Health & Science

Fear of the Pink Blanket

A Q&A with Lise Eliot, author of a new book on sex differences.

Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, is the author of the new book Pink Brain, Blue Brain. It’s about how small brain-based sex differences grow into troublesome gaps and what we can do about it, to paraphrase the jacket copy. I reviewed the book for the Washington Post and then talked to Eliot about her ideas for DoubleX.

You say that you expected this book to be a relatively simple project, but in the end it was hard. Why?

Lise Eliot: I’d written an earlier book making a linear connection between what children do at different ages, and how their brain development tracks their behavior. That came together pretty easily. I thought in this new book, I’d do the same thing, only breaking down the brain science by gender. But I found that the data about gender difference just aren’t clear and overwhelming. That’s partly because it’s hard to do research on children. But it’s also because sex differences in the brain are small.

What’s an example?

Eliot: Well, the largest behavioral sex difference is the one we all know: dolls and trucks. If you put boys and girls at the age of 3 into a room with stereotyped toys, the boys will spend 70 percent of their time with the trucks, and the girls with the dolls. That is the largest sex difference in behavior that we see. So you’d think we’d have some brain structure that would correlate with it. But we don’t. Obviously, there is something there [in the brain], but not at the level of gross anatomy or what we can see on an MRI.

Aha. So where did you go from there?

When my premise didn’t work out, that forced me to look more closely at sex differences in the brain for adults.  I though they were more definitive. But I found some of that dogma overturned, too.

In what sense?

In 1982, a high-profile study that made Science suggested that the corpus callosum, which is the white matter that connects our two brain hemispheres, is larger in women than it is in men. That finding was supposed to explain why women are better multitaskers and why they are more empathetic. A slew of follow-up studies followed. By the end of the 1990s, a couple of scientists did a meta-analysis. That’s where you do a comprehensive search of the scientific literature to find every study that’s been done, and analyze for effect size. This way, you have a huge population, and you can create an enormous study. In 1997, a meta-analysis of the studies on the corpus collosum found no difference in size between men and women. That’s been edited out of the neuropsych text books. But it’s still out there in the popular imagination—that women are more empathetic and better at multitasking, and that there is a brain-based reason for that.

Tags: lise eliot, pink brain blue brain section: health, plasticity, sex differences

Emily Bazelon is a founding editor of Double X, and a writer and editor at Slate.

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