 o'r fath o'r Dr Rippon i'r hyd yw'r cefnodd. Rwy'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r fath o'r Prifysgol Cymru. Rwy'n meddwl i'n meddwl i'r fath i'r fath o'r bod yn ei bod yn rhoi. Rwy'n meddwl i'r Serfanaeth i'r fath o'r awbyddol. Felly, chi'n gwaith o'r cyffredig oedd y cyfans. Felly, fe wnaeth i gyfans i'n meddwl i'r fath o'r holl i'r fath o'r fath o'r fath o'r fath, Everyone has lots and lots of things I want to share with you And I've been told strictly keep to time So the question I'm going to be talking about tonight is Do you have a female brain or a male brain? Or are we asking the wrong question? And somebody said could we have the take home message at the beginning just in case you drift off or the technology fails? So I will spoiler alert telling you that the answer is yes. And actually what I'm going to be talking about is why I think This is the wrong question. So, as Patricia mentioned, I'm just finding that. This isn't actually me. I'll move it on here then. OK, slide is not. Yes, it is. Good. OK, just briefly to say I'm a cognitive neuroscientist. What that actually means is I use brain imaging techniques to investigate the relationship between brain and behaviour. So it's not just looking at the anatomy of the brain. It is looking at what this actually means, what difference does in the brain actually means. A, as Patricia said, my main work is actually looking at developmental disorders such as autism. There is a great saying in the autism community, that if you have met one person with autism you have met one person with autism. So, the idea is I want to know what makes brains different. The lot of early neuroimaging was trying to find the common factor in everybody's brains. ein bod yng Nghymru o'r ddiwylliant a'r ddweudio am y ddweudio'r cyfrannu, ac rwy'n gweithio'n dweudio'n ffordd yng nghymru yn eisiau'n amser o'r ddweudio'n ddweudio'n ddweudio. A mae eich cyfrannu eich紅arau a'r ddweudio agor, i wneud eich bod yn credu Mae'r iawn yn mynd yn yw ymddangos yma yn y ddweud i'w ddweud o'r fogwysig yma. Mae'nichiol yn gwahanol ac mae'n gweithio gael yma. Mae fyddwn ni'n gweithio'r modd yn ymddangos. Mae amgar iawn i'n ffamilio a'r amgar iawn, sy'n ymweld y cwmwysig iawn, ac mae'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'r cyd-drygau ymddangos ymddangos ymddangos ymddangos, am ymddangos ymddangos ymddangos, ddeswyl gwaith o'r sy sylwys yn ymwneud a'r sylwys i'ch parod yn gweithio'r trio hyd yn brygiol. Mae byddwn gwneud hynny i ddarparu gwahanol gan gwaith o'r wych. Mae'n ddag hwnnw mewn bywyd gyda phobl yn ymwneud. Ond, o eich dweud â'r cyfle cyfnogi, byddwn gwneud hynny o ffostigol o bobl yng Nghymru a'r gwrs ac godiwch o'r ffostigol o gweithio'r tyg. Ond rwy'n ei ddweud yw'r acefnod o'r darwod y ñ mae bethau allan, a gael ei fod yn ymweld. Ond yna'r ddwy'r gwneud o'r ddweud, bod nesaf yw'r ddweud yn ddigonent yn y rhaglen a'u ddweud o'r ddweud o'r mynd i'r theoriad ymlaen, ac mae'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud yw hefyd yn rhoi i ddwych ar gyfer y byd. A dyna'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud, y ffordd y cyfnod o'r bwysigобau sydd wedi'u gennym o'r bod y dyfodol sydd y bydd y bwysigon yn y brân, ychydig i'r bwysig o'r bwysig o'r 200 o'r bwysig, mae mae bwysig ar rhan o'r bwysigio'r bwysig, a fydd y rhan o'r bwysig o'r bwysig o'r bwysig o'r bwysig, o'r bwysig o'r bwysig. Roeddwn i'n rhan o'r bwysig o'r bwysig, oherwydd oherwydd o'r bwysig o'r bwysig o'r bwysig, receives the informed. The ideas that we will be talking about. It struck me that there was all sorts of problems with this research. The reason I am going to give you a bit of a warning now is that my challenging the idea that there were male and female brains was not universally well received. I am just going to share with you some of the comments that I got in case you decide you want to leave or switch off your computers. The telegraph Christina Rogers would only said this theory a ddärwch yn ysgolodraeth sydd yn eu ffettig oedd hynny. Rwy'n cael ei wneud bod chi'n credu i ddynion ei cyfweld ar y pethau ychydig yn ysgolodraeth. Mae'r rhain o'r cyfrifysgau o'r ddygol o'r ddillodraeth yn ysgolodraethau. Roedd yn cael ei gyfysgol o'r gynhyrch o'r dda, ac oedd yn cael ei ffwyd o'r ddillodraethau. Roedd ddillodraethau yn cael ei ysgolodraethau ddillog. Mae'n rhai fydda i'r ddillodraeth. Maria Cawrfaid pell yn ystod yn gyfwn y cyffredin iawn, dillewf ni'n bach gyda'r cyfoedd yn amlwg ac yn rhoi'r cyffredin iawn. Ysgolwch chi yw'r cyffredin iawn, felly gynllun â'r cyffredin iawn. A hynny, mae y gwerthodd, mae yw y ffordd pryd yn zeithio. A ydych chi'n sydd â'r gyffredin iawn, rydych chi'n ddweud, diolch o'r hwn yn y rhoi'r rhan o os ydych chi'n ddweud o gyfer amser, i'n hyrddoedd y mewn cofwyr wedi gweithio mewn gwirionedd. Ond ychydig o'r erbyn nhw y gallwn i'n mynd fan arlawn i'n dal, Ac mae rhaid i ddweud i'r lleidio ddweud eu gwneud i amdano. Rwy'n ddyn nhw'n ddyn nhw ymbrif wedi ddwyledig, ac mae'r tynnu'n ddwyledig gweld, bod y gwaith yn gwneud gyda'r rhannog oherwydd, important, ond pla owned you can talk about things being different, but what we need to be aware is that when we talk to the, you know, popular in the popular press for example when we talk about things being different. People have a different understanding of what we mean by different I mean, men like this and women alike that and you get distributions a bit like y cael ei fod yn gyfnewid ei gael, ond mae'n gonyddwch yn cael ei gael ei gael eich fod yn ei gael eich bod, ond ond ei wneud ei gael ei gwnewid ei wneud. A Coxyddwyd, fel y cwrt nag, mae'n rhan o gyfnodol ei wneud y d Sodion i Ddweud. A'i aelodau yno'r ddweud yn gweinio, mae'r i'n gilydd i gyfleu'r ffordd, a phawr o'u ddweud, y sydd wedi cael ei gwyddoedd o'r ddweud yr oeddu o hyn o ddweud. Iня â gael, mae mi'n gweinwch hefyd yn ei wneud ychydig wrth yn iawn. covidiaeth. A y fydd yn iawn, gweld i'r gweinwch gyda anoddiadau, a fydd yw'n gweinwch gyda gymrydau i gwybod. Yna alygu o'r gwозio ffeyddd wedi ffeydd hynny, i gynwedd i gyd wirklichddu'r gweinwch, ond mae hynny'n gweinwch yn gweinwch, yr hynny yn digwydd gwrth gweinwch cymdeithasol i'r llunio'r gweithwch dioch. Yn raises, mae helyn i'r gweinwch. a rheswm am eu gwneud o knowiadau sextaer, i gael ei bobl i'r br LOVE SYG, a i'n rhaniwch yn ddiwylliant o ddod ystod, fe ddysgu'r cyffredinol a'i bwysig. On yn datud eich尔 yn y bwysig ynhame, oherwydd i chi'n gwneud o'r bwysig yn y cymotor xudu wahanol, oherwydd i chi'n ddiwedd y brwysig, a wneud o wneud o'r bwysig. Yn ymgyrch ar y cwestiynau, bywwn i chi'n gweithio, a rwy'n ni'n gobeithio i mi gwellu. gyda'r wnaeth i enghraifftu'r ymddindol i managedu hynny yw'r crasgau gefnogaeth, ar ychydig yn y rhan o bobl y gallwn, dwi wedi'n rhoi'r ysgrifennu'n gwychhaf sydd ymddindol i'r rhan o berthyn, ym wych yn gweithio ei gwreithio eu cyfaintol yn y cwrdd, er fyddai'n meddwl yw'n mynd iodi'r rhan o'r pwysig ar allan y lle'r talwedd. Gynnydd ychydig nhw? Roedd yna'n meddwl yn ddwy ar wnewodd, saying this is actually an idea which has passed itself by date? But is it the idea that these differences, such as they are, have arisen because of some kind of biological script there. Therefore, naturally, we shouldn't be changed. But actually what we're really interested in is what do they mean for the brain's owners? If you've got this kind of brain, are you empathic or a systemiser? Do you come from Mars or do you come from Venus? We will come back to that as longer to ask you. We're asking all of you. We want to be quell. o'r gyfweld sy'n lleidio, oedd ymweld ar maeddoedd o'r bynu o gweithio. Felly, mae'n gweithio ar y perspective rydw i'r gweithio, yw y gallwn ei ddweud o'r cwestiynau chi ychydig? Mae'n ddweud o'n wneud, mae'n bwysig o'r anoddau anathom i ddesgrifio ar yr unrhyw, ar yr unrhyw o'r unrhyw o'r unrhyw o'r cyfrifiadau. Mae'n rhi wneud o'n ddweud o'r certyn gweithio. Mae'n ddweud o'r cwestiynau, ac os i ffwrdd, Mae'r bwysig iawn. Mae'r swydd fyrraedd o'i ei gwaith o'r sgwrth. Rhyddaeth, ein bawb, rhan o bwysig iawn fan hyn nhw, ac mae'n bwysig iawn, mae'n anodd fynd yn y byddwg caidd â cerdwyr yn y bwysig iawn, a'r rhannu a'r rhannu ar gyfer yng Ngheirwyr, a'r hyn yn gwneud ddim yn y bwysig iawn, ac mae'n hynny'n ddim yn y bwysig iawn, ac mae'r bwysig iawn pan dwi yn ni dda i, iawn o bwysig mewn gweld, yn gallu wahanol ar gyfer cyfrant gyda gนesid gyda bwysig? Yn argymprif yw rhan, sy'n gyd o fynd trefyn o'i gwyயn o'r wahanol, yw yw'r wahanol gyda'u gwych ar gyfan gyda gwn. Felly wewn i ddweud yn gallu ddweud o bwysig mewn gweld hynny, os yna'r gweithio, ei ddefnyddio bwysig o gyrwng yn uwch amweithio'i glasol, os yw'r gweithio gwych yn sylweddol hynny, ar gael rhan, dnewch ei ddefnyddio'i gwahanol, Ond mae'n rhoi'n lefais iawn ar yr Basfyn Llywodrae i ffuntrwyddol, oherwydd mae'n rhoi'n bwrdd yn gweithio y rhhaid. A gallai weithiau thinkweld cyfnodd wedi cyfnodd, oherwydd gyda'r cyfnodd a'i ddweud. A wnaeth i'n ddau o'r cyfnodd, maen nhw ydi'r 21a yma, i gyd yn cael ei maen nhw yw ei colli, yng nghymru, mewn ezwaith y rheswm y rheswm, gyda gwp yn rhaid i'r 150 y rhan i ni, a'r r paste o rhad i gyntaf, sy'n meddwl i'r ffordd y dyfodol cyffordd bryd. O'r oed yn ystod gynaill ar y peth y siarad yn gyffordd ychydig, yn 100 oed gyfodd. Y report 