José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente on Twitter - "Probability of choosing STEM, SEH (Socsci&Humanities/Education/Health) and business, by SES and gender, in the US."
The Impact of Parental Occupation and Socioeconomic Status on Choice of College Major
Richer girls overwhelmingly choose to study the "arts" instead of STEM compared to poorer ones. There is a dose-response effect too. The feminist explanation would presumably be that as girls get richer, they get more and more influenced by "patriarchy" This is similar to what we see in poor countries where gender differences are smaller than in rich ones
Yes, there is a female and a male brain: Morphology versus functionality - "In a recent PNAS paper, Joel et al. examine several large datasets of MRI images and surveys of human brains. The authors conclude that brains of women and men are not dimorphic and not categorically different, as are the genital systems of the two genders, but resemble more an overlapping mosaic of specific functional regions and therefore cannot be distinguished as male and female brains. This conclusion cannot be drawn based on the methodology used. MRIs are “still images.” Looking at these is more akin to examining a road map and drawing conclusions about traffic patterns. Other imaging methods might have yielded different results... Functionally, brains of women and men are indeed different. Not better, not worse, neither more nor less sophisticated, just different. The very brain cells differ chromosomally. The male brain is exposed to a completely different hormonal environment during intrauterine life than the female brain. The available scientific data as to the crucial effect of testosterone on the developing male brain is overwhelming... Consider the heart, which is morphologically indistinguishable between the sexes; however, more women than men who suffer from a heart attack will have open coronary arteries and atypical symptoms. Consider drugs: prophylactic aspirin taken by women will more often prevent strokes, and if taken by men will more often prevent a heart attack. Consider the gastrointestinal system: passage time of food and drugs will more often be longer in women than in men, with consequences for drug absorption and food digestion"
So much for "neuro-sexism"
Sex differences in the structural connectome of the human brain - "Sex differences in human behavior show adaptive complementarity: Males have better motor and spatial abilities, whereas females have superior memory and social cognition skills. Studies also show sex differences in human brains but do not explain this complementarity. In this work, we modeled the structural connectome using diffusion tensor imaging in a sample of 949 youths (aged 8–22 y, 428 males and 521 females) and discovered unique sex differences in brain connectivity during the course of development. Connection-wise statistical analysis, as well as analysis of regional and global network measures, presented a comprehensive description of network characteristics. In all supratentorial regions, males had greater within-hemispheric connectivity, as well as enhanced modularity and transitivity, whereas between-hemispheric connectivity and cross-module participation predominated in females. However, this effect was reversed in the cerebellar connections. Analysis of these changes developmentally demonstrated differences in trajectory between males and females mainly in adolescence and in adulthood. Overall, the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes."
Geoffrey Miller on Twitter- "in fact, there’s very little overlap in strength between the sexes. almost all men are stronger than almost all women. it’s just bizarre to deny it."
"TIL the average 80 year old man has much higher grip strength than the average 25 year old woman."
Inquisitive Bird on Twitter - "Perhaps even more surprising, this paper investigates the subgroup of highly trained female athletes, and they still score on average lower than the typical (untrained) male."
This also has interesting implications for trans mania
Universal sex differences appear in adolescents' career aspirations, study finds - "A new analysis by David Geary at the University of Missouri and Gijsbert Stoet at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom finds career aspirations from nearly 500,000 adolescents shows consistent sex differences across 80 nations, suggesting biologically-influenced preferences can play a role in gender segregation in the workplace later in life. The researchers also found a tendency for larger differences to appear in gender-equal countries, such as Finland, Norway or Sweden... "The sex differences in interest in things- and people-oriented occupations were not only found throughout the world, but mirror those found in a study done more than 100 years ago," Geary said. "The results are consistent across time and place, in keeping with inherent sex differences that make some activities more attractive to adolescent boys than girls and others more attractive to girls than boys.""
