In a new study published in in the June edition of Neuroscience & Behavioral Reviews, Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at Rosalind Franklin University, analyzed 30 years’ worth of brain research (mostly fMRIs and postmortem studies) and found no meaningful cognitive differences between men and women.
Men’s brains were on average about 11% larger than women’s—as were their hearts, lungs and other organs — because brain size is proportional to body size. But just as taller people aren’t any more intelligent than shorter people, neither, Eliot and her co-authors found, were men smarter than women. They weren’t better at math or worse at language processing, either.
In her paper, Eliot and her co-authors acknowledge that psychological studies have found gendered personality traits (male aggression, for example) but at the brain level those differences don’t seem to appear. It’s true that more men are diagnosed with autism and women with Alzheimer’s, Eliot points out, but those differences may be attributed to factors other than brain makeup. When Hans Asperger first defined what he called “autistic psychopathy,” in 1944, for example, he focused only on boys, effectively limiting diagnostic criteria for decades to come.