2020, mae'n cyd-fyrdd i'r ffordd y bwysig yma, rydyn ni'n cyrraed o gyd y cyfroedd, galle'n 99,5 ymwyng, y report 2021 o'r cyfeirio i'r penderwyr yma, roedd yn all gyfyrdd o mynd i'r nerf. Fydwyrnydd angen i 135,6. a wnaeth y cymaint yn y ddechrau. Felly mae'n dweud i'n mynd i ddim yn ei ddweud. Mae'n mynd i ddim yn ei ddweud, ac rwy'n gwybod yn gwybod bod y gwaith yn ddiolch yn y Rhyll Nôl Ffilosofiogol, ymerdd yng Nghymru, ymgylch, ymgylch, ymgylch yn y Rhynghysol, ac ymgylch yn y 17 oed, o brif yn ddegwyd, ymgylch yn y ddechrau, o gyda'r cymaint, oherwydd mae'n cael ei cyfnwysbeth, four, we understood about the brain. He said I'm going to have a look at the evidence in this area and what counts as evidence is not because it's always been like that or not because it says it in the Bible. So I think he was one of the first people who pointed out that you know, anecdote does not equal evidence or the plural of anecdote does not equal evidence. So he actually came up with the idea that Mae'r lleidiau, dwi'n cael ei gael y bydd yma, byddai yn cael ei fod yn ymdodol, a'r siwr bod yn cael ei gael, ymdyn nhw'n cael ei gael, ac ymdyn nhw'n cael ei gael. Felly, mae'r llyfr yn ysgrifetio. Mae'r llyfr yn no mwy o'r cyffredin. Yn rhan o'r fwy, mae'n bwysig yn ysgrifetio, a yn fwy o'r ideaeth, ac mae'n gweithio i yr enwedd y 180r hynny ym 19r hynny, When researchers were understanding about the relationship between brain and behaviour, and the newer brain science was being established, and the researchers at that point were saying, we'll have a look at the status quo, we'll see the difference between men and women, and then we'll work backwards and explain where these differences come from. So they actually looked at the status quo and they said women clearly are inferior to men, and that was quite clearly stated, as we can see here, because they were, because they didn't have access to educational, financial independence, political representation, etc. So they said what we need to do as scientists is to explain the inferiority of the female brain. Now people very often have a picture of scientists of being logical, rational, objective, so I will just draw your attention to the sentiments of particular scientists in this area when they're asking this question. So women represent the most inferior forms of human evolution closer to children and savages than to an adult civilised man, and similarly there are occasionally bright women, but so rare there are like a gorilla with two heads, which was actually one of the names I wanted to give to my book, a two-headed gorilla, but that was voted down. But the scientists at the time then said, right, let's develop the kind of metrics which could explain why female brains are inferior. Didn't have access to intact living human brains, it only had access to dead brains, which they could weigh or they could measure bits of it once they've cut the brains open, or they could look at the skulls of living people and say maybe something about the surface of their skulls might tell us something about what the brain is like inside. So big flurry of activity in this hunt the difference agenda, which said we really must find out why female brains are inferior. And the interesting thing to bear in mind is that the first finding they have was that on average, thinking back to the graph I showed you earlier, male brains are about five ounces heavier than females. The answer, bigger is better characteristic of this kind of argument in this area. Therefore, men were clearly superior because they had on average bigger brains. And then somebody pointed out that actually sperm whales and elephants had bigger brains than human males and were not generally renowned for their intellectual superiority. And therefore they had to rethink the metric, they had to say maybe it's a ratio of the brain size to the body size, etc. And so on and on with phrenology and craniology, measuring different angles between ear lobes and tip of the nose, etc. But the important point to remember is that there was clearly an agenda here. There was an idea that we had to say whatever hierarchy was produced by these metrics at the top of that hierarchy had to be white because it intersected with questions about race, upper class because it intersected with questions about class as well, males. So there was an idea of what the answer had to be. And there was clear evidence that if any metric used didn't come up with that answer, the metric was discarded. So it was clear that there was definitely agenda in this particular debate which started at this point. Joining in on this as well was the emergence of experimental psychologists who said, well, let's generate a nice go to list of differences between males and females in terms of their skills, their role in society, their abilities, etc. And generated the kind of list that actually if you stopped a lot of people now and said what's the difference between males and females, they would equally come up with the sort of list that we'll as we'll see later became familiar. So you've got again these kind of comments for these supposedly objective males, I have to say. We must start with the realisation that as much as women want to be good scientists or engineers, they want first and foremost to be womanly companions of men and to be mothers. And this was evidence given to an American society looking at the commitment required of a woman entering a scientific profession. So this area is littered with clear, very fixed beliefs in the people who were doing the research who didn't at that point have access to the organs that they were talking about. Right. Moving swiftly on then. Despite all of this, despite not having access to a living, intact human brain, clear chain of argument was quickly generated. And this is what I call the inside out model, the idea that all these differences were because of something going on inside the brain. Whatever it was at that stage, we didn't know about, didn't know about genotypes, et cetera, determined differences between male and female anatomy, also determined the differences between brains. Later on, that was written into the this was fueled by different kinds of levels of hormones, which we will come back to. So if you had a female anatomy, you had a lady brain, if you had a male anatomy, you had a manly brain. An associated with that was a kind of collection of portfolio of abilities and skills or lack of ability and skills. So if you had a lady brain, you were very good at understanding emotion, very good at networking, rubbish at reading maps. Whereas if you had a manly brain, you were very good at kind of scientific thinking, very good at spatial organization, et cetera, but not very good at listening or understanding emotions, et cetera. So the idea was that we had a very clear link, causal link. This was inevitable, inevitably, female anatomy meant female brain, female brain meant empathic, for example. And if you were that kind of person, then you were going to get particular sort of role in society, a caring role, nurturing role, more likely to be a nurse, primary school teacher, et cetera. Whereas if you had a manly brain, as you said, there's a portfolio of skills which meant you're much more likely to be hugely highly achieving scientist and explorer, certainly a leader of the world, et cetera. So logical, rational and so forth. So this was the chain of argument, what I've called the inside out model. And if you like using the term gender, which we might come back to at the end, this was how sex, the biological differences, got to be gender. Gender in terms of what is expected of us in society, our identity, the expectations that society has of us, et cetera. And there was a very clear idea that how female brains got to be different from male brains. They were born different, different sizes, slightly different sizes, but certainly different characteristics bearing in mind again, that we didn't have access to intact living infant brains. Brain, boy brains arrived in the world with certain kinds of skills which they improved by being allowed to be exposed to education. And then there was a fixed developmental endpoint at which point you got the kind of brain that meant you were logical, rational, a great scientist, et cetera. Whereas if you were a female, you had a slightly softer, more fragile brain shouldn't be exposed to the exigences of higher education if you listen to 19th century researchers. But the idea was that that brain would grow up to give that person a particular role in society, particularly to do with being logical, emotional and I cheekily put the kind of princess meme on there to demonstrate these kind of differences. So there was a very clear belief about these differences between males and females. And these were supported by books at the time. There's a book called The Essential Difference. I noticed Patricia stressing essential because essential means in those terms actually some kind of biological characteristic. But I bet if I'd stopped any of you coming in and said, what do you think essential means? You would probably think this is something really important, something that we must have. And so calling a book The Essential Difference is something of a challenge, which I'll come back to, opening lines of that book. The