The seares in full swing with very exciting upcoming events. You can head to harvard. Com and sign up for the weekly email newsletter to learn more including with Jennifer Block on october 12th for a discussion of her new book, everything below the waist, why Health Care Needs a feminist revolution. We also have upcoming ticketed events we and we would love to see you there tonights program will conclude with time for questions after which i well have a book signing right here at this table women also have copies of gender in our brains available for sale at the registers in the next room. And we are pleased to have cspans booktv here taping tonights evented. When asking questions during the q a, please know your questions will be recorded and please wait a moment for the microphone to be passed to you before asking you question. And always i want to take a moment to say thank you for buying books from harvard book store, your purchases support the author series and they do ensure the future of a local independent book store so thank you. Finally just one last reminder to silence your cellphones before the talk begins. Now im very pleased to introduce tonights speaker. As professor of cognitive neuroimaging at ason brain center, genie rippon researches the use of state of the art brain imaging techniques to investigate developmental disorders and of course to demolish sexist myths. She was made an honorary fellow of the British Science Association in 2015 for her contributions to the public communication of science. She is also a member of the inspiring the future initiative, belongs to wise and signs girling and is part of the european and anyone of either sex who cares for children. In the guardian, reach. Cook right it is a highly accessible book and also an porsche one cia apart from how interesting the science contain is, it has the power if only people would read it to do vastly more moore gender equality than any number of fem mist manifestos. We delighted to horse this event here testimony. Join me in welcoming gina rippon. [applause] thank you very much, kate. Welcome, everybody. Im going to stand in front because is i behind that youll only see the top of my head. As kate said, the books that ive written well, ive actually written a book called the gender brain in the uk but the u. S. Publishers decided americans couldnt cope with the term gendered. Thought a nation who turns nouns into verb is was quite surprised to the book is calls gender and our brains and effectively its really an investigation as to how brains get to be different. In fact, its not really i wasnt interested in the sex difference aspect to start win. Im an autism researcher, and one thing in the Autism Community is a statement which says if you met one person with autism youve met one person with autism and i spend my life looking at whole range of different brains vastly different in all sorts of suspects, huge amount of variability. Well, as you will see i will talk about for the rest of the talk the old idea really once i got to it, actually this isnt quite reliable as i thought it was and i started to unpack the chain of argument, actually proved quite unpopular when i started talking about it and writing about it briefly before i wrote the book. Theres a fairly conservative newspaper in the uk called the Daily Telegraph and one one of e writings said my words marked with feminism so i just need to warn you about. I love the idea of being interested in equality is some kind of provers practice. Anyway, on to the provers practice. Sorry about that. Just press the button. What im no. Yeah, thats right. Very simple, very straightforward well established chain of arguments about male and female brain and that is what determined the difference between male and females since we started argument 200 years ago, but some kind of process which produced various differences between males and females, whatever that process was, it also gave them different brains, female body, you had female body, male brain. You had the male body, you had the male brain and with the two different kinds of brains, its important to hang onto two different kinds of skill sets, temperaments, personalities, whatever. If you had female brain, empathy, but rubbish at reading maps whereas if you had men, spacial, cognition, rubbish at understanding emotions and with those skills sets arising from the brains, the empathy, the brain that gave you empathy, wellsuited caring professions, the brain that gave you spacial cognition, a winner of nobel prize, et cetera. I am slightly characterizing but when you look at some of the early literature its not that much of stereotype and so this is a very simple chain of arguments, its for them trying to unpack particularly biological, predetermined link here. I also need to remind you that the term sex and gender in themselves are ambiguous, used to be the idea that the biological sets were firmly attached to your social gender. And so all of the processes were referred to as sex differences. Now it seems to have reversed itself all of this is called gender differences, we dont have sex pay gaps, we have pay gaps and something that we might want to talk about at the end. What we then arrived at was an argument which said, it suggested that there were two different kinds of brain at birth and that you had a male brain which slightly larger and had some skills necessary for the adults and adult end points and role in life. As the brain developed it got more necessary skills, became resilient and well armored and eventually when you win nobel prize or prime minister, part over that given the state of uk and the u. S. Leadership at the moment. [laughter] okay, otherwise you had pink brain, smaller, not necessarily with any of these slightly worrying cognitive skills, the role of the brain to produce a womenly companion of man, quote. The brain got bigger but, again, didnt necessarily have too many of these the kind of unfortunate skills that might interfere with reproductive process. Used to be the case that people were clearly viewed women in syria and later they thought service