There is no male or female brain, only physiological and personality traits that individually appear more (sometimes barely more) often in people of the male or female sex. That means it is not too unusual for a female (by sex) to have only traits that some researcher has labeled “male” and a male to have only traits that more commonly occur in females. Remember, more commonly could mean as little as 51%. But most people are a mix. There is no real evidence that females have more “female” traits or males have more “male” traits on average.
Let that sink in.
I’ll explain it another way. Say you have a jar of different red and blue candies with lots of different shapes. If you pick a star, it is more likely to be red than blue. Does that mean that if you pick a red one that it is more likely to be a star? Well, we can’t know that because we have no idea how many shapes there are or how many of each kind of shape is in the jar.
In other words, we are all a unique grab bag of traits, some more common in men and some more common in women (including some that actually change!). Our biological sex makes very little difference except for a few things that make very little difference. Men have bigger brains, but they are less dense (they have more air and white matter), so we don’t know if that really matters.
So where did these myths of the male and female brain come from? In Gender Mosaic, Daphna Joel, PhD , with help from Luba Vikhanski, blows our minds with the obvious confirmation bias, assumptions, and sometimes just plain old bias that have led to our current pop-science understanding of the brain, swiss army knife and all. I’m sure there is a lot more to learn, but in the meantime, I’m inclined to agree with Professor Joel when she says, “how can we claim boys don’t like pink if there is even a single boy who does?”
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