female brain, so there is such a thing, is hardwired, so it's fixed for empathy. This is what females can do. The male brain is hardwired for understanding systems. So a very clear statement from a scientist writing for the popular audience that we've clear scientific beliefs. And then you get the classic granddaddy theme, which comes up time and time again, how different men and women are to the extent that they could come from different planets, men are from Mars and women are from Venus. And if any science came up with proving that, the headline was always something like at last the truth scientists have caught up. So this is a belief very firmly fixed in the public consciousness. But along comes brain imaging, the kind of techniques that I showed you at the beginning that I've been using. And therefore we should at this stage say fantastic, we can now really look at the brain, should take a step back, see, find out what we can think about the brain, understand the brain in greater depth. But unfortunately the difference agenda continued. So it was still the case that very early brain studies were still looking at the differences between males and females. So we're still saying, let's find what makes a brain female, what makes a brain male. If we actually look at the data that's been collected since the 1990s, when brain imaging arrived, you could say, well, the story is looking good. There's thousands of papers which have headlines such as sex differences in the adult human brain, which are then picked up by the popular press. Proof at last scientists caught up, women and men are born to be different. So you get an amazing impression that scientists agreeing with this hunt the difference agenda. But if you start looking at those papers, you can see that actually the story is never the same. So you get thousands of papers and I mean thousands. But then you start saying, well, these people are reporting a difference in that part of the brain. That group is talking about that part of the brain. That group is saying males haven't got a bigger amygdala, start again, amygdala. Males have got a bigger amygdala, et cetera. And you start to think there isn't any kind of consistency here. And the other thing you have to bear in mind, which is why I'm characterising it by an iceberg, also known as the file drawer problem, if you're actually starting off by looking for a difference and you don't find it, then it's quite likely that you don't publish or you might submit it to be published and the reviewers will say there must be something wrong with what you're doing because you haven't found a difference. Everybody knows there's a difference. So there's a huge amount of research which isn't published or even in the published papers. If you look at the thousands of comparisons that are possible in published papers, if you actually drill into them, you can see the only thing they talk about are where they do find differences. But on average, 80% of the comparisons they make may be more report no differences. And if you think of the last few months, if somebody had said, well, this vaccine works 10% of the time, but not 90%, you wouldn't be terribly impressed with the conclusion that we must all use this vaccine. But that's exactly what we're doing. And just recently, there's been a paper which came out and looked at, reviewed all of the findings over the last 30 years, looked at the size of the differences, the consistency of the story, came up with this amazing title, Dump the Dymorphism. There is no clear evidence that there is a difference between a male and a female brain. I can't look at a brain or a brain scan and say, well, that's a male, that's a female. If a male or a female comes to my lab, I can't say this is what their brain will look like, this is what their brain will look like. So that's important to remember. So that part of the argument hasn't stood the test of time. And the same thing has happened with the experimental psychologist go-to list. Let's have a look at this belief that women are much more good at verbal tasks, good at being emotional or empathic. Men are much better at logical, rational reasoning, et cetera, even measures of masculinity and femininity. So again, looking at the kind of metrics that have been used to come up with this answer, same observation we have arrived at. Men and women are much more similar than they are different. And again, another great title, Black and White or Shades of Grey, are gender differences categorical or dimensional. Those overlapping data that I showed you earlier, of course, make sense of this. Huge amount of variability within the two populations, huge overlap, much more likely that you can better characterise those differences either by talking about mosaic type brains, lots and lots of different brains with lots and lots of differences between within the groups, or you can actually have a single dimension. Right, moving on, as I've been told to stick to time. But of course, the end of the argument is about male female brains, male female abilities. What about gender gaps? What about those roles at the end? Can we get rid of those as well? Well, unfortunately, and of course, this is why this is still an issue. It is the case that gender gaps in the world are still evident, are in fact getting larger. One of the areas I'm passionate about is the underrepresentation of women in science. And despite all sorts of well-meaning initiatives, perhaps we can talk about that at the end, there is still a vast representation of underrepresentation of women in science. The top kind of technological groups like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. If you look at the leadership, women in leadership in those roles, or the women in technical roles, vast underrepresentation. A report this year from UNESCO looking at the kind of future proofing of science and looking at the changes in the proportion of men and women in what they call the emerging technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence, content management, etc. In some cases, the representation of women in those subjects is actually going backwards. So clearly there's something that we really need to understand. We can't just get rid of, you know, if we're just interested in anatomical argument, I could stop now and we could have lots and lots of questions. But I think this is something we need to say that neuroscience can help, still help, but we need to get away from some earlier ideas. Now these are the kind of new thinking thoughts about the brain that have emerged since we've had access to intact living human brains. And that's an understanding about how the brain works, bearing in mind that we all thought that brains all worked in the same way. There was some kind of internal programme which was playing out, which reached a fixed developmental end point. And that our brains were for something in particular, particularly cognitive, so individual skills giving you language, creativity, etc. We need to get away from that idea if we're going to try and tackle the kind of gender gaps which I think are a problem. And these are the three P's that I've come up with. So apologies if alliteration sets your teeth on edge. But this is to say that our brains are like predictive textures. We used to think, well, we know that their brains are hugely efficient information processes, but we thought they were kind of passive recipients. We now know that brains are much more like self-organising systems if you're going to use artificial intelligence type terms. They're learning rules all the time. They are monitoring the outcome of any particular incoming sensation or the outcome of any particular action, generating rules based on that and driving their owners around according to those predictions. So it's not actually receiving. It's actually saying what's going on in the outside world. This is what you should do. Similarly, we know that our brains are plastic. I mentioned developmental end points and it was assumed that once our brains have stopped growing, nothing changed in those brains. The right connections were in place and there had been any kind of damage or deprivation and there were differences in how these brains had developed. But gradually, your skills emerged and they were entrenched and nothing was going to change that. So once your brain has stopped growing, but we now know that our brains are plastic in terms of flexible or mouldable and that the experiences we have throughout our lives right up to the unfortunate covenancy of cliff that some of us are closer to than others, where the brain stops functioning quite as well as it has done. But even that, we now know, is not as inevitable as we assumed. So we know that things that you do will change the brain in the classic stories about London taxi drivers learning the knowledge where they can actually demonstrate that the amazing visual spatial feat that they learn, the knowledge, actually changes the brain, the structure and the function. But interestingly, when they stop being taxi drivers, those differences disappear. So our brains wax and wane according to the experiences that we've had, or they won't change if we haven't had those experiences. The other thing we know is that our brains, the third P, our brains are permeable. They don't