bit rude, they have complementary skills, but effectively there are different sets of skills and the brain which was labeled had imperfect, characterizing it, the idea that there were two types of brain, female brain and male brain and that was biologically determined and determined gender gaps in the world and in society. So effectively just as a little task i set myself in writing the book, all the streaming questions i really need to rook at in understanding and early on. First of all, basic question, differences in the brain. Do we have a female brain or male brain or a brain either pink or blue or in fact, 50 shades of gray matter and thats what i want to call the book but they wouldnt let me do that, period. [laughter] were need to know where they come from. Actually are we looking at some kind of differences determine bid the demands of society. I started looking at that. Its a well well established question that people ask, i thought actually this dichotomy so are we looking at either role or looking at much more complicated process and finally, what are the differences if there are any, do we have people from mars or venus preserving people or things, multitasking skills and do it firmly on whether youre male or female and will explain the kind of gender gaps that the research is about. Okay. A very old question, it didnt used to be a question, it was a statement, mens brains are different from womens brains, it was really at the end of 18th century, beginning of 19th century that neurology as it is called then, brain scientists wanting to explain the status quo, instead of saying lets investigate the brain, there couldnt, really, because you could either look at dead brains or damaged brains or guess about brains or you couldnt see what was going on, they took the status quo and effectively as you can see from the charming statements from well established neurosurgeon at the time so women represent the most forms of Human Evolution and closest children savages than adult civilized man. Im not saying that that think asking in research today. Thats bearing in mind thats where it started from. Difference agenda. Trying to show how womens brains were in syria and thats why men were superior and whole array of really weird metrics filling a skull with birdseeds and what they found early on, on average, important phrase to talk about, is it womens brains were 5ounces lighter than mens, they found the answer, men were more intelligent because they have bigger brains and women in syria were smaller and elephants have bigger brains and more intelligent than human man. Strange technique involving all different skull measurements, up to 5,000 if you can believe it. The aim of the metric was very clear, it date intercept with racial issues, white, top educated male were up in scale, then came women and children and lower class, uneducated classes and racist bottom. Its an interesting insight into the fact that we assume metrics that we are using to inform research are objective, have been well tested, reliable and valid and, again, im not saying that we are still in the era of measurement but it is important to remember that sometimes the story that the metrics tell are not out objectively, they are informing a politically informed agenda. Old question but a question that we are still interested in today and certainly i know that if im looking at the nearest some obscure journal and whole array of different similarities, within a couple of weeks, the popular press would be full of headlines like members in brains, proof at last, women and men are born to be different. Very important to gender for us today and i think part of that is why ive been called names in the press because it sets an agenda attacking. You dont get if somebody has a big not much difference in womens brains, you dont get a headline, we know that mens and womens brains arent that different, strangely enough. Okay. So remember that all of this theory about brains and how they made men and women different were as i said before we could see brains, we didnt really have a good idea on how brains worked. In 1990s, actually not long ago, the kind of energies, think have been around for a long time. These are images, in fact, mainly from my lab, you could look at different structures in the brain so you could continue on how to make difference agenda which has bigger and the whole size matter issues as characteristic of the area of debate applies to brains as well and all you could look at different activities, given different tasks, is this reflected in the activities, the images were very important in actually understanding how the brain worked. This is fantastic opportunity to really go back to old questions like are there male and female brains and investigate quite and to find differences continued. Continued the to hunt the Difference Campaign in comparing male and female brains. There was another problem with the images, looked as though we had a realtime window into the brain, the visible the invisible was being made visible, et cetera. People didnt realize that these are complex images which dont necessarily represent the individual part of the brain activity as a result of huge amount of statistical manipulation and colors are not colors you see in the brain, they are a way of coding the differences that you found and those also reflect different thresholds. But they did have immediacy and produce excitement and there was a phrase in the beginning of this of this century, neuro is the new black and it became much more contemporary and exciting because it looked as though scientists had understood the brain and we could stop to apply that understanding towards different issues, what happened we got a wave of books which sort of jumped on this band wagon and thought, for example, relationships, differences between males and females or people just saying that men are from mars and women from venus, the grand daddy of them all, really. , wholesale without going into too much detail about what they were sharing and using to actually illustrate books and come to conclusions, again, this book