The idea that fundamental differences between the male and female brain explain the lack of women scientists has been dismissed as “neurotrash” by a leading neuroscientist.
Gina Rippon said that the “insatiable desire” to blame biology for differences in achievement between men and women was not backed by scientific evidence.
Speaking before a talk at the British Science Festival in Birmingham on Sunday, Professor Rippon, of the University of Aston, said: “We really cannot afford to sit back and accept the essentialist view that girls are not going to be interested in science subjects because of some brain deficiency. I don’t actually think there are any significant differences between males and females in terms of brain structure.”
Her research shows that in many cases the differences between male and female performance are small, that differences can disappear with relatively small amounts of training and that they are not consistent across cultures.
In a recent study, scientists at Aston University assessed how well men and women performed on a task that involved taking another person’s visual perspective to work out whether an object would be visible to them or not.
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British men did significantly better on the task than women, a result that has previously been linked to men having superior visual-spatial skills. However, when the experiment was repeated with Chinese men and women, there was no gender difference, according to the paper published in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.
That suggests that this particular difference may be because of environmental influences rather than being pre-determined by biology, according to Professor Rippon.
“The idea that women can’t do mental rotation has become embedded in the public consciousness,” she said.
She added that sometimes scientists perpetuated stereotypes by superimposing spurious evolutionary arguments on to their findings. “There’s an idea that women prefer pink because it makes them better at spotting berries when they’re foraging. It’s nonsense,” she said.
Another study described by Professor Rippon found that girls who did badly on spatial rotation tasks improved significantly after they trained by playing Tetris regularly for six to eight weeks. This was one of many studies showing that the “vacuum-packed” model of the brain, in which people follow predefined biogical tramlines, was outdated.
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“We know that brains are plastic and can change very quickly,” she said.