just process, if presented with a problem, in a completely vacuum packed way. They will take account of the context in which that problem is presented. So if you say to a group of people, I was going to put somebody in a scanner and say, people like you have difficulty with these kind of tasks, but I want to see what happens to your brain when you solve this particular problem. Or you say to another group, exactly the same task, people like you are really good at these kind of tasks. So I want to see how your brain is solving this problem. So exactly the same problem. People who have been given the positive message, unsurprisingly, probably, do much better on the task and make fewer errors. And the parts of their brain which are activated are the appropriate areas of the brain for the problem presented. People who have been given the negative message make many more errors, therefore they underperform. And the parts of their brain that are activated are much more to do with emotional control centres and error monitoring systems. And therefore their brain is not performing as efficiently as it should. So the same task, but the social context. The other aspect of the brain that we now have come to understand is what is the brain for, as well as the way in which it works. We'd almost assumed that the brain, understanding the human brain, was understanding how we acquired cognitive skills like language, science, ability to do science, problem solving. We now know that actually one of the advantages of the evolution is given the human brain is it makes us social. We work much better together as teams, we collaborate much more, we have many more intricate social networks, et cetera. And the parts of the brain that evolutionally youngest parts of the brain at the front are those parts of the brain which are activated by social experiences, by, for example, understanding social norms, how you should behave in social situations, how you could get to belong to what seems to be your in-group. So a sense of self, a sense of other people, understanding other people. And we know that within the brain there is a network which actually informs that particular social behaviour. So we have the, characterise them as a kind of Pixar figures here. So we still have the kind of evolutionally oldest emotional part of the brain which is coding, hopefully coding the outcome, bearing in mind predictions, of particular social events. And what's a good thing for you if you're going to be part of a social norm and what's a bad thing for you as well. And monitoring the interaction between the coding system and the outcome system is what I've characterised as a traffic light system here, the anterior singulate cortex, for those of you who like the anatomical terms. And that's where I've spent a lot of my research time. There is a system in the brain which acts a bit like traffic lights or railway point systems. And one of the things it does a lot is inhibit behaviour if it is coded in some kind of negative way. So it's a system where mistakes are noted and monitored and behaviour is corrected so those mistakes are not repeated. And similarly, that's just with cognitive tasks but also with social tasks as well. So galloping through this, these are the kind of tasks that I've been involved with in trying to understand what it is that makes people behave in a social way and what the impact of negative social experiences are. So when I kind of put this list together and talk to colleagues about the kind of things we do to our participants, it strikes me that actually we're quite unpleasant because we put people in the scanner and we make them experience social rejection even if it's like playing a little video game where they appear to be rejected by the other players. Or we make them think about a mistake they've made and how much they think it was really their fault. Or think about yourself in your hierarchy at work. Are you, you know, whereabouts are you on the kind of ladder of self-esteem? Or we say to people, you know, we can get them to listen in to or to play a tender type task, for example. You can swipe right on somebody in a picture that you think you might quite like to go out with that person and then you're shown an image of that person swiping left on you. So we do our best to make our participants feel bad, which is not pleasant but informative in a particular way, hopefully, as I'll show you. So the key thing about this is that part of the brain which is activated and which is demonstrated here in the coloured areas is the part of the brain I was talking about that the traffic light system. It's also the part of the brain which is activated by real pain. So a real negative driver within the brain. So social behaviour or negative social experiences do have a very powerful effect on human behaviour. And we can demonstrate this by saying if you actually look at those parts of the brain and then you look at people who have particular social difficulties. So we are not just looking at brain activity. We're looking at people who for clinical reasons, for example, have poor self-image. People who have very sensitive to being rejected or always anticipating rejection in some way. People who have very high levels of self-criticism. People who are characterised by some form of self-silencing feeling this is really not something I'm very good at who tend to withdraw from situations, who suffer from, for example, impostor syndrome, et cetera. And therefore you say, well, the brain, we need to pay much more attention to what's going on outside the brain in order to understand the kind of gender gaps we're looking at. We can't assume that these gaps have arisen just by some kind of vacuum packed biological script inevitably unfolding within each individual. We need to be aware that the brain is constantly monitoring what is going on in the outside world. And therefore we come up, or I have come up with this, what I call the world as a brain influencer, the outside in model of the brain where we're still looking at brain processes but we're looking at how those brain processes have been moulded by a gendered world, for example. We could be talking about anything, we could be talking about other experiences of disability or being a member of ethnic minority. And sometimes when I'm giving this talk to schools, et cetera, I said, let's stop here and you could fill in what kind of thing you think might be in the outside world, particularly if you're interested in gender gaps. Do we live in a gendered world? Is the 21st century characterised by all sorts of emphases on whether you're male or whether you're female? And I'll just fill in some quick examples here because I'm going to go on and see if I can enlist your help in a puzzle. So, first of all, the classic, just how gendered do we think the world is, the whole pink and blue tsunami. I haven't got time to go into my characteristic rant about gender reveal parties in 20 weeks before tiny humans arrive on this planet. We're already labelling us whether they're boys or girls, they'll play football or be princesses, et cetera. Similarly, the kind of cards you get when you have either a male or a female baby. Toys, very important. And in fact, it's interesting that just recently, Lego has announced that they have started to realise having really emphasised and focus targeted their marketing onto boys, that these kind of toys are actually very important for all kinds of skills and they are actually sustaining stereotypes, gender stereotypes by marketing only to boys. And this is actually very interesting because I mentioned earlier the idea that a particular kind of spatial thinking underpins science and men are very good at the spatial thinking and that's why there are more scientists or less female scientists. But what we now know is that actually if you look at so-called robust sex differences in the brain, such as visual spatial thinking as monitored here by this kind of task, but if you then take into account the kind of spatial training opportunities that people have had, you then say, let's have a look at the kind of toys that people played with, let's have a look at the occupations they have, the sports they play, is there a spatial element? And there was a big survey done in the States which looked at spatial cognition, came up with the on average males do better than females, but when they factored in the kind of spatial training opportunities that toy play or sports et cetera would bring to these individuals, the sex differences disappeared. So in fact, what looks like a sex differences is actually very much to do with a kind of experience that particular brains have had. And if of course those experiences are gendered and you're more likely to play with Super Mario or Lego if you're a boy, then maybe that's why you're better at spatial training opportunities. I've just got time to say, well, Mattel has acknowledged that and they did think, well, there is another representation of women in science. So we'll solve this by producing Barbie the engineer. So we have here Barbie the engineer with a very short lab coat and even shorter miniscope. It has got DNA patterns on, I don't know if you can see that, but it makes her sciencey. But what's interesting in terms of how many people look at this and think