re: backlash / science: remember suzette haden elgin's NATIVE TONGUE describing the background of the new legal women's oppression? it all started with some bad science ...

I'd agree that this research needs to be examined to see if they corrected for background differences in the subjects. I'd also like to know how many subjects there were.

The next step should probably be to do the study on a bunch of men and women who are on a pre-med track, because their backgrounds in academics will be similar, with plenty of math and science. There also seems to be a better gender balance in that field than in, say, computer science, so it wouldn't be too hard to find enough people of each sex.

Doing the study with male engineers and female literature majors would probably skew the results. Doing that, and also a study with female engineers and male lit majors could be interesting, however.

As far as this research's relevance to the Harvard flap goes, it occurs to me that, even *if* men's brains are better at mathematical computation, women's brains might be better at problem solving and innovation, due to the higher degree of connectedness.

There are plenty of tools available to do the scut work of computation. Pretty much any mathematician is going to be using something like Maple or Mathematica, anyway.

It may be that a female mathematician with Mathematica can be a more productive, innovative researcher than a male mathematician (probably also using Mathematica), due to the more-connected brain.

One last note: White matter gets its name from the fatty coat of myelin that surrounds the nerves. I expect someone will make a joke about that.

Another thought:

Apparently, Multiple Sclerosis, a disease of the white matter, afflicts more women than men, by a ratio of 2:1 or 1.5:1 or thereabouts.

If women have more white matter than men, that'd make sense.

The whole male brain/female brain issue is far too politicized to trust. Simon Baron-Cohen, the Cambridge neuroscientist, wrote recently:

There is, however, evidence that on average women's and men's brains are subtly different, that they function differently, and that at the psychological level, males and females are interested in different aspects of the environment.

For example, men's brains are larger and heavier. Women's brains interestingly have a thicker corpus callosum (the connective tissue between the two hemispheres, which allows for better communication between them), and women tend to use both hemispheres for some language tasks. Girls also talk earlier than boys. When given a photo of a person's eyes to judge how the person in the photo is feeling, women on average do better than men. And when asked to find a target shape hidden in a complex pattern, women are on average slower than men.

But do these differences reflect aptitude, or interest? Some intriguing personality questionnaire data suggests it is the latter. On the empathy quotient (EQ), which asks a range of questions about how interested you are in people and their emotional lives, and how involved you become in other people's feelings, women as a group score higher than men. On the systemising quotient (SQ), which asks you how interested you are in systems of different kinds (maps, gadgets, car engines, forecasts, structures), men as a group score higher than women. This has given rise to the idea that in a typical female brain, interest in empathy is stronger than interest in systems, whilst the typical male brain is more interested in systems than in empathy. Of course, a proportion of both sexes are equally interested in emotions and systems.

Our research group has recently analysed the proportion of each sex with each of these profiles, and the results are striking. For every 10 men, six will have a male brain, two will have a balanced brain, and two will have a female brain. In contrast, for every 10 women, four will have the female brain, four will have the balanced brain, and two will have a male brain. This leads to certain conclusions. First, the sexes do differ on average. Second, women seem to have specialised more (as a group) to be better at empathy, and men seem to have specialised more as a group to become better systemisers. Third, more women seem to be balanced. These differences may be the result of evolutionary selection pressures on the two sexes. Finally, and most importantly, we can conclude that you cannot tell what kind of brain a person has from their sex.

If you can't tell what kind of brain someone has by their gender, why use "male" and "female" to describe them? This article was written by the man who came up with the distinction.

Experience shapes brains, as many cognitive scientists have proved. Brains also shape experience. There are a dozen different weaknesses in the argument that women are not good scientists. Mostly they boil down to "no gurls alloud."