Misguided attraction: The contribution of normative and individual-differences components of the sexual system to mating preferences - "We examined the contribution of variations in sexual-system functioning, namely, sexual hyperactivation (heightened sex-related desire and worries) and sexual deactivation (suppression of sexual behavior and thoughts), to mating preferences. Participants (N = 78) completed a questionnaire assessing sexual hyperactivation and deactivation and rated their interest in videotaped potential romantic partners in two mating conditions (long-term, short-term). Sexual hyperactivation was associated with increased short-term mating interest and a greater reliance on gender-typical mating preferences (e.g., lower short-term standards among men). Sexual deactivation was associated with gender-atypical mating preferences among men (e.g., short-term preference for high-status women). These findings highlight the role of individual differences in sexual system functioning in shaping mating preferences.
► Sexually hyperactivated men and women display elevated short-term mating interest. ► Sexually hyperactivated men display lower short-term attractiveness standards. ► Sexually hyperactivated women display higher short-term attractiveness standards. ► Sexually deactivated women display lower short-term mating interest. ► Sexually deactivated men prefer as short-term mates women high in economic status."
Ugly Truth About One Night Stands: Men Less Choosy Than Women - "Men are far more interested in casual sex than women. While men need to be exceptionally attractive to tempt women to consider casual sex, men are far less choosy. New research shows that men are more likely than women to report having had casual sex and they express a greater desire for it than do women. It is also thought that women but not men raise their standards of attractiveness for a casual sex partner... Across all three levels of requestor attractiveness, men were more likely to go out, go to their apartment and go to bed with them than were women. German men were less likely to go out with the requestor and go to their apartment than American and Italian men. Italian men were more likely to go to bed with the requestor than were American men. German men were even less likely than American men to go to bed with the requestor. These differences highlight cultural differences in sexual morals and preferences. For each of the three offers, men were more likely to accept when the hypothetical woman was moderately or exceptionally attractive than when she was slightly unattractive, but whether she was moderately or exceptionally attractive made no difference. Women however placed more importance on the requestor's good looks. They were more likely to accept the apartment and bed requests from an exceptionally attractive man than from either a moderately attractive or slightly unattractive man."
Gender differences in responses to moral dilemmas: a process dissociation analysis - "The principle of deontology states that the morality of an action depends on its consistency with moral norms; the principle of utilitarianism implies that the morality of an action depends on its consequences. Previous research suggests that deontological judgments are shaped by affective processes, whereas utilitarian judgments are guided by cognitive processes. The current research used process dissociation (PD) to independently assess deontological and utilitarian inclinations in women and men. A meta-analytic re-analysis of 40 studies with 6,100 participants indicated that men showed a stronger preference for utilitarian over deontological judgments than women when the two principles implied conflicting decisions (d = 0.52). PD further revealed that women exhibited stronger deontological inclinations than men (d = 0.57), while men exhibited only slightly stronger utilitarian inclinations than women (d = 0.10). The findings suggest that gender differences in moral dilemma judgments are due to differences in affective responses to harm rather than cognitive evaluations of outcomes."
Steve Stewart-Williams on Twitter - ""Sex differences in occupational preferences have been found in every society where psychologists have looked for them. In one large study (N ≈ 200,000), Lippa found the differences in 53 out of 53 nations: a level of cross-cultural unanimity almost unheard of within psychology"
"sex differences in occupational preferences have remained remarkably stable throughout the half-century or so that psychologists have measured them, even in the face of significant shifts in women’s social roles and place in society (Su et al., 2009). In particular, the sex difference in interest in things vs. people seems stubbornly resistant to change. One analysis, for instance, found that whereas the number of women pursuing high-status professions increased a great deal since the 1970s, the number pursuing things-related professions remained virtually static (Lippa, Preston, & Penner, 2014). Notably, this was the case despite the fact that, during that same period, a wide range of initiatives were established to try to entice women into those very professions"
Are Sex Differences in Preferences for Physical Attractiveness and Good Earning Capacity in Potential Mates Smaller in Countries With Greater Gender Equality? - "On average, women show stronger preferences for mates with good earning capacity than men do, while men show stronger preferences for physically attractive mates than women do. Studies reporting that sex differences in mate preferences are smaller in countries with greater gender equality have been interpreted as evidence that these sex differences in mate preferences are caused by the different roles society imposes on men and women. Here, we attempted to replicate previously reported links between sex differences in mate preferences and country-level measures of gender inequality in a sample of 3,073 participants from 36 countries (data and code available at https://osf.io/4sr5f/). Although women preferred mates with good earning capacity more than men did and men preferred physically attractive mates more than women did, we found little evidence that these sex differences were smaller in countries with greater gender equality. Although one analysis suggested that the sex difference in preferences for good earning capacity was smaller in countries with greater gender equality, this effect was not significant when controlling for Galton’s problem or when correcting for multiple comparisons. Collectively, these results provide little support for the social roles account of sex differences in mate preferences."
