Don’t Fall For Women In STEM Neuro-Nonsense

Did you click on this article because you saw a picture of a brain? Does it seem more compelling because of the image? You’re not alone, studies have shown that even people with psychology training find it hard to distinguish credibility from quackery when results are accompanied by a brain image. I’m sorry to break it to you, but there is a lot of neuro-nonsense out there and we are all falling for it more often than we should.

A Little Knowledge Is A Dangerous Thing

I have become increasingly concerned about emerging science, used by unqualified lay people, as evidence for exclusion. This week saw yet another press article arguing from the author’s personal experience that because her brothers liked maths and she preferred art, that girls are inherently biologically different and most likely don’t have the natural skills for careers in STEM.

She suggests that because young infants show preferences for certain toys these ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ preferences must be biological rather than a result of all of the societal messaging that that children are subjected to. According to the author we have created the conditions for girls to act like victims of sociological forces, when actually the differences are real and we need to embrace them. The older I get, the more I realize how susceptible young women are to this type of embedded command; I totally fell for it myself pre-motherhood.

The author attempts to use neurodiverse conditions to make her point. She claims that the gender imbalanced prevalence rates of Tourette Syndrome are an indicator that women’s brains are different because apparently you “cannot misdiagnose Tourette’s.” To use this misleading statement as justification that girls are not built for science and maths I simply cannot countenance.

She rightly points out that the lower rates of diagnosis of ADHD and autism in females has been explained away by a more mature research field that has discovered girls are just better at masking, and in fact they suffer for this with higher rates of anxiety, eating disorders and depression. Tourette Syndrome researchers themselves caution that access to diagnostic services, confidence to report and many other social factors affect diagnosis. Additionally, being a girl might not be the only social category that teaches you to mask, hold things in, be worried about what people are thinking of you, redirect your impulses inwards, self-medicate etc.

Tourette Syndrome is also lower in prevalence for Hispanic and black children, higher for non-hispanic whites with higher income. Should we use this data to suggest that Hispanic and black brains are different to white brains? Absolutely not! This simply demonstrates that correlation does not equal causality.

Confirmation Bias In Neuroscience

As Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience Gina Rippon articulates in her book ‘The Gendered Brain’, neuroscience is an immature field that is still asking the wrong questions.

The majority of neuroscience studies are based on small samples (because imaging studies are still very expensive to conduct) and they require visual interpretation and mapping. The small differences between men’s and women’s fully mature brains are statistically significant and entirely expected, given the differences in our lives. Even pre-birth, knowing if you are carrying a girl or a boy changes the way mothers talk to their bump. From the word go, we sing, carry, tease and play with boys differently to girls. And our brains are sponges, they soak up our environment and grow accordingly – which is why London taxi drivers have enlarged hippocampi as a result of enhanced navigational skills and Romanian orphans have atrophy across multiple regions due to neglect. The effects of lived experiences on our brains should not be discounted. If you talk to girls a lot and throw boys around, one will develop enhanced verbal skills and the other will have enhanced spatial reasoning.

Professor Rippon notes that from the moment scientists started looking at brains, we’ve been collecting evidence to support our prejudices and reinforce the reliability of the cultural differences to which we abide. In her book, she describes early attempts to justify differences based on what we could see at the time – size, shape and ratio of brains to body, the location of lumps on the head. All of this was debunked gloriously by John Stuart Mill who remarked that if true, tall men must be more intelligent than short men and Chihuahuas would be the most intelligent dogs. I am not sure what purpose gender difference studies and articles serve other than to reassure the authors that their own experience is correct, it smacks of confirmation bias and it is bad science.

Don’t Fall For Neuro-Nonsense

There’s no scientific evidence to support a workplace that awards people the top jobs in science, tech and finance on the basis of a social identity category. Be a neuro-sceptic, and apply critical thinking to the arbitrary reporting of differences between types of people. We don’t know enough about the developing brain to make those kind of predictive choices. It is extremely unlikely that we ever will because even now, the reported overlap between the sexes (men who are good listeners, women who can write code) is so large that you will still need to observe a job applicant as an individual to judge their merit. Random juxtaposition of correlationary data will not help us recruit the best thinkers for STEM, or indeed sort out the right thinkers for social work and creative writing.

Gendered Cheese

So what WILL work, in breaking down access barriers and selecting the right people for the right roles, when that means overcoming gender stereotypes? Psychological research has demonstrated the effect of “Stereotype threat”, which means that if you are being tested on something at which your gender / race / class is purported to do badly, you will underperform. Some studies have shown that simply asking math test takers to note their gender at the top of the form will create lower average scores for groups of women. This is a psychological effect called “priming” and it works both ways. Role models act as a form of positive priming, letting us know that our category can succeed, which will in turn create more success. This is why we need more than a couple of female scientists featured in high school curricula to prime the next generation of STEM innovators from both genders.

In the workplace, research from Deloitte indicated when leadership is inclusive, companies achieve increased high performance, effective decision making and collaboration whilst lowering absence. Business leaders can showcase the talents of diverse employees and increase visibility of role models to pull talent through from entry level to senior careers.

We know that our behavior as leaders can dramatically affect the opportunities for women, people of color, disabled people and LGBTQ+ in STEM careers. The world is waking up to the news that diversity equals agility, flexibility and performance: Goldman Sachs announced recently that they won’t invest in companies that lack diverse representation on their boards. As inclusive organizations rapidly poach the best young talent, it won’t be long before gender brain differences seem as silly as assessing intelligence by the bumps on your head.