in particular and i have said in public before, it will not get sued for slander, its an amazing example of how you can misuse neuroscience research. Theres so many statements and quotation of research, for example, women use language much more than men and they have different characteristics of the particular language and if you track right back to the book and look at reference and if you look at reference youll find out that this research was being done on some birds, so you might find a lot about birds but then applying that to females and males is a stretch. A big wave of these kinds of book which i labeled neurotrash. [laughter] i was actually gave this talk in one of the authors and identified in the audience. Did make questions interesting i have to say and i standby it. These becomes are ill informed and they actually sustain stereotypes, they strengthen peoples believes in stereotypes. They have source of credibility. Made very clear statements which i would claim are a bit misleading, theres a book called the essential difference and weve come across before where the idea was, biological essence, but i bet if you stopped any number of people, perhaps not in harvard areas, if you stopped a number of people and you say what essential means, they would say really important, we have to have it, so the essential difference carries a different message or ambiguous message if you like and this isry is a researcher like me. The book start with a statement the female brain, so there is one, its hard wired, underlined for empathy. The male brain is hard wired for understanding system, its a clear statement right at the beginning to have book. Kind of passing comment in fact, that you dont have to be a women to have a female brain or a man to have male brain and thats the point at which you think you know, language matters in this area, you really have to be careful what youre saying because youre talking to people who have children and who are teachers, who are employers, et cetera, and therefore sustaining these kinds of stereotypes even if you could then say thats not really what i meant, i was just pointing this out is something that we need to be careful of. Although we had direct access to the mule brain, different agenda being played out and still Firm Statements about differences in the brain. I would also point out very basic question, are there any differences in the brain and how big are they and quick look at the research literature, you see thousands and thousands of papers, you see differences in adult human brain or various statements like that, Good Research and fantastic techniques, Interesting Data but the focus is on finding the sex difference, if you go into these papers you can see the large, large numbers and measures being taken and the ones that are being reported on are always in the minority where they find differences. Also the case if you scan through all of the papers, yes, they find differences but strangely differences in different parts of the brain, so one will suddenly say have bigger compass, and then another set of papers will come out and say, well, weve looked at all the studies measures and we havent found any difference between those at all, however, we have found a different difference, so although differences are being reported, i have to say, i have to put my hands up that we have done lots and lots of research and still no consistent pattern or structures or networks which reliably distinguishes male brains from female brains. I could look at the brain image and i might be able to have a pretty good guess if i knew what the size of the brain associated, because theres a sex difference, on average, come back to that, this is what this is about, mens brains are about 10 bigger than womens, but thats actually because men are on average about 10 bigger than women, they have about on average bigger hearts, livers, kidneys, but i dont imagine any time soon, i stand correctly somebody standing up and talking about sex differences in the liver, for example, so thats an issue to remember. Another thing to to remember to overstate the case that they find, if they find a sex difference, you get the titles, sex differences in the structural but you will also find that the measures that they report are tinny, tinny proportion of the whole measures they took and this is quite a study which looks at the impact for the public understanding of neuroscience because it was a Firm Statement and the researchers themselves taken results revealed fundamental differences in the structural architecture of the human brain. Actually they didnt, they did show that there was some characteristic patents of wiring between males and female, males appear to have stronger pathways. But not all the pathways were like that, this were Something Like 134 different pathways, 75,000 different comparisons, still could be important, im not denying that there are sex differences and i would say thats another thing that ive been called from the more polite things, denier, there are sex differences in the brain but they are very tinny and the story behind, the emphasis we need to look, the kind of differences we are talking about are very, very tinny, the use of the word different, you assume distinct, characteristics which reliably template thats the male brain and template of female brain, when you look at the data you will find that the two groups males and females, theres a huge variability within each group and you get this typical bellshaped curve but if you put the data of the two groups together, theres a huge amount of overlap and this is, in fact, the biggest difference that this particular study found, so very, very tinny, the focus is always on the average difference here which statistically is different, in other words, we need to look at, ignores the fact that we have a huge variability here, huge amount of variability, the focus has been on the tinny differences here and always important to remember sex supporters will acknowledge the difference that is we are talking about. You think about, its not very useful to know whether men female or