The power of patriarchy!
Addendum: Patriarchy is more powerful in countries with more gender equality. Amazing.
From 14 August 2020 time I posted this: "So much for "gender stereotypes" being the problem" (I also posted this on 22 May 2019 oops)
Genetic Variants Tied to Sex Differences in Psychiatric Disorders - "Just as recent research has shown that the sex of cells used in cellular models can bias studies of neurological disease, new research is showing that men and women also have genetic differences that are linked to their likelihood of developing certain psychotic and mood disorders...
Jill Goldstein: If you start at the population level, there are sex differences in the incidence of major psychiatric disorders. For example, in schizophrenia there’s a slightly higher incidence in men than in women, but in major depression and anxiety disorders, the risk is actually two-fold higher in women than in men. The importance is that it’s worldwide, it is not culture-specific, so [scientists] really believe there is a biology to understanding the incidence difference... We’re living in the day and age of precision medicine, and we want to identify genes that are associated with treatment responses so we can personalize our treatments. It’s absolutely critical, if we’re going to talk about these things, to consider sex and gender. In 2001, for example, eighty percent of adverse drug reactions [occurred in] women. But most studies in neuroscience and in medicine in general involve male animals, so we shouldn’t be surprised that the side effects and drug reactions would be greater in women than in men. There are a few instances in which this has changed treatment completely. One is in cardiovascular disease, where it’s primarily treated as a small vessel disease in women and a large vessel disease in men. Before, most of our treatments were developed for large vessel disease and the development of plaques. When these sex-based differences were discovered, it really revolutionized women’s heart health programs. There are also examples in stroke and in lung cancer, in which brilliant scientists were about to throw a treatment away because it looked like it didn’t work. But it turned out that in lung cancer, for example, they were targeting a mutation [linked to] a form of lung cancer that was more common in women, but they were testing it using male animals. There are real-life consequences if we do not develop sex-dependent therapeutics, and I think it is critical for precision medicine."
The power of patriarchy and neuro-sexism!
