I read that interview this weekend and thought she was actually pretty aware of how quickly her research could be scooped up by anti-feminists:

"Any of this could be taken badly. I worried, for instance, that stuff about pregnancy and the mommy brain could be taken to mean that mothers shouldn’t go to work. The brain shrinks 8 percent during pregnancy and does not return to its former size until six months postpartum."

She goes on though to explain that brain size has nothing to do with intelligence and that women have "more connections between the two hemispheres, and we have 11 percent more brain cells in the area of the brain called the planum temporale, which has to do with perceiving and processing language."

I can understand your reluctance to embrace her research but I thought she did a decent job with explaining and being sensitive...

Let's look at some stereotypes that Ms. Brizendineon seems to think are based on "an aspect of truth":

Hmmm

Black Men: physically strong, therefore should do grunt work.

White Men: less physically strong, but very "smart" so they should manage the world's resources.

Black Women: once, again, strong so they should work hard labor while also caring for children. They are also sexual voracious, so you can't really "rape" a Black Woman, she'll always be up for sex.

White Women: weak, both of body and mind; can't be expected to do any work beyond look pretty and do needlepoint or learn to sing. Must have children, but should employ a "mammy" to care for them.

Where do these stereotypes come from? Slave-Era Plantations! Just because stereotypes are developed to justify the exploitation, rape, and oppression of one group by another does NOT MEAN that there is an "aspect of truth" to them. The truth merely reflects the social realities of oppression, not the "natural" inclinations of human people(s).

Spot on, Heather. I can't say how infuriated I am that the same people who would be quick to dismiss racial stereotypes as racist are quite benevolent towards their sexist counterparts and even ready to consider them "common sense".

"...a woman’s brain structure explains a good deal of her behavior, including a penchant for gossiping and talking on the phone." If I prefer spend my time with math and programmation langages than gossiping for long on the phone it must be because of a problem with the connections between the two hemispheres of my brain. Maybe she think that women being naturally programmed to be dependent on men is also a stereotype based on an aspect of truth: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=420513&in_page_id=1879

Ah, the junk science. So Brenzendine thinks that men walk around all day silently, with blank expressions on their faces? How can they make droll observations or clever jokes?

Hang on for my piece on this in Vanity Fair. It will be called: "Men are joyless robots."

A stereotype always has an aspect of truth to it, or it wouldn’t be a stereotype.

How much bigger dya think the hullabaloo over this would be if she had said that while speaking in the context of a discussion about race?

(And, I imagine that any grain of truth in most stereotypes has to do with nurture rather than nature, so to speak.)

I can understand your reluctance to embrace her research but I thought she did a decent job with explaining and being sensitive...

I can't speak for Vanessa, but my reluctance to embrace Brizendine's research comes from her doing a crappy job with being factually correct.

I agree with Alon. Pseudoscience makes my hemispheres ANGRY. It's good that I have a shrunken mommy brain. Otherwise, I might devise a plan to go nurture this pseudoscientist in the nose!

And HeatherNan - You are dead on. I couldn't have said it though - I find it impossible to listen to people after that now stock sentence about stereotypes pops out of their mouths.

Hysterectomies were the only cure from pre-menstrual mood swings 50 years ago, before modern antidepressants, Dr. Brizendine writes on page 48/49. Yep. Female castration was THE ONLY cure for depressed teens. The doctor is more inane and unscientific than you can imagine, even from the most scathing reviews.

I'm so glad to see a discussion about this. One of the things that drives me most crazy is the current scientific establishment's refusal to address the reality that male-female aren't these opposite poles; that these groups overlap and aren't so clear cut. I don't want to argue that everybody's just the same, but I do think we need a more nuanced discussion that accepts gender as, at least in part, a fiction.

"...a woman’s brain structure explains a good deal of her behavior, including a penchant for gossiping and talking on the phone."

Bullshit. It's just that when men do it, they don't call it gossip. They call it "hanging out with the boys" or "getting the inside scoop." And I suppose it isn't men who are constantly yakkiing on their cell phones on trains and other public places because their business is just so important that we all have to hear them talk about it in their loud booming voices?

I agree with so many of you, especially the comment that sexist stereotypes are overwelmingly "common sense" it drives me crazy to hear my friends, coworkers, and family members (women especially) say that gender and sex are these clear cut things that just make sense and are the truth. It also makes me crazy that science like this never considers social reasons for the differences in gender, they all think science (natural that is) is the end all be all (I apoligize to anyone in the science field, it just seems like we get only one persepective and that persepective (science) is untouchable and infallible). Good point on the fact that guys do gossip, more so then that they do have guy talk which usually isn't classified as gossip becuase its not about rumors or spreading news on people.

Liz,
I am a scientist and no offense taken. The problem isn't with science, per se, but with the gender and social bias in many conclusions.

My question:
So what if women are (on average) more talkative/nurturing than men? First, if somehow we found that one race were (on average) stupider than other races, would that justify discrimination against the smart ones? And isn't being communicative and nurturing a good thing?

Key to me (i.e. for saving my sanity) are three points:

1. There are sex differences in psychological function, but not many, and the effect size is typically small (Hyde 2005).

2. Brain structure is a result of a range of factors, environmental and genetic. It can and does change as a result of the environment, learning (e.g., Maguire et al, 2000). (And this "hard-wired" nonsense is annoying - the brain is a very fluid thing!)

3. A mean difference mean(group 1) > mean(group 2) between groups on some measure does not imply that for every x1 in group 1, x2 and in group 2, x1 > x2. This is pretty damn important for when people (and this applies to both men and women) want to work at something which doesn't fit the gender stereotypes.

Hyde, J. S. (2005). The gender similarities hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60, 581-592.

Maguire, E. A.; Gadian, D. G.; Johnsrude, I. S.; Good, C. D.; Ashburner, J.; Frackowiak, R. S. & Frith, C. D. (2000). Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 97, 4398-4403