this was a good idea, in order to encourage girls into science, A, you've got Barbie the engineer. B, what can Barbie the engineer build? She can build a pink washing machine or a pink jewellery carousel. So I leave that out there with you to think it's our world gendered. And there's a whole other issue too, if you look at schools that was part of a BBC documentary three or four years ago now, went into a classroom full of six-year-olds, looked at the extent of gender stereotyping quite unconsciously in how the boys and girls were treated, the expectations they had of each other at the age of six, girls saying boys could grow up to be president, maths is a boy thing, girls being the lack of self-esteem in girls at the age of six was really quite distressing. And then they took these stereotypes out of the classroom for just six weeks and made quite a dramatic difference, which is good to hear. I've also mentioned the idea that women are underrepresented in science. And I just quickly show you the rogues gallery, I won't go into it in detail. But very often you get these kind of public proclamations from males, I have to say. For example, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard, different availability of aptitude at the high end explaining why there weren't great women, mathematicians and engineers. James Daymore, the Google engineer, saying Google shouldn't be wasting its time trying to encourage diversity within Google because there was a different distribution of preferences and abilities in part due to biological causes. Physicist stood up in CERN two years ago and said physics was wasting its time trying to encourage women to do physics because physics is a man subject. And therefore we should acknowledge this. So I'll move on from the rest of this. So you should say, okay, in my closing stages I can say the female braid instead. So in answer to the question, are we asking the wrong question, are we asking the, is your brain male or female? Are we asking the wrong question? The answer is yes. And you think, great, we can move on. We can really say this is a time to understand where these gender gaps are coming from. What is a more interesting question to ask? But sadly, and hence the title of this slide, the female brain is dead, but long live the female brain. So despite efforts of people like me writing a book called The Gendered Brain and all sorts of other people and this huge survey saying there is no difference structurally between males and female brains, we're still getting a big pushback by saying you are wrong. We have known for 200 years that men and women have got different brains and therefore you are doing something wrong. So a bit like the metric being dumped if you didn't come up with the right answer. And the kind of accusations are sexism fears, hamper brain research. So I have actually been accused of being a feminazi who is undermining research into conditions like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's by saying there are no sex distances, so stop researching them. Absolutely not. And that's why I raised the issue at the beginning. Why are we asking this question? If we're looking at brain-based differences, we should really drill into why we're not finding the differences. What is a better way of characterising people who are more likely to get Alzheimer's or people who are more likely to get Parkinson's disease? And something which has emerged recently with respect to the pandemic is what you might think that I would say has a feminist, isn't it great? And now people are saying the female brain, the female leadership, women in leadership, the power of the female brain. So we've still got this kind of argument going on that there is such a thing as a female brain being given a positive spin, if you like, saying countries led by females seem to have done better with the pandemic. I think that's an issue which will continue to be debated for some time. But the idea of the female brain is powerfully there. And similarly in terms of an issue that I mentioned earlier is the idea that huge underrepresentation of women in science. Just recently some attention has been drawn has been drawn to the idea that there is a paradox. If we assume that the underrepresentation of women in science is something to do with poor access to education or some kind of lack of expectation in a gendered world, how come in the countries which have the narrowest gender gap, still not equal like Finland, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, proportionally they have the biggest underrepresentation of women in science. So the idea is that there is a paradox here. And the statement made is that sciences level the playing field or gender equality gaps have reduced any differences between men and women's opportunities and expectations. Level the playing field, women are still choosing not to do science. And there is what I call a neo-essentialist argument here saying, okay, we've kind of lost the argument about male and female brains having different competencies. But maybe we should talk about preferences. Women prefer people and men prefer things. So those of you who are scientists in the argument might kind of object a bit to this kind of understanding that women prefer to work with people and that's why they don't do science. The implication being that science has nothing to do with people. And there is also the observation that women tend to be better at reading literary scores. So the competencies in these groups have been matched. Women and girls and boys do just as well on tests of science but girls tend to do better on literacy studies. So the suggestion is that women are turning away from science because they're going to get a greater, and I quote, sense of efficacy and joy by pursuing their literary abilities. And you think that's another interesting way of characterising science. So just moving on to the end stages here. So we have these kind of emerging ideas. The female brain remains. We've got still an argument. We must find some kind of biological argument. We must hang on to the idea that there's male and female differences and find some kind of biological explanation. And this is what I call the whack-a-mole problem in the book when I talk about trying to get rid of research findings that you know are wrong. There is an amazing stickability in the world about science and very early science observations. I'll just see if this works. It should actually, it does, yes, okay. So I don't know if you know the whack-a-mole game where somebody is a game where you think, all right, here comes the mole, I whacked it on the head. So this is me writing saying this research isn't very good, we should forget it. And then the next day you read something in the paper where that research is quoted. This area is full of examples of that and the scientific papers which come up with the idea that male and female brains are different. Those are much more popular and remembered than papers saying, there is something wrong with that particular study. I've, we've mentioned earlier, and I've got just, yes, time, the neuro trash problem. And this is about communication. This is about the translation from scientific journals to popular communication, bearing in mind that one of the things in the outside world is a continued belief in differences between males and females. And if this is said by science, that belief will be sustained and it will also become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I give talks in schools where girls talk about not having a science brain or not being, you know, maths, being a boy thing. So there's a couple of examples here to give you an example of what we're up against. So a paper came out in 2018. Brain regulates social behaviour differences in males and females. Clear statement, helpfully illustrated with a classic pink and blue brain. And it's an opportunity you get, I think it's about the fourth paragraph. And if you can see that, in this study conducted in Hampsteads, the researchers investigated the hypotheses, et cetera. And there is now a website, I think it's called Only in Mice, where somebody does actually report all of these papers which talk about sex differences, but they're only in mice. But that's not a website which lots of people spend a lot of time accessing. And this is something I was involved in quite recently where I was asked by a colleague to review a paper which was looking at estrogen receptor cells in particular part of the brain in female mice. And it was only in female mice and it wasn't a very good paper. And we did point out that, as it was only carried out in female mice, the kind of interpretation of the data was questionable. And this is something I'll come on to very shortly. And that's how scientists themselves describe things. So having rejected this paper and said, I don't really think it's telling the story that you think. I was then sent to Google Alert. And I hope there's not too many people with great sensitivity here. Science explains why some people are into BDSM and some aren't. Do you like the rough stuff even in bedroom, et cetera? So I've said this is supposedly a difference between male and female brains. And very often in those studies, it's quite those headlines, it's quite difficult to track