Sex Is Binary, Gender Is Fluid - "For the thousands of studies that show sex differences, please check the resources I’ve provided at the end of this post. Neuroscientist Camilla Benbow, for instance, has studied data from nearly 2,000,000 children, including adolescents, and seen clear brain differences relevant to future math performance. She and other researchers utilize large sample sizes, study tens of thousands of brain scans, and study the brain longitudinally (over a long period of time)"
The Fight for Gender Equality Is Increasing Sexism (Playboy) - " Damore’s memo wasn’t an anonymous email he sent to all employees at the company, or a Google doc that he shared with a few people that went viral; it was feedback invited by Google after he attended a “Diversity and Inclusion Summit”... he advocated for viewpoint diversity in addition to diversity around gender and race. His goal was to help the tech giant implement useful strategies to close the gender gap, instead of ineffective policies based on the incorrect assumption that all differences we see between women and men are due to socialization or bias... another former Googler, Tim Chevalier, has also sued Google, after he was fired for denigrating white men... [He] compared Damore to—of all people—Elliot Rodger and Marc Lépine, mass murderers who targeted female victims... it becomes clear that most people didn’t bother to read the memo before spouting their opinions... in 10 to 15 years from now, I predict the gender gap we currently see will only widen as occupational opportunities for women continue to expand in less equitable countries. Somewhere along the way, science on biological sex differences became taboo, and in countering its existence, it’s become acceptable to resort to making up claims, like saying that the latest science shows something altogether different and that Damore was “cherry picking scientific evidence to support a preexisting point of view.” It also includes having the gall to put the words “prenatal testosterone” in air-quotes, as if the jury is still out on the legitimacy of its influence. Speaking further to how threatening some find this research, Quillette Magazine suffered not one, but two, DDoS attacks after publishing commentary by three scientists and me, in response to the Google memo... In order to mandate a 50:50 ratio, we will essentially be forcing women to do things they don’t want to, and what has gone unspoken in this debate, which I find particularly concerning, is the undervaluing of female-typical occupations. The belief that girls should be pushed toward male-typical jobs as the only acceptable option is where the real sexism lies, yet no one is talking about this. What I also found terrifying is how the average person bought into the narrative that James Damore was a woman-hating tech bro who called upon “pseudoscience” to justify his "sexist" and "racist" views. Why did they buy into this story? Because they, perhaps reasonably, assumed that mainstream media outlets aren't going to outright lie to you... If we follow Hanlon’s razor, journalists promoting these specious ideas either don’t know anything about human biology and statistics, or they don’t know how to read... as a woman with a PhD in a STEM discipline, I truly believe that if a person wants to succeed in the field, there is nothing holding them back... "if men are afraid of even interacting with women because that interaction might be seen as sexist, then they will stop interacting with women, and that hurts both of them"... employees were awarded bonuses for arguing against the political viewpoints Damore laid out in his memo. What I want to know, among many things, is why Asians are being lumped in with white men in the name of advancing "diversity." But then it occurred to me: it’s because we don’t fit into the victim-oppression narrative promoted by far-left ideology, especially when it comes to income and level of education. But instead of altering their hypothesis, people who subscribe to this warped way of thinking double down and change the rules of the game—the only plausible explanation must surely be that Asian Americans also possess "white privilege."... libertarians and conservatives are “hesitant” to be themselves at work, particularly in the context of Google’s reaction to Damore’s memo. Right-leaning individuals also had higher rates of leaving the tech industry as a result."
What might be even more terrifying is that there're people who claim to have read the "memo" and have such poor comprehension skills that they still insist the media were right
"Diversity" means it's good for right-leaning people to leave the industry, since they have nothing to offer (unlike "minorities")
The Casual Misandry that Masquerades as Criticism of Men and Boys - "Describing the results of four large-scale, cross-cultural studies of personality differences between the sexes, Kaufman notes, “All four studies converge on the same basic finding: when looking at the overall gestalt of human personality, there is a truly striking difference between the typical male and female personality profiles.”Kaufman notes that these include traits like “sensitivity, tender-mindedness, warmth, anxiety, appreciation of beauty, and openness to change” for women and “emotional stability, assertiveness/dominance, dutifulness, conservatism, and conformity to social hierarchy and traditional structure for men.” Women were also found to be more sociable and sensitive as well as more prone to self-doubt, while men were less risk-averse, more thrill-seeking, and utilitarian on average. None of this is news to anyone who spends time around the opposite sex, of course, but at a time when the acceptable cultural message is that gender is a fluid construct, and embracing the non-binary is so important that it must be compulsorily enshrined even in our pronoun use, offering evidence that men and women are fundamentally different is a surprisingly radical act... culturally we are so intent on avoiding harmful stereotyping drawn from sex differences that “rarely do we consider the harm that could be caused by ignoring sex differences!”... The most revealing (and poignant) moment in her piece —albeit one she breezes past in her long march toward re-educating supposedly toxic boys—is when she asks a college sophomore what he likes about being a boy. His response? “Huh. That’s interesting. I never really thought about that. You hear a lot more about what is wrong with guys.” He’s right, and pieces like Orenstein’s in elite publications like the Atlantic are a major reason why young men feel this way. So is the relentless message of girl-power uplift that has dominated the culture for decades, and the casual denigration of masculinity that permeates much of popular culture. What do you think passes through the mind of an adolescent boy when he sees t-shirts and bumper stickers that say things like “The Future is Female,” or any of the other casually misandrist slogans celebrated as empowering by peddlers of feminist kitsch? Where does he see himself fitting into this future? What is his role? Orenstein, like many self-appointed fixers of boys, starts from the assumption that boys (and the male personality traits they are, on average, more likely to display) are a problem that needs to be fixed. This is a far cry from their response to the struggles of girls. When girls struggle, the argument goes, it must be the fault of the culture, or patriarchy, or Disney princesses. When boys struggle, it’s because they are inherently flawed (or have embraced an inherently flawed model of manhood) and must be reeducated by “experts” like… Orenstein... Unfortunately, writers like Orenstein are more interested in the “reality” of proving their theories of toxic masculinity than in improving the lives of boys."