male, to guess how they will do on special cognition task, thats important to remember as well. This is where it gets into the work that ive been doing, looking at different ways of understanding how the brain work s. The 3ps here, brains are reprotected, its like we used to believe and they are that brains are amazing Information Processing systems but they were receiving that Information Processing it and driving the owner through the world appropriately, what we now know that the brain is actually quite proactive, it is out in the world gathering rules, making predictions quite scary to think that we are being driven but through the world by somebody guessing what the ending might be, what the facial expression might mean, what the conversation coinfer might mean. Generally the brain gets it right but the important thing to remember that if its generating these rules by looking at the outside world, we need to be very careful to understand whats in the outside world to inform those rules. The other thing, the second 3, is our brains are plastic and plastic in terms of flexible and baby brains, when they grew they have different kinds of connections, you can see the connections actually form but the developmental end point was fairly early in life, the brain didnt change until you got to the other side of the cognitive, but we now know that the experiences we have will change the brain or the experiences that we dont have wont change the brain, which, of course, is the basis for differences that might emerge. The study here is study done on london taxi drivers where they have to do this amazing spacial memory, they have to memory 20,000 within 6miles, information to have when you get into the black cab but what they found was that they actually tracked the individuals before they started this task and takes 3 to 4 years and 6 years to come people and lots of people fail, so they looked at the brains of the individuals before they started to learn, they looked at actually practicing and interestingly they looked to having once retired and no longer taxi drivers in london and they showed that the particular parts of the brain associated with the spacial processing changed as they acquired the knowledge and that change disappeared once they retired. So it demonstrated that our brains are plastic throughout our lives and taxi drivers is an example. Theres other things, playing musical interesting, juggling, not many people can do it, you can get quite lots of people, before they learned to juggle and then you look at what happens. You can see how the brain changes, but, again that means our brains are being changed by external experiences. The final p operating, quite sensitive, very sensitive to the social context of a task, theres a process called stereotype threat and we have to have been overhyped in terms of how it changes behavior. Has been quite clearly demonstrated at the brain level that if you give in this case 3 groups of women being given particular spacial task, this is a special task women arent good at it but i want to see what happens when i put you in the scanner and the other group neutral message and the other group are given positive message. This is a perspective take, women are good to see what happens, i will put you in the scanner, exactly the same task. The people who got negative message make more mistakes, people who got positive message made significant, less mistakes but interestingly its also affected brain level, those who got the positive message, the appropriate areas of the brain, activated, they are focusing on the task at hand and they made fewer errors, those who had negative message, we will come back to later is much more to do with looking at mistakes, anticipating mistakes or sort of emotional processing, so exactly the same task but the social context is different and thats what actually changed how the brain works. Okay, moving on, sharing complicated brain diagrams, this is kind of the core message of the book which is we need to be aware that our brains evolved not to just make cognitively superior in that we could solve problems, we could be scientists, we could be creative, we should learn languages or develop language and frontal cortex, youngest part of the brain is associated with that emerging skill. We have cognitive superiority but we also have social superiority, that part of the brain is also associated with the fact that human beings are social creatures, we have large numbers of social networks, we have many bigger social networks in other creatures, we solve problems and understand social scripts and mind read of the people we know, what other people might be thinking, we can anticipate thoughts, their belief, conversation can develop appropriately, so being social is a very powerful human drive and also in the same way that other parts of any human activity although we like to think we are superior in terms of evolution and have evolved to not be driven by basic Human Emotions, are basic Human Emotions still drive processes, perception is still affected by beliefs and our expectations, positive or negative and our social behavior is also affected by whether or not we have positive or negative social feedback. And this is my favorite part of the brain, this is the brain i look at, mainly in my research, its a bit like traffic like system or railway point system and what it does it bridges this very highly evolved Processing System and this rather less evolved driving system and really make sure that theres kind of careful balance between the two. This is some work from the lab which is looking at the work looking at social processes, looking at the consequence of social failure, being rejected by a group you want to belong to. Involves actually very simple video game with two little cartoon figures throwing a ball to each other and then you come in as the third cartoon figure and the to the the ball to you and then they stop and youre just having the ball thrown youre watching wanting to join in and ive been in the scanner doing this. Really annoying. Its a little unfair and you can test the measure of