The linguist Deborah Cameron dissects the damaging allure of neuroscience for non-scientists who write books about female and male brains.

For every scientist doing her best to communicate the complexity of contemporary brain research, there are a hundred non-scientists—self-help gurus, life-coaches, marketing consultants—churning out what has been labelled ‘neurobollocks’, a species of discourse that purports to be scientific, but is actually, in the words of one article on the subject, ‘self-help books dressed up in a lab coat’.

You can picture them on the shelves at Barnes & Noble or Waterstones, in the Men Are From Mars section.

The language connection explains why over the years I have felt obliged to read such classics of neurosexism as Why Men Don’t Iron, which proclaimed on its cover in 1999 that ‘men’s brains are built for action and women’s for talking: men do, women communicate’; and The Female Brain, a bestseller in 2006, whose author was so convinced that women’s brains are built for talking, she reproduced the invented statistic that men on average utter 7000 words a day whereas women on average utter 20,000.  (As I explained in an earlier post, real research shows that women don’t talk more than men: where there’s a difference, it usually goes in the other direction.)

Anecdotally, I’ve never noticed men being shy about dominating conversations.

At the end of last month, the mainstream media were full of headlines like ‘Scans prove there’s no such thing as a “male” or “female” brain’ and ‘Men are from Mars, women are from Venus? New brain study says not’.

What occasioned these headlines was a research study which looked at a large number of structural features on MRI scans of over 1400 people’s brains, and found that only a small minority of those brains displayed consistently ‘male’ or ‘female’ characteristics. The majority were a mixture: they showed some of the characteristics previous research has associated more with male than female subjects, and some of the characteristics that previous research has associated more with female than male subjects. The conclusion the researchers drew was that if you examine the brain as a whole, there aren’t two distinct types that could sensibly be described as ‘male’ and ‘female’.

So will the people who write the “women gossip and men do math” books stop writing those books? Cameron doubts they will.

Maybe they should, but I very much doubt they will, because this is not the kind of popular science that’s written for laypeople with an interest in science. As the article quoted earlier observes, it’s more like self-help in a lab coat. Rather than starting from current debates in neuroscience, writers begin with familiar gender stereotypes (things like ‘men don’t listen’ and ‘women talk all the time’), and then cherry-pick a few studies whose results appear to support the argument they want to make (that these behaviours are ‘hard-wired’ in the brain).

…

Readers who buy books with titles like Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps are not looking for a nuanced, scientific discussion of sex and gender. They’re looking for a story that confirms their beliefs about how men and women are different, and reassures them that men and women will always be different no matter how much feminists shout and scream. It’s not about the science, it’s about the politics.

Men and women will always always be different. Some women will have male bodies, and some men will have female bodies, but that’s just a surface phenomenon that doesn’t mean anything. The real Woman and Man is inside the head, in the brain, choosing either the pink frilly skirt or the black tailored trousers. That’s that sorted.

Every generation of scientific sexists disclaims the errors and biases of its predecessors and assures us that today’s science is different. Yet in one fundamental respect it isn’t different at all: contemporary scientists may be offering a new explanation for sex-differences, but the differences they’re trying to explain are the same old collection of stereotypes and myths. Occasionally one of these does fade into obsolescence (no one today suggests that education shrivels the ovaries); but many are in the category of ‘zombie facts’ which have been around forever (sometimes they’re older than science itself), have never been supported by good evidence, and still refuse to die.

The belief that women are the ‘more verbal’ sex is a case in point. Every time I encounter yet another discussion of what neuroscience might have to tell us about this (and such discussions appear in the scholarly literature as well as the popular bollocks), I feel as if I’m reading an account of how unicorns evolved. How compelling I find the explanation is beside the point: there are no unicorns, and women don’t talk more than men.

Well ok maybe women don’t talk more than men…but women certainly are way more irritating than men when they talk, which if you think about it is kind of the same thing. That’s science.

That’s why I’m cautious about hailing the ‘no such thing as a male/female brain’ study as a great leap forward, politically as well as scientifically. I do think the findings of the study are interesting, and I’m glad to see research evidence casting doubt on the idea of brain-sex. But I don’t think that gets to the root of the problem. The beliefs that are most damaging to women are not beliefs about the brain as such, they’re beliefs about sex-specific abilities and behaviour (like ‘women are no good at maths’ or ‘men can’t express their feelings’) which at the moment are often justified by appealing to supposed facts about the brain. Those beliefs may be reinforced by ‘the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations’, but they existed long before those explanations became available, and they could survive if those explanations were discredited.

No matter how much feminists shout and scream.