How men's and women's brains are different - "over the past 15 years or so, there’s been a sea change as new technologies have generated a growing pile of evidence that there are inherent differences in how men’s and women’s brains are wired and how they work... data from animal research, cross-cultural surveys, natural experiments and brain-imaging studies demonstrate real, if not always earthshaking, brain differences, and that these differences may contribute to differences in behavior and cognition... In 1991, just a few years before Shah launched his sex-differences research, Diane Halpern, PhD, past president of the American Psychological Association, began writing the first edition of her acclaimed academic text, Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities. She found that the animal-research literature had been steadily accreting reports of sex-associated neuroanatomical and behavioral differences, but those studies were mainly gathering dust in university libraries. Social psychologists and sociologists pooh-poohed the notion of any fundamental cognitive differences between male and female humans, notes Halpern, a professor emerita of psychology at Claremont McKenna College... Navigation studies in both humans and rats show that females of both species tend to rely on landmarks, while males more typically rely on “dead reckoning”: calculating one’s position by estimating the direction and distance traveled rather than using landmarks. Many of these cognitive differences appear quite early in life. “You see sex differences in spatial-visualization ability in 2- and 3-month-old infants,” Halpern says. Infant girls respond more readily to faces and begin talking earlier. Boys react earlier in infancy to experimentally induced perceptual discrepancies in their visual environment. In adulthood, women remain more oriented to faces, men to things... Women are twice as likely as men to experience clinical depression in their lifetimes; likewise for post-traumatic stress disorder. Men are twice as likely to become alcoholic or drug-dependent, and 40 percent more likely to develop schizophrenia. Boys’ dyslexia rate is perhaps 10 times that of girls, and they’re four or five times as likely to get a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder... the great majority of female subjects with ASD, the researchers found, had cortical-thickness variation profiles similar to those of typical non-ASD males.In other words, having a typical male brain structure, whether you’re a boy or a girl, is a substantial risk factor for ASD. By definition, more boys’ than girls’ brains have this profile, possibly helping explain ASD’s four- to fivefold preponderance among boys compared with girls... In general, brain regions that differ in size between men and women (such as the amygdala and the hippocampus) tend to contain especially high concentrations of receptors for sex hormones... Scientists routinely acknowledge that the presence or absence of a single DNA base pair can make a medically important difference. What about an entire chromosome?... Shah’s experiments in animals employ technologies enabling scientists to boost or suppress the activity of individual nerve cells — or even of single genes within those nerve cells — in a conscious, active animal’s brain. These experiments have pinpointed genes whose activity levels differ strongly at specific sites in male versus female mice’s brains.What would happen, Shah’s team wondered, if you knocked out of commission one or another of these genes whose activity level differed between male and female brains?"
