y chromosome can also influence psychology and consciousness.
We regularly see how the presence or absence of a single DNA base pair makes a huge difference.
Differences in brain structure and psychology based on sex reflect the alchemy of these hormone-receptor interactions, their effect within cells, and the mediating effect of genetic variables—especially the ownership of the XX versus XY genotype, Cahill says.
Weight and volume of the human brain
The brain belongs to the central nervous system. It consists of five sections and is covered with three membranes. The anterior section is represented by the right and left hemispheres, which, in turn, are covered with the cortex.
Absolutely all our actions are determined by the functioning of the brain. We think, analyze, walk, eat, sleep, thanks to him. When he dies, we die too. The brain is securely hidden in the skull to reduce the risk of damage.
He grows and develops with us. At birth, its weight is 300 grams, over time this number increases almost five times. The volume of the modern human brain occupies up to 95% of the skull, taking its shape as it grows. As a rule, the brain weighs from 1 to 2 kilograms, and its volume in the average person reaches 1200–1600 cubic centimeters. In women, its size is smaller than in men.
Now let's start the fight: women are better programmers than men
At least on Github there is proven discrimination against them in the open source community.
Researchers from California State Polytechnic University ran approximately 3 million pool requests submitted to Github and found that code written by women was accepted more often (78.6%) than code written by men (74.6%).
In an attempt to find an explanation for the gap, scientists examined several facts, including whether women make tiny, insignificant changes to code (turned out, no) or whether women only outperform men in certain programming languages (turned out, too). ).
The conclusion was clear: the adoption rate of code written by women was higher in each of the 10 popular programming languages.
Then the researchers made the assumption that women were leaving on the basis of reverse discrimination - the desire of developers to encourage the contribution of women in areas where they constitute an absolute minority. To test this, the authors separated accounts that were clearly female and gender-neutral.
And they made an ugly discovery: code written by women was accepted more often in cases where the programmer’s gender could not be determined. When the code was clearly written by a girl, the acceptance rate was on average lower than for code written by a man.
Interviews with several female developers who use Github revealed a complex picture of how girls are making their way in the open source world in a gender-biased way.
Laura Jane Mitchell, a developer whose work comes almost entirely from GitHub, says it's impossible to tell whether her pull request was ignored because she's a girl or simply because the project owner is busy or knows another developer IRL. Her Github account clearly shows that she is a woman and she will not change it because of the research results.
I understand that this can sometimes get in the way, but it is important to me that it is clear from my account that I am a woman. I want people to understand that minorities exist. It’s important for other female developers to see that they are not alone.
Another developer, Isabelle Drost-Fromm, who has a female cartoon character as her GitHub profile picture, says she has never experienced discrimination while working at Github, but she uses it to work on projects with a team that knows her well personally, and the way she programs.
Jenny Bryan, professor of statistics at the University of British Columbia, uses Github for teaching and as an R developer.
Men who don't know me sometimes start explaining things to me that I understand much better than they do. But the men I communicate with in the R community on Github know me, and if my gender somehow influences our communication, then I rather feel supported in my work and training.
Differences between men and women
Men love to make fun of the fact that women are supposedly dumber than them. Not very smart men will also be happy when they find out that on average their brain is 100-150 grams heavier than a woman’s. However, this does not affect intelligence, and the difference in mass is explained very simply. The female body is naturally smaller and lighter than the male, therefore the weight of the brain in women will be lower. And if you translate it into a percentage relative to body weight, then the advantage will go to the weaker sex.
Conclusions: more questions than answers
Are women really better coders?
Could it be that, due to the attitudes of society, only those who truly have talent, perseverance and ability make it into the profession? Even if the brains of men and women are significantly different, does this affect the ability to learn technical sciences?
Be that as it may, support your close girls in their desire to become good programmers - and let's see how the situation will change in 30-40 years and time will put everything in its place.
Links to studies:
Gender differences and bias in open source Two minds. The cognitive differences between men and women
Brain mass of some famous people
How much the human brain weighs is best studied using specific and familiar examples. Weighing the brains of famous personalities once again confirmed the fact that the mass of a person’s brain tissue does not in any way affect his genius. Below is a list of famous people whose brain data was obtained after autopsy. As you can see, the spread of values is quite large:
- Sergey Yesenin: 1.92 kg;
- Leon Trotsky: 1.57 kg;
- Otto von Bismarck: 1.97 kg;
- Vladimir Lenin: 1.34 kg;
- Ludwig van Beethoven: 1.75 kg;
- Anatole France: 1.02 kg;
- Ivan Turgenev: 2.01 kg.
It's especially unusual to see the last two lines. The “brains” of two famous writers differ from each other by a factor of two in mass. This means that it doesn’t matter at all how much a person’s brain weighs.
