How AI helped to understand differences between male and female brains

At Stanford Medicine, they’ve used the pattern-recognising powers of AI to robustly distinguish between a female and a male brain, boasting an accuracy rate of 90%.

Cue the alarum! Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Women are empathisers, men understand and build systems.

His brain is full of boxes that never touch; her brain is full of wires that connect everything to everything else.

Don’t ask her to read a map – but don’t ask him to read a room!

All good fun, at a mildly drunken party of your peers and confidants. But the sober accounting must eventually come.

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In an excellent commentary piece, Aston Brain Centre’s professor of cognitive neuroimaging, Gina Rippon, notes first that the Stanford paper refused to draw headline-making conclusions about its findings.

However, our media outlets, she notes, have an unslakable appetite for the “sexed brain” hypothesis. They’ll seize on anything as an excuse to rail on about it.

These are fuelled by occasional meltdown news events. Like the leading economist Larry Summers stepping down from the presidency of Harvard in 2006, for suggesting “women might be less suited than men for careers in science and mathematics for biological reasons”.

Or take the 2017 Google Memo from James Damore. He objected to his company promoting women into technical and engineering positions, for which their “biologically determined psychology” made them ill-suited.

Rippon acknowledges this stereotype-hungry climate, and places this new paper in a much better context than all that.

For one thing, she says that much of modern neuroscience points to how much brain structures are developed and shaped by social and cultural experience.

We can now easily see, from brain imaging, how a violinist or pianist can overdevelop different brain areas: this growth both serves and responds to their practice.

So remember, cautions Rippon: what look like “hard coded” differences (arising from their brain-scan study of 1500 younger adults) could have also “been shaped by lifelong experiences”.

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This goes even deeper. The Stanford study’s AI picked up on differences between (chromosome-defined) men and women’s “default mode network (DMM)” in the brain.

The DMN is where “we store key elements of social knowledge acquired by interaction, from the moment of birth, with the outside world – about yourself and about other people, about social rules and social norms, and even social stereotypes”, writes Rippon.

This means that all of the cliches, assumptions and archetypes pummelling through our societies may indeed be causing “gendered” changes in sensitive and malleable bits of our “social” brain – bits like the default mode network.

But this is a sexist imprint on our susceptible grey matter. We shouldn’t mistake this for “essential” male-female differences in the brain, suggests Rippon. There’s also a lot of common sense to be applied here.

Studies may find differences in brain-matter size between men and women, to men’s advantage. But as Rippon points out, in her YouTube debate with psychiatrist Simon Baron-Cohen, all of men’s other organs are also bigger – so it’s only proportionately larger.

Much of the current sex-difference science also begs its own question. Raised levels of testosterone in natal girls, and its behavioural consequences, are interesting to measure. But isn’t calling it “the tomboy index” putting a thumb on the scales?

Rippon reminds us constantly that brain structures respond dynamically to outside influences. In this context, it’s a pleasure to welcome a new voice to Scotland. Someone who fully grapples with the neuro-cultural conditioning that may prevent women from playing an equal role, particularly in science and technology.

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Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon is the new chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University, succeeding Annie Lennox.

She is a “rock star” for women and minorities’ take-up of STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects, founding the playfully-named campaign network Stemettes a decade ago.

I encountered Anne-Marie when I was curating festivals for the innovation charity Nesta in the mid-2010s, and nobody could deny her status as a force of nature. But her stats – readily gathered in her recent book, She’s In CTRL – are pretty undeniable too.

Women today comprise only 26% of people working in tech in the UK, and only 27% of people who work in STEM professions (incidentally, women working there earn 57% more than non-STEM occupations).

When asked, 78% of students can’t name a women technologist. And while 33% of male students had a tech career suggested to them, only 16% of women did. And what happens when (and if) women get into the lab?

“Female biomedical researchers receive less funding than male researchers”, notes Imafidon.

This means medical conditions which affect women more can be less researched. And if we give culture and society their due for shaping the plastic nature of our brains in certain directions, then the media stats on women’s presence as experts seems shockingly distorted.

According to Imafidon’s research, only 24% of broadcast media experts are female.

During Covid-19, it was only 19%, with men at 74% (this is particularly outrageous, given that 69% of health professionals in the world are women); 77% of experts quoted in online media articles are men.

No doubt having appeared on her share of “manels” over the years, Imafidon also notes that a 2018 study across 60,000 speakers at commercial events found that 69% of speakers were … you guessed it, male.

Anne-Marie also makes a strong point about curricula and institutions – which is that they don’t celebrate enough those female scientists who did seize rare opportunities, or break through their conditioning.

Are girls (and boys) properly taught about Ada Lovelace’s refining of the algorithm, or Hedy Lamarr’s designing of WiFi, or Grace Hopper’s pioneering computing, or Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery of quasars?

From her chancellor’s perch at Glasgow Caledonian, I’d be very happy for Imafidon to be generating inspirational cultural and social experiences for girls in STEM subjects. Let the brains be imprinted!

But I am struck by the strength of these scientists’ assertions about the plasticity and flexibility of the human brain, when it comes to stereotypical sex differences. And how this sits at an angle to many of our recent fraught political debates about sex and gender.

This is a scientific story that says our brains possess an inexhaustible neurological flexibility.

We distribute traits like “empathy” and “analytical tendencies” in a “mosaic” across our brains, as Rippon puts it on YouTube. This creates unique organs with distinct formations.

Now, doesn’t this flexibility support a view of sex and gender that allows for huge, non-binary variations of identity and desire?

As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once mused: Are we even aware of what a brain and body is yet capable of?

Those sound like excellent research topics to my ears.

However, we’re in somewhat grim and dysphoric times. So it’s extremely pleasing to imagine that young minds around us may be liberated into new scientific understandings, if we paid more attention to the cultures and stories which develop their brain matter.

Heard the one about the difference between a male and a female brain? Yes I have, incessantly.

But I now want to hear about all those brains, between and beyond those poles, that could be.