So much for "neurosexism". Testosterone Rex strikes again. Actually since, we are told, "science" shows that trans people have brains resembling those of the sex they think they are, that means allegations of "neurosexism" are transphobic
Gender is not just a social construct, according to scientific research - "A study published (paywall) in November 2017 suggests that these sorts of girly toy preferences aren’t simply a reflection of gendered social pressures. A meta-analysis of research, reviewing 16 studies on the subject that collectively included some 1,600 children, found that both biology and society affect boys’ and girls’ toy choices. The researchers found a huge effect size (1.03 for boys playing with boys’ toys more than girls, and 0.9 for girls playing with girls toys more than boys; anything above 0.8 is considered “large”) across geographical regions. “The size of sex differences in children’s preferences for male-typed and female-typed toys did not appear to be smaller in studies conducted in more egalitarian countries”... contrary to the popular progressive belief, gender is partly socially constructed—but it’s not just a social construct... "We strive to find out how the biology of people works. Would we close our minds as scientists because it might be politically incorrect?"... “If we have a better understanding of how biology impacts the developing brain, we might be better able to tailor educational practices to specific students,” says Stevens. In other words, nurture can be manipulated so that it more effectively interacts with nature to develop particular skills. If we ignore biology, says Stevens, “we’re not acknowledging that there might be another factor impacting things and then we wonder why things aren’t as effective.”"
Testosterone Rex strikes again
Feminist logic - the fact that more gender equal societies still had the same sex differences shows how strong patriarchy is
Old T-Rex - "Rather than talk much about differences between the sexes, which would do her case no good at all, she talks about testosterone’s role in creating such differences. Testosterone is a strawman theory, here. Sex differences might be caused, in part or in whole, by biological factors other than testosterone: would disproving an incorrect testosterone-based theory make the differences go away? On the other hand, it might confuse people enough to reduce or eliminate belief in such differences. People are fairly easy to confuse... Men take more risks, especially after puberty. Fine attempts to talk this away, as she often does. Her argumentative approach sometimes has a certain mad charm, as when she mentions her baby son rolling across the room to a power drill, juggling knives, and trying to plunge a running hair dryer into the cake mix. I guess that no truly educated person could believe in anything so obvious, so… She also steps up to ” No true Scotsman “. She defines what must be the only correct definition of a risk-prone personality – someone that tends to embrace every possible risk – and if those correlations aren’t perfect, how could there be such a thing as a risk-prone person? She reminds me of Donald Rumsfeld, trying to define away the insurgency in Iraq by explaining that real guerrillas must have a unified doctrine and central command, which would have been a surprise to the raggedy-assed Spaniards fighting Napoleon, the men that gave us the word... Generally, sexual selection is strongest in the sex with the greater reproductive variance. Usually, that means males – some have many offspring while others have few or none. Female reproduction varies less. Fine discusses a series of experiments by Angus Bateman [published in 1948] that led to claims of higher reproductive variance in male fruit flies. There were problems in those experiments – mistakes, technical problems and limitations. Some of the mutations used to trace paternal identity interfered with fitness and thus buggered the statistics. We wouldn’t have to use such a sloppy procedure today, but hey, it was 1948 – they didn’t even have the human chromosome count right. Yet similar studies have been done more recently on many other species – without those problems – and Bateman’s principle, that females are the limiting factor of parental investment, is generally true. Male reproductive variance is generally higher. So how does criticism of errors in a pioneering study refute a now-proven idea? That would be like claiming that Otto Lilienthal’s glider crash, where he died saying “sacrifices must be paid for” [which makes no sense at all] proves that Man will never fly. Fine’s fruit fly chapter is completely pointless. This lawyerly rhetorical technique, criticizing an early experiment in order to snipe at a well-established contemporary theory, was also used by S.J. Gould in The Mismeasure of Man, when he argued that Samuel Morton had skewed his measurements of skulls to fit his preconceptions. Which was untrue – but it wouldn’t have mattered a rat’s ass if Morton had screwed up, because the art has advanced very far since Morton’s time. Today we use MRI and CAT scanners to image skulls to millimetric precision. Fine takes a stab at showing that there’s isn’t much point [in terms of extra evolutionary