selfesteem and you selfesteem is affected at a simple level. Similarry, selfesteem is affected by some kind of feedback your getting in the scanner or off to rank where you think you are in a social hierarchy and feel your fairly low down you see patterns activity here or a person who is selfcritical, make mistake and blame yourself, as opposed to selfreassuring where you say, that is dish should never really have tried to slice that job. Never going to get it and this one will about no wonder i cant get a job because if a made so many mistakes in my life. All social processes so they involve assessments of our ourselves in relationship to other people. All of these years of activity are my favorite little traffic light systems. These kinds of behaviors do lead the brain changes lead to changes in behavior. Monitoring the time here. The kind of changes in behavior i wont go into in detail but some of them can be pathological. Individuals where that brain activity is associated with low selfesteem, they have poor selfimage, very sensitive to being rejected by the group they want to belong. To eye levels of selfcriticism and a kind of behavioral were drawl pattern which is called selfsilencing where they disengage from the situation and decide not to carry on being involved. Hold on to the effect of negative social processing and on the brain and behavior. Last part is when does this all start . Is this something which waits until we are grown up and wanting to be part of the social world . Or does its start very early, which suggests that we should be looking very early, and this is one of the thing is found when i was writing the book. I worked with Young Children moving up to adults, but i havent worked to this point with very tiny babies, number bornes and this newborns and this is in the we didnt know much but baby brains until the last 20 years or so. Because we didnt have access to them but we now have this kind of information. One thing i found, again with my work and looking at the literature, was that we have always assumed that human babies are dependent and helpless for longer than the young of any other species so we assume that babies were pretty reactive to just information, that they were helpless or described as subcortical in some cases. But what is becoming clear from very, very clever developmental psychologist us, not me but the kind of work theyre doing, is that babies arrive in the world with our little social antenna quivering and picking occupy social excused from the moment of social cues from the moment of birth, recognizing faces and scrambling images when hourses of birth, being able to distinguish their native language from another hawk within weeks of birth and picking up important cues in the outside world, and if you look at the kind of longer term developmental trajectory, one important social cues thats respond to and spend a long time processing is that of gender, differses between boys and girls, males and females. Very early on theyre starting to respond to unusual patterns of behavior so here a picture of a man put on lipstick in the babys world is quite unusual and they do this little kind of kindy, aha, and later on theyre very dish call the junior gender detectives, very keen on knowing im a boy, what do guys die and what do girls do and police the dressing up box in the nursery. Theyre fierce defends 0 girls cant wear boots and boys cant wear tiaras and then later on we see what we call gender compliance and ill mention that briefly. By that age childrenning saying im a girl and this is what i die. Wont be able to do that because thats a boy thing or wont do that because thats a girl thing and this is set in trained very early on in life. We have the those tiny special sponges. The completion of this is that we need to look at the world as brain influencer, we need to look at if we are interested how brains get to be different, there are biological processes we must look at and also need to be ware that the very profound influences ton those brains from the outside world. I started to look at stereotypes and i could stop here because we could have fun looking at the pink and blue tsunami issue. I could give some examples if we think the world is a brain influencer and we are interested in differses between male and female brains, kites be that some of the differences come free thrift expenses they have in the outside world . Now, bearing in mind that were talking about very, very tiny babies being social sponges. Ive talked but very early introduction the notion that society really codes male and female differences and stresses this importantly and i have a rant in my book about gender reveal parties. Never heard of them. Actually looking for dish have to be careful if theres any card manufacturer those gasalier its a baby girl and its a baby boy cards in pink and blew and i came across gender reveal parties and mope hopefully they will by banned but 20 weeks before a baby is officers theyre already being put in into a box, is it pink or blue, should we all be cheering because its a wave of blue confetti, et cetera. Im not saying is a think something in the New York Times said im not saying that having a gender Revealing Party will change your babys brain but it does mean that society is focusing very much on whether that is a boy or a girl, and with consequences these consequences, we dress boys and girls differently. Somewhat unwise baby grow for a little girl but thats not goo and that we have different beautiful girls coloring books, brilliants boys coloring book and the whole toy debate and im involved in an Organization Called let toys be toys and im sure you have the same over here, which is for goodness sake, can we get away from the pink and blue, pink for girls, blue for girls, girls have dolls and toy kitchens and boys have really exciting creative toys. I will at this point say i think this is a very good case study of showing what we thought was a sex difference actually turns out to be Something Else and this is this spatial difference i mentioned earlier if that idea that many have a superior spatial circle