back where that scientific statement came from. So I was very surprised to find that that headline was informed by the paper about estrogen set to cells in female mice. So you can kind of understand what we're up against in trying to fight this. And again, not to go into this in too much detail given the time, the language we've talked about, we talked about differences. Sometimes scientists will report the kind of differences. Here we've got hugely overlapping distributions of data, tiny little average differences. And they will talk about fundamental sex differences in structural architecture of the human brain. Or they will talk about one particular paper that the paper you can see on the right of the screen where actually the brain imaging data, the brain imaging study they carried out allowed them to make 34,716 different comparisons. And 178 of them were significant. And that's all they talked about. Sex differences in functional connectivity are prominent. These data provide novel evidence, et cetera, et cetera. So scientists themselves under pressure to show how their research has impact actually over egg pudding. And the essential difference which I've already talked about, told about the opening state opening lines was that males hardwired for systemising. Later on in the book, the author tells us you don't have to be female to have a female brain. You don't have to be male to have a male brain. At which point you think language really matters in this argument. Why are you using those terms and sustaining that particular evidence? So closing then, can we finally stop talking about male and female brains headline in the New York Times in 2018? Recent research is making it clearer than ever that the notion that sex determines the fundamentals of brain structure and behaviour is a misconception. And yet, and yet, the female brain is dead, long live the female brain. So hopefully some of you will be able to explain to me how we can move this debate on. Thank you very much. We do a stop share. Is that right? Right, thank you. I hope that that has given both the audience here in the room and there are at least 159 people watching from home. Some thoughts of questions. So you have a few minutes in which to think about your questions and we will be starting again within five minutes. So thank you. Right, we are going to start the Q&A session. I'm going to take a couple of questions from the floor here. I'm pleased to remember that I have to try and repeat them for the audience at home. So do we have any questions from the floor? Richard will bring the microphone to you. Just... I can't hear, sorry. I can't hear, sorry. The difference between any women is the difference between any women is more than that thing. And we obviously have a lot of differences. Is that in any way in France in the kind of brain I've paid in the kind of questions that you use? Is that a question that you remember? OK, right, so the question is that, saying that the difference between men and women is more than the brain, are hormonal differences being taken into account? That's a very important question. Absolutely right. One of the interesting things, I mean I didn't, obviously, it's a long talk anyway. The whole other talk about hormones. Mentioned very briefly the idea that whatever it was determined, anatomical differences also determined brain differences. And that of course is the hormone story because the male fetus is exposed to testosterone in utero, is born with male genitalia and the next stage theory was that the brain had been organised differently as well as the other anatomical differences. Most of the work, and in fact to call the 20th century, sometimes the raging hormone century, because very much there was a big in the 1920s understanding of how hormones affect behaviour, big emphasis on differences between males and females, and this is in non-human animals with respect to their respective roles in the reproductive process and how that could be manipulated by removing auto-ing hormone levels in male or female fetuses or male or female animals. So a lot of the understanding about hormones came from the study of non-human animals. And one of the things we know, bit like plasticity of the brain, is that hormones in humans are much more responsive to the social context than hormones in non-human animals. For example, testosterone levels in the fathers of newborn babies are lower in the fathers who are the primary carer of those babies as opposed to fathers who are not the primary carer of those babies. So the same social event, but the context of that event has a more powerful effect on hormone levels. So yes, hormones are very important. The term hormone means drive to action. And yes, females and males have different hormone levels. Females and males talk about male and female hormones, which is actually a bit of a misnomer. And they're called Elia Fine has written a great book called Testosterone Rex, where she has looked at all the evidence with respect to non-human animals and humans and how far we can translate research from non-human animals into humans and how good or bad the research in humans is. So yes, hormones are important. And one of the things that we have to bear in mind is that hormones also determine physical characteristics and that can be things like upper body strength and weights and height, et cetera. And our brains don't float around in a vacuum. They float around in a body. And how the human societies organise is that people respond differently to different bodies. They use their bodies differently. So that aspect of it is very important. Whether or not we can use that kind of information to explain the kind of gender gaps that we're talking about in terms of political representation or underrepresentation of women in science is another issue. And I think it's, again, with respect to looking at brains, we need to say how important or how primary are these hormone differences in the kind of gender gaps we're looking at. Do we have another question from the floor? We do. Are there changes to the world of science in the universe that we're looking at more and more? So do you have a sense of what is going on in the world of science? What is the difference between the men and the girls that are given to them? Is that open for you to be able to see the difference between young men of a different level of knowledge that they are given to them? So the question is following on from that. Are the differences then because of hormone levels such as from adolescence to adulthood and following the menopause in women? Yes, it's the short answer. Although, again, it's very interesting. I mean, I think the menopause is very timely. It's quite a hot topic at the moment, particularly with respect to business organisations and allowance for the physical characteristics of the menopause. Premenstrual tension is a similar sort of area, again in the late 20th century, where it was very often claimed, and I mean, there were claims, wasn't it lucky that, trying to think how many people might remember the Bay of Pigs Cuban crisis, wasn't it lucky there wasn't a menopause or female in charge of the nuclear button at the time given how well a male's dealt with it that will leave that to one side? So it was very often used as a kind of argument to explain why, and very early on, again in the 18th, 19th century, women had these amazing cycles of emotional problems that this meant we shouldn't give them any power or authority. It's very, again, interesting in that there was, if you look at the context of premenstrual tension, for example, it almost can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So it's what we call in the social psychological attribution theory. So if you could have something like a menstrual cycle on which you could pin explanations for behaviour, then very often that's how behaviour was explained. So women weren't angry because they were angry, they were angry because they were premenu ffosal, therefore you could dismiss the reasons of their anger, for example. But also it's the case that you could trick women into believing they were premenu, that they were premenstrual by manipulating physiological feedback they were given. And then they started explaining any kind of behavioural problems they were having or emotional problems in terms of their belief that they were premenstrual. So again there's a kind of idea that our hormones are much more sensitive to what else is going on, it's not just an automatic response. So those are the kind of issues as well. But I think it's again the case that there are physical changes associated with hormones in both males and females. And the interpretation of those physical changes can lead to differences in behaviour, which look as though they're confirming the driving, the unidirectional driving force of hormones as opposed to the fact that the cycling, that the sort of feedback effect they appear to be having. So we can't dismiss them and I wouldn't. But sometimes we need not to just use that particular part of biology as an explanation. We're going to take a few questions from our online audience now, but we will come back to questions from the floor here. So the first question we're going to take is, are there any significant differences in response to negative message