fitness] in men getting extra mates. She comes up with an unphysical and absurd example – mentioning how unlikely it would be for 100 one-night stands to generate an extra 100 babies. That’s totally irrelevant: all it shows is that she’s innumerate... if sexual selection doesn’t really happen, what could explain men’s huge strength advantage? Eating Wheaties?Fine seems to think that only producing a horde of extra kids could have any evolutionary significance – but she is wrong. One more kid is a big deal, fitness-wise... In talking about the effects of testosterone, Fine mention a kind of cichlid fish where dominance influences gonadal events – causation ( in part) goes from behavior to hormones, instead of hormones to behavior. Interesting. But is there evidence of a similar pattern in humans? No. Are humans so evolutionarily close to fish – in particular, cichlid fish – that any pattern we see in cichlids is an immediate heads-up, something that might be happening in humans? Christ no. Then what’s the God-damn point? If we’re talking logic and inference, there is none: Fine seems to think that random unconnected facts are just fine for confusing her audience, and of course she’s right about that. Or, more charitably and probably more accurately, they’re good at confusing her"
On Cordelia Fine's Testosterone Rex
Denying the Neuroscience of Sex Differences - "Turns out that yet another book, this one with a fawning review in Nature, claims to “shatter” myths about sex differences in the brain while in fact perpetuating the largest one. Editors at Nature decided to give this book their imprimatur. Ironically, within a couple of days of the Nature review being published came a news alert from the American Association for the Advancement of Science titled, “Researchers discover clues to brain differences between males and females,” and a new editorial in Lancet Neurology titled “A spotlight on sex differences in neurological disorders,” both of which contradict the book’s core thesis... It is now abundantly clear to anyone honestly looking, that the variable of biological sex influences all levels of mammalian brain function, down to the cellular/genetic substrate, which of course includes the human mammalian brain... Recognizing our obligation to carefully study sex influences in essentially all domains (not just neuroscience), the National Institute of Health on January 25, 2016 adopted a policy (called “Sex as a Biological Variable,” or SABV for short) requiring all of its grantees to seriously incorporate the understanding of females into their research... Since Simone de Beauvoir in the early 1950s famously asserted that “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” and John Money at Johns Hopkins shortly thereafter introduced the term “gender” (borrowed from linguistics) to avoid the biological implications of the word “sex,” a belief that no meaningful differences exist in the brains of women and men has dominated U.S. culture... it is replete with tactics that are now standard operating procedure for the anti-sex difference writers. The most important tactic is a comically biased, utterly non-representative view of the enormous literature of studies ranging from humans to single neurons. Other tactics include magnifying or inventing problems with disfavored studies, ignoring even fatal problems with favored studies, dismissing what powerful animal research reveals about mammalian brains, hiding uncomfortable facts in footnotes, pretending not to be denying biologically based sex-influences on the brain while doing everything possible to deny them, pretending to be in favor of understanding sex differences in medical contexts yet never offering a single specific research example why the issue is important for medicine, treating “brain plasticity” as a magic talisman with no limitations that can explain away sex differences, presenting a distorted view of the “stereotype” literature and what it really suggests, and resurrecting 19th century arguments almost no modern neuroscientist knows of, or cares about. Finally, use a catchy name to slander those who dare to be good scientists and investigate potential sex influences in their research despite the profound biases against the topic (“neurosexists!”). These tactics work quite well with those who know little or nothing about the neuroscience... You may ask: What exactly are people like Rippon so afraid of? She cites potential misuse of the findings for sexist ends, which has surface plausibility. But by that logic we should also stop studying, for example, genetics. The potential to misuse new knowledge has been around since we discovered fire and invented the wheel. It is not a valid argument for remaining ignorant... No one seems to have a problem accepting that, on average, male and female bodies differ in many, many ways. Why is it surprising or unacceptable that this is true for the part of our body that we call “brain”? Marie Curie said, “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”"
Why do the tactics sound so similar to creationist ones?
Feminists: It's sexist to only study men since the results don't apply to women
Also feminists: Men and women are the same and if you say they're different you're sexist