better at map reading. This is the kind of task which is the classic measure of mental rotation task, take a twodimensional reputational after threedim maybal figure and say are these two figures fs the same except the orientation and you have to take the first figure, mentally rotate it and say is that the same or one of them pointing the other direction. Really hard. And i have to say stereotypically imread really bad its but brilliant at parallel parking so shows i know i i think this is something which is being held as a really robust sex difference. And its not just a kind of general psychological interest. Its been claimed as the basis for in the underrepresentation of women in science which its area im involved in. This is a by a ciphers lot of scientific skills and the idea is if men are better even if its on average, these kind of skills, thats why theyre better scientists and not many females and there is would a big sur say done in the states about two years ago which actually took a whole range of these different spatial measures, a large number of males and females and found on average overlapping but significant differs with males doing better, then they said lets go back to the population and say what kind of spacial training opportunities did you 1 2 have you played with construction toy as childs . Did you have hobbies which involved construction or manipulating objects . What subject does you study now . What kind of experiences have you had. And what generated this spatial experience metrics, the sex differences disappeared. And they found that if a woman had as much spatial Training Experience as a man, her performance was very much the same. And if a man had little spatial experience, his performance was the same as a woman who had little spacial experience, this is an example where we think there are sex differses but theres Something Else going on. If you look at the fact these kind of games, lego and video games, are very good spacial training opportunities and i give talks in schools and you can see the teachers rolling their eyes in he back when i say video games fashion spatial training opportunities but i lets them deal with that there are differsness spacial opportunities wimple say just as being aware of the time issue need to move on, how long have i got some five minutes. Do i think there are actually different spatial training opportunities in the world for boys and girls . And this is characterizing it a bit but, okay, caricaturing this, a lego that girls are givens lego friends, girls dont play with lego so lego produced lego friends which is kind of big bits of leg goes because they obviously couldnt do any fine manipulation. What they could make with lego friends, bricks with things like hair dressing salons and nail parlors and this i my favorite. This is stem barbie. Mattel understanding the underrepresentation of women in describes thought they would have the solution so produced engineer barbie. She has the very, short lab quote, even shorter than a minner skirt and has dna pattern on to its show she is describesy, very high heels. Dont see anybody in laboratories with that. We their engineer barbie can make a pink washing machine. Or a pink i think its a pink jewelry carousel or shoe ward drone. A whole range of perhaps we meager typically stereotypically female objects. So, i think, yes, this is a nice example of the way in which the world can actually give two different groups of people two different kinds of training opportunities, with quite profound effect. I will wiz through the rest of. The which is point out we know the experiences change the brain but attitudes and expectations can change the brain. And i was part of a bbc program which is aired two years ago actually looking at gender stereo types in the classroom, look at sevenyearolds, measuring selfesteem, belief in what they could do in the future, and these are sevenyearolds and then taking everything stereotypical out of the classroom, telling the teacher, off coaling the girls sweet pea and boys mate and try to treat the children same and this wasnt deliberate. It was quite unconscious, blue cupboards for boys coats and pink cubboard for girls coats and they got the children to paint the cupboardses orange and could hang the coats where they liked. Im not saying again that the coats would change childrens brain the way you hung your coat would change your brain but the point is another consistent message you belong to a different tribe than the person you put there coat in a blue cup board and sometimes teaches over mark boys and undermark girls and this a study and it was shown that bias score had quite profound effect irrespective of sizes of family or class or socioeconomic status. That was a very profound effect on who chose to do science later. Christian given choice between a game for really clever people or people who actual worked really hard. Girls were likely to reject the candidate for raley clever people because they didnt feel they would the were the kind of people that were clever and nineyearold girls saying things like math is a boy thing, im going give up math because im a girl and girls dont do math and downstream consequences over that for the involvement in science is clear. And i just being aware of the time, remind you talk bug thank you underrepresentation of women in a science, big argument maybe were looking at some kind of different availability of aptitude. Maybe there is a biological imperative that says men are much better at these kind of things. I if your james who wrote the googling memo saying google was wassing too by a the distribution of prefer reins men and women different in part kindly dubaiologyal causes. So this due to biological causes. One of the greatest skype continues, charles darwyn, big misogynist and believed women were insphere you think 200 years, we have moved on but these were statements made in the last 15 areas so this answer atitude and expectation and the brain can change Information Processing differently depending on the attitudes and expectations its encounters. So ill move on from that and just