experiments? Yes, I mean I think the permeable brain that I talked about is a really nice illustration of that, that if there's a people like you context or a negative expectation, or girls not expecting to do well in maths because maths is a boy thing, there is a theory called stereotype threat, which is a social psychology concept which emerged 1980s, 1990s, which is I think have been over attributed its power, but it is the case particularly if you look at the brain imaging studies because I would believe that brain imaging studies were, if you like, a powerful backup for these explanations, that if there is a negative expectation, then you are much more likely to demonstrate the kind of self-criticism, self-withdrawal, or underperformance which we can track as being driven by the brain, if you like. So yes, I think there's a question that I find quite interesting, somebody can't understand the reason why the female presence in science in countries such as Norway and Iceland is low, even though in other respects there is quite high equality there. Okay, well that is if you like the gender equality paradox that has been receiving quite a lot of attention because the idea is that these countries are somehow ideal and the playing field has been levelled. There is another whole talk in that, in this how level is the playing field in science and actually there's a lot of attention looking at, for example, the reward systems within science, so people who get the biggest grants, people who are the lead authors on papers, the citation indices, et cetera, the papers that are written. All of those rewards within which then get you to progress within science, clear evidence of gender bias and a lot of the big journals like these bring a nature group have actually started carrying out really interesting surveys and demonstrating clear evidence of gender bias. So you could say that this underrepresentation is not because women biologically are saying I don't really want to do science, what their social brains are saying let's have a look at this institution, is this an institution where there's lots of people like me, where people like me will be rewarded, where we win prizes, et cetera, answer no and say your traffic light system might say perhaps this isn't for you, let's have a look somewhere else. So what I'm saying is I don't think science has levelled the playing field and that would be a better explanation and until we do level the playing field we can't actually sort out what the explanation is. Now we have a very nice short question from one of our regular questioners who asks is this not all about nurture? Thank you for the question because I give me an opportunity to say please no it's not all about nurture. One of the reasons that I wrote the book was because it had all been nature about the 1980s, second wave of feminism, biologies are relevant, it's all to do with nurture, it's all to do with social manipulation, social pressures, social drivers, et cetera. What I'm trying to say is that it's neither. Now we know how powerfully the brain is affected by it outside and so I call it the outside in model by outside pressures. We know that the brain and society hugely entangled so expert and bearing in mind the babies arrive in the world it's much more tuned to what's going on around them than we ever realised. So things that look as though they must be elate because they start early, we can see they are hugely effective social sponges soaking up the methods that they message in the outside world and organising themselves appropriately. So no it's not all about nurture but it's saying we must pay attention to culture society if you want to call that nurture but I'm not saying it's nothing to do with biology, I'm not to say a sex difference denying same kind of terms like China difference denier with same consequences for civilisation I assume. So no it's not all about nurture. Now I have a slightly longer question from someone who trained as a psychiatrist in the early 1980s when it was already established that the forms of men and women, for example on IQ threshold, amenable differences, do you think that the continuing insistence that differences exist is largely propaganda by groups in society seeking the justification for retaining power? There is a great phrase that if you've lived a life of, let me get this right, I'll have to think about it, I'll come back to it. If you've lived a life of superiority then equality can feel like oppression. So I think there's an idea that if there is power out there and evidence suggests that you should be relinquishing some of that power that could be part of the pushback. And I think given the power of some of the pushback and the very unpleasant messages that sometimes just on social media to me but sometimes in bigger arenas, a big pushback saying a clever pushback if you like saying we must find out why more women have Alzheimer's. Therefore we need to study sex differences in the brain. It gives the credibility to saying stop telling people not to research into sex differences. What we're saying is you should be researching into sex differences that understand that let that not be the only question you ask. And therefore you need to pay attention to the fact that people have different levels of education, different occupations, different socioeconomic status, different access to health care. And those are the additional questions we should be asking otherwise we're going to come up with the wrong answers. And just briefly on that bearing in mind the time. Autism which is my kind of day job if you like is a great example of how a particular filter can lead to divert and search down the wrong track. Always assumed that autism was primarily a male condition early brain imaging studies only done on males. And yet it's emerging that it's really because there is this belief that it's mainly males. The diagnostic dice are loaded in favour of finding males. Whereas it's clear that there are females girls and women who have gone for years decades sometimes unrecognised as being on the spectrum because everybody assumed you can't be autistic because you're female. So that's quite a good example of how a particular filter can divert or distract from understanding of the problem as a whole. The next question is from someone who's wondering give the variation within males or females has been shown across all areas of brain function to give the large overlap your chart shows? And if the small areas of non overlap just a minute just let me read this properly sorry about this. Once you have the variation within males off females has been has been shown across all areas of brain function to give the large overlap your chart shows. And if the small areas of non overlap distinct to specific areas. I think I think I can get the handle on that yet. I mean I think certainly in human brains there's studies done by Daphna Joel, Tel Aviv three years ago and publishing since demonstrating what my belief is is that actually every brain is different from every other brain because people say well if you think male and female brains aren't different you're saying male brains are the same female brains. I'm saying no everybody's different everybody in this room their brain will be different from the person they're sitting next to even if that person is their identical twin but yes because everybody's brain will have had different experiences identical twins may have had more similar experiences as they get older they may vary so I think that's important certainly in humans there are you know the evidence is that our brain's much more like a mosaic of different characteristics and I think so I think that that is where we're moving but it ought to be should we get away from thinking in terms of developing are we losing much more interesting data by first of all saying well let's put our participants into a male category or a female category so we need to be much more nuanced about it. I hope that answers the question. We have a question which is perhaps a little unfair on Gina in that it's about a bill currently in the Scottish Parliament and of course Gina living in the English midlands. So the question is the proposed gender recognition act currently in the Scottish Parliament is causing a lot of agitation about the concept of self-identification with some women's groups expressing concerns relating to what they see as potentially dangerous intrusions of persons who were assigned male sex of birth into female spaces. What do you propose as a way of resolving such concerns? Oh gosh so just a music question there. Yeah okay is it tomorrow then you've got to get home. Yes as you can imagine this whole issue is something to which my work is relevant but my argument taking my perspective one of the things I'm trying to undo is if you remember the very early chain of arguments was how sex gets to be gender the assumption that there was an inevitable link between the anatomical differences at birth which got mainly individuals allocated to female or female an inevitable link to the kind of brain you had inevitable link to skills you had inevitable link to where you could be in society that being identified in the 1980s is if you like gender and that could include gender roles it could include sexual orientation