Brains and Gender

The BBC’s Horizon programme last night was entitled, rather provocatively:  ‘ Is your brain male or female?’ (http://bbc.in/1sJl1jI ). 

picture from Morguefile.com

It was primarily designed to entertain,  but nonetheless gave an useful view of the some current evidence about the nature – nurture debate re. gender-based differences in brain function. Both nature and nurture are almost certainly involved: on the nature side, for example, there is the fact that there are more autistic boys than girls. On the nurture side was the really interesting observation about differences in the ‘wiring’ of left and right hemisphere which may be present in adults but not children (http://bit.ly/18C4Ivw ). One part of the programme that particularly reinforced the ‘nurture’ argument, I thought, showed how mothers tend to underestimate the crawling ability of female babies  but not male (see:  http://bit.ly/IOBX2F ).  This example shows how insidious social factors can be re. gender stereotyping, and indicates that ‘society’ has to work harder at equality. As far as education is concerned, evidence discussed by Daniel Willingham in his blog points to few advantages of single-sex schools (http://bit.ly/1rC4ATT ), but we do need to think about the ways in which science is taught and portrayed, and the careers advice that girls receive