to remind you is this how the brain can change no, because of unrolling of a buyingologial temp plat but exposed to different social experiences and attitudes and expectation is. So come back for three questions, are there any . I dont think anywhere such thing as a female or may there are differses between brains and i actually think everybody brain is difference from every other brain but he nine of sex has been overplayed over the last 150 years and we need to revisit it. Where do they come from . I think its a twowe realization slip between the brain and its world. Its not nature or nurture. We now have the link which closes that and can show how the brain is changed by this world. What do they mean for the brain is we could well hey peeve who are better emphasizing or systemizing, who perhaps not necessarily come from mars or venus but who knows, who do prefer people or things or better at map reading or multitasking but maybe the differences have very little to do with the biological section and more to do with the kind of experiences theyre had. But those are maybe those differs arise as much from how your treated in the belief in the world around you. So we need to remember, take home message one, we have kind of essential pathway but i think we also need to acknowledge that brain doesnt pass through the world in a vacuum. It has all sorts of different experiences so a gendered world with produce a gendered brain. And this is a really nice having showed you all these amazing ilks issue came across the picture that a sickyearold would have drawn that says it all. Everybodys brain is attached to the world so we need to remember that brains reflect the lives theyve lived, not just the sex of their ownersle you have a choice, you need to stick with the idea that boys will be boy, biology is destiny, shouldnt mess around with social engineering and its ask at that time many ally yours with the men are from mars and women are from venus and some people think thats important. Theres a different way of viewing the world. Hope you understand everybodys brain is attached to the world and has to be careful because youre in a book shop but any students are keen to social justice warriors and they wanted to produce some stickers to puts on books in book shops so this is an english sense of humor. They wanted to stick that stick that sticker on those type of books, and of course this kind of book we have this. So thats me. Thank you very much. [applause] for questions down need to held the mic because we have this guy right here. You mentioned nobel prizes, i just wanted to remind the audience that marie currie one two and her daughter won one but in general more men have won but you have to be nominatedded and i think a lot of times men were sort timid to nominate women. Lisa mighter in found radio active and work in the same lab as at to haun him won the nobel prize for chemistry, she won nothing. I can say she was nominated 57 times for the nobel prize and was never given its which i thing is a significant issue. Your question. I think i mention pit the book. Downed downed the double election and took it double election and took it and never gave heir a footnote. Yep. One interesting opinion that the game of chess at the highest level. Chess has ratings. And there is a certain distribution of ratings where the men are better or higher and the World Champion is a male. Its interesting to note that the woman may be the last woman on the list of the womans list could beat 99 of the general population. Yes. I think thats an important issue and i think sometimes thats raised to say, whenever its an inconvenience thought there does seem to be evidence that men do better in some particular areas than women and i wouldnt deny that, but i think you need look at the opportunity. For example, nigel short who talk but the fact women werent much good at chess because their brains were wired differently. Her was beaten by both of the sisters, and one of the things that because their father brought them up to be chess players and he wouldnt let them play in girls chess games. He woman only let them play in games so, yes, im sure all of us here have a whole range of different skills, different brains, but i think if you are going to say if you say most people who dont play chess will are female, moma who play chess well are smell you draw conclusions and also need look at who won the most money for the different games, snooker is another example of snooker is another game where men earn more money and therefore they can become professional snooker players and spend hours pointlessly sticking a stick at a ball, and whereas women dont get so plump money and dont get the training opportunities. Im not saying that prove is theres in sex differences but theres nor sex ooh be the first question you ask, not the last and thats important. That was a long answer. So, youre saying that the studies in general in the past that showed a difference were just improperly controlled . I think no i think its the question is whether the sides that have shown a differs. You can find a differs but if you think of the variable in the populations youre looking at, your take one group of people and take your samle from males and females and you find a difference, that may well be a difference but the next person that comes along will take a samle from system males and still females and then they will actually get a different difference. And i think the issue is, consistency. Not saying theres fraud, although remember if you set out to find a hypothesis and a difference, and you find it, youre moch likely to submit it to be published and if you set out to find a difference and you dont find its, then you wont publish it. So if i call the iceberg problem. This point above the water level where all of these differences being published, so the unwary journalist who says, has anybody done any work in this area . Well, have a look at the an track and say theres a huge number of abstracts showing differences, not being aware theres a huge number of abstracts papers which either have not been submitted or