Male vs Female Brain, What's the Difference?

Are brains aren't binary and we aren't either

Hiya!

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a big fan of finding balance. It’s almost like a puzzle for me, trying to find where opposites meet. I mean, we live in a world of contrast — love and hate, hot and cold, up and down. But humans are happiest when we find harmony within conflict. Not that it’s easy to achieve, let alone maintain.

More often it seems, our instinct is to choose one extreme or the other in a desire to simplify, instead of doing the work of combining the best of both. Not just in ourselves, but our culture and society. In Curious Adventure, we talked about the benefits of combining rational thought with our emotions. Now let’s look at another infamous set of opposites — males and females. Turns out, the difference between a male and female brain is a bit complicated, but I’ll do my best to explain.

First, let me state that this article is not about gender. I am a firm believer that sexuality and gender identity are fluid and personal, and that every person should have the right to decide for themselves where they are on the spectrum. This newsletter pertains only to the biological differences between the brains of the male and female sexes from a scientific standpoint.

Female Biology has Been Severely Overlooked

One of the reasons scientists have only recently begun looking for differences between the male and female brains is because females are largely missing and under-represented in the fields of science and medicine. For centuries, it was believed males and females were the same, biologically speaking, aside from our physical appearance and sex-based hormones. Women were also excluded from scientific studies because of their hormonal cycle, which scientists thought would lead to inconsistent results.

Any behavioral differences were chalked up to social and cultural norms or again, the different sex hormones. This is still the case sometimes. For a recent-ish example, consider how often a woman’s bad mood is blamed on PMS. The result is that women live in a world designed for men, and in some cases, it’s causing massive amounts of harm—especially when it comes to medicine.

It wasn’t until 1998 that Nirao Shah, a Caltech Ph.D. student at the time, became curious about the mechanical differences between female and male brains. For his postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia, he studied the role of neural circuits and how they regulate behavior. Specifically, he wanted to understand how sex-associated behaviors — regarding parenting, aggression, and mating — are wired in our brains.

In an article by Standford Medicine, Dr. Shah, now a Stanford professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and of neurobiology, explains:

“These behaviors are essential for survival and propagation. They’re innate rather than learned — at least in animals — so the circuitry involved ought to be developmentally hard-wired into the brain. These circuits should differ depending on which sex you’re looking at.”

Dr. Shah was one of the first to notice the rising evidence indicating a difference, even a slight one, between female and male brains. No one really cared at the time though, and most other experts ignored him. Finally, things started to change about fifteen years ago when technology advanced and scientists had better imaging of our brains and how we use them.