I would like to be in a world which isn't particularly dominated by men.
Studies have shown that people who emerge as leaders are more likely to be more ambitious,
social, curious and have higher IQs.
Do men run stuff because they have more suitable brains than women?
There are actually almost no differences, consistent differences, which is a surprise
to people because we have a long standing belief that there is a female brain or a male brain.
It's certainly as yet there is nothing clearly which differentiates
a human female brain from a human male brain, but their brains are bigger than ours, right?
Yes, they're on average, men's brains are about 10% bigger than women's brains.
And that's really the consistent difference we found over a couple of 100 years.
But that's because men on average, are about 10% bigger than women.
So it's just a scaling issue.
But there's no one part of the brain, which we can reliably point to and say,
that shows that's a brain from a man.
But, this is a controversial area.
Scientists disagree about how different male and female brains really are.
There are absolutely differences in the brains between men and women for very good reasons.
Because there are some important behavioural differences between men and women that have to be
pretty much pre wired into the brain through different
programmes of development, that wire up male and female brains slightly differently.
And most of those behavioural differences are directly to do with
reproduction or sexuality in some way.
Then there's of course,
a load of questions about what else could be different between the brains of men.
There are a few very small structures, things that control aspects of reproductive behaviour,
for example, in parts of the brain called the hypothalamus
that really are different than you, you know, if you had a slide of dissection
of male and female brains, you could tell the difference because there's an area that's
six times larger in males than in females, for example, and that's just one there are many others
that are like that, but you can only see those at the under the microscope.
And those differences, can we extrapolate them through to differences in behaviour?
Not really, not directly.
I mean, we do see differences in behaviour. And we
see differences in anatomy and functional parameters.
But we can't really say that the
differences we see in the brain measures cause the differences in behaviour.
Frankly, we can't do that for hardly any differences in behaviour, not
even just sex differences, any anything at all.
And it's probably because there is
frankly not a direct relationship between one bit of the brain and one behaviour.
Kevin's rationale is that when he looks at the animal kingdom,
he sees many other mammals with big differences between the sexes.
We're animals too why should we be any different?
So males tend to be have more dominant personalities than females.
One reason why that might be comes back again to reproductive competition.
It pays off for males to mate with many females where it doesn't pay off for females.
That means males will be competing for females.
And one way that they do that is by establishing dominance.
What that means is there may be a biological underpinning that could be expressed in modern
society in a way that men want to be dominant over, particularly other men.
Yes, men currently rule the world.
Yes, differences in our physical size may once have given men the upper hand
in an era where physical aggression was the best way of getting what you want.
Gina and Kevin may have different opinions on male and female brains, but they agree that
the variation we see between individuals is much greater than the variation we see between sexes.
So really, someone's sex isn't that relevant
in predicting their interests or their personality or their career prospects?
You could argue that the solution is to care less about someone's sex.