where the similarities are not made much of because if you are looking for difference, thats what you report. So thats an issue that science needs to conference. Its not a badly controlled. Very good techniques, some amazing techniques but not replicated because of the nature of the population or the verity. That the veriability. Very interesting topic. I just wonder, much of the analysis of where we have come to with these kind of false categorizations, sound like built upon the social constructs by and large. When you say dont have the example of being the a vacuum ump if you did a thought experiment put people in a vacuum, how would you gauge the influence of to use thank you neural prefix but neuroendocrinology and say the influence of child bearing, the hormone and child bearing. I think what is interesting is i focus on brain changes as a function of the social context. Neuroendocrinologists are saying hormone trains are sensitive and even at the cell characterrics can change quite dramatically from the female form female form to the male form. So its a very fluid difference and so in terms of the thought experiment, that is something you can look at and not saying there arent differences but i think some of the studies looking at Association Studies 2 of variance is accounted for by biological differences and you say why are we focuses on that what about tout 98 . Think thats important. But people talk about gender neutrality and i say the only way forward is gender irreal estate. Lets sex not be the first thing you see. If you see somebody who is strong and brave creative for whatever, encourage them to be that, as opposed to if youre a girl thats what you do and if boy thats what you do, and those kind of changes, even irv at . Time is its subconscious, people talk about School Teachers send all the boys out to play football and the girls can sit and read in the story corner. Not being aware or not thinking there might be some girls who would really like to play football, and some boys who would like to sit and listen to stories, so i think those are the issues. Its almost as though you could never solve the problem because the thing is so entangled. It was all right when it was nature and or nurture and you do do nice dichotomy study burden if theyre entangled its quite difficult. One or two more questions. Thank you for the great talk. You mentioned images study that looked at male brain versus female brain and saw theres more front and back connection in the mail and more lateral connection in the female brain and then you explain thats in part dues to the training and experiences that led up to that point. So has anyone look at children and whether theres a difference in that. The very study which reported those differences, they did have a whole range of individuals, Something Like 900 individual and the differences didnt emerge until after adolescence which i think is very important but adolescence is a time when the brain is rewiring itself, which is interesting. Something we didnt realize, another new finding that we just thought an adolescent brain was a child brain getting bigger and didnt realize there were dramatic changes, so that study itself showed that there was no difference between adolescence, another study i point about the 5,000 brains they found a sex differs. This average age of the participants in at the study was 60. Now, average age. So theres quite a lot else going on in that population, and not least is the average age was 60, quite likely there will be quite marked differences in exposure to education because it didnt used to be the case that in either male order female stayed in school lodger but if was a difference the mails had greater experience in education. So i think thats important and the baby brains i talk about, sex differences from adult brains, some say we found that baby boys have thicker cortex, and or the cerebellum is bigger and then sometimes another study looks at the same age group, same measures, doesnt find a differs. Things like cerebellum, we show that baby boys are encouraged to be motoric much earlier and are you looking at the fact someone is spending time bouncing children up and down as opposed to patiently quietry reading stories and its an example i think the children studies that are important, but now we know that culture actually not necessarily gender reveal parties, theyre not picky as 20 weeks before their born, but very early on, they are very sensitive to social cues. So, your focus in this talk is mostly on helping neurotypical situations but are there conditions, and things that come to mind like autism or psychiatrist frequent ya where sits frequent ya where there are mow mails than females that have. Thats a great question. Its certain lay good reason why we must continue to study sex differences i wouldnt differ card looking at that as one factor. Maybe the starting point. Theres differences in physical illnesses such as alzheimers and parkinsons, differences in mental illness, many more women with depressing and seating disorder, several harm. Statistics of young men committing suicide at the pathological level there are clearly sex difference is. Out tim is very interesting example. Autism is a male problem but people are starting to say its because its thought of as male problem it has back male problem. You look at the diagnostic capacitygoers theres evidence that large numbers of girls and women undiagnosed because theyre girls and women ask you cant be autistics because you understand sore scrips make eye contact and this is a big move i had a symposium the week before i calm up here which was saying we need look at autism in girls. Early brain imaging studies only loo to boys because only boys had autism. I think there is that and may well be there is a sex dis. Maybe atim fan seases differently in girls and thats why its missed. There certainly are talking but neurotypicals but certainly are path idealogical issues and it mate be that those extremes are where perhaps sex has a stronger factor. I dont know. But certainly we have to look at it. Thank you so much. [applause]