the whole link of behaviour and interestingly the term gender where we used to only use sex to talk about that particular chain of arguments the term gender is now used in that way as well so we talk about gender reveal parties which of course aren't gender reveal parties they're sex reveal parties which may get people to think about something else but anyway let's move on I think it's it's difficult because for me I would say the transgender community are really demonstrating that we should break that link between sex and gender but within that conundrum is the idea that quite a lot of the transgender community wish to link themselves to a particular biology so instead of saying biology is irrelevant to who you feel you are etc and then people say to me to what do you think about it and I say well I've been a neuroscientist all my career so clearly I think biology is important what we need to talk about is how important it is the consequences it has for people's gender identity and in a way that's all what conflated with the idea of same spaces and it's driven people into quite defensive silence if you like and the idea is as some of you may know about the Professor of Philosophy in the University of Sussex in the last few weeks has had to resign or has decided to resign her post because of the kind of toxic nature of the argument so it's really unfortunate it's an argument which has got very strong really interesting scientific threads running through it but has got conflated with an assumption that if you say I think biology is relevant therefore you're transphobic has driven people you would be very supportive of some of the arguments you know away from that argument or have been accused of different interpretations of the data safe spaces I think is something which is very much a political argument and really needs to be properly debated but it's going to be difficult to debate it unless the people concerned come together and say let's have a look at where we agree let's have a look at where the difficulties emerge so that's a very long one to say I've put that suitly note to the conventrum I'm afraid but I obviously am aware of it and we have one or two more questions online but I'm going to take some from the floor we didn't quite is there any physical way of looking at a brain dissecting a brain to tell whether it's male or female no it's a short answer and I think any human brain we're talking about and certainly anatomical studies would confirm that so you can't pick up a brain the only thing you might get a clue about is on average male brains are about 10% bigger than female brains that is a sex difference but that's because on average males are about 10% bigger than females and so you know small females have small brains big females have big brains and ditto so no anatomically with respect to the data I was talking about brain imaging if you look at MRI structures fmri which is some of the functional differences um the they dumped the dimorphism paper that I talked about was looking at MRI I would say that the kind of techniques that I use which is MEG magneto encyclography may lead us a bit further towards understanding some of the differences because there clearly are differences I'm not saying there can't be any differences what we don't know is how those differences contribute to the gender gaps we're interested in so I think once we have much more refined brain imaging techniques which we now have but once we combine them with for example gene expression techniques um metabolic profiles uh hormonal profiles immunological profiles as well I think once we get a much more complicated but nuanced measure of brains then we might be able to say with that kind of profile I would think that that brain is male or I would think that female that brain is female they are trying that with some machine learning techniques at the moment so not allowing you know allowing on human brain to look at itself as it were um but they once you've corrected for size machine learning techniques possibly accurately identify brains as either from males or from females about 60% of the time which given that you can actually ask without going into all of that isn't isn't a great record so no that's the key thing I that was absolutely key it was always assumed that male and female brains were different long before people I mean probably because people couldn't see what they looked like so pink and blue brains again do we have yes the later day one more question from the pork and so much to your talk um and very much to see that the brain is un-generated um and so it's the obvious that I said that the occupational freedom position to think that it's mainly culture that creates these generally values um having gone to that point and also someone with a mother um and I thought it was extremely interesting how that had gone for white babies and that was a very feminist I could not dress my white babies in pink I could dress my girl baby in blue but I couldn't dress my white baby in pink is an emotional barrier there I mean it wasn't just because I don't have a feeling that it's dead yet and it was to do with the power of society yeah finally but this was the long thing what you thought I was into um and our secondary people who were feeling what I was bringing I lived in some kind of religion or a theme all all some of you know this is about a lot of forms of humans um I think I have a question my question is this how are we going to change whether we produce this sort of free flexibility and whether we are aware of this so that we found that we use funds of values to generate quality okay so that question was from someone who is quite convinced that there is an old difference between males and female brains but had concern when she had children that she could dress her sons in blue she could dress her girls in blue but she could not dress her boys in pink yes I mean that's very interesting and there is an asymmetry in gender stereotypes I think as I mentioned briefly Lego has very recently declared that they're going to stop gendered targeting gender toy marketing in particular because they did a big survey and they found that the stereotypes were harmful in terms of girls lacking spatial experience because they weren't encouraged to play Lego but they also found that there was an imbalance in terms of whether or not girls could be encouraged or people wouldn't mind if girls played with boys toys and that was generally found whereas parents got much more concerned if boys wanted to play with girls toys so much more discouragement of boys playing with dolls than discouragement of girls playing with Lego so complicated story but there is a clear asymmetry and I think that's that's important and clearly we need to address that particularly because I mean one of the things the questions we're asking about mental illness you could say there's clear evidence that whatever stereotypes are doing for males or females they're not serving them all well because we could say if everybody's you know living their life of efficacy and joy and girls are really happy being stepped towards type wives and boys are really happy you know leading the world but there's huge evidence of gender differences in depression and suicide rates in young males etc so clearly something that needs to be addressed so the discouragement of boys from playing with dolls for example is certainly something that needs to be addressed and I think one of the key issues is and organisations like let toys be toys is not saying you know we must let boys play with girls toys and girls play with boys toys what they're trying to say just get away from the ideas that there are toys for boys and toys for girls these are all toys that everybody should be encouraged to play with because they all have a different role in training in you know playing with dogs and and social interactions around the dolls house for example can encourage social activity or socialisation skills Lego and Super Mario video games can encourage construction and visual spatial things so in a way people are talking about gender neutral because I think it's well as Lego I think California has come up with a really poor compromise big big department stores I think more than 500 staff or something they can still have a blue aisle for boys toys and a pink aisle for girls toys but they've also got to have a gender neutral mile and you just think what a stupid stupid conclusion let everything be gender neutral just stop labelling things for boys and girls because children pick it up really early I mean there's a really interesting study so I'm going on a bit but where parents in one room were asked to rate how you know woke they were with respect to didn't mind what their boys and girls did what they played with groups of fathers saying didn't mind if the more than 60% of the fathers saying they didn't mind if their boys wanted to have ballet lessons or wear dresses next door their little four-year-old boys were being asked do you think your father would mind if you wanted to play with the doll less than 6% of the boys agreed that their fathers who were claiming themselves to be really woke would mind if they played with dolls so children will pick this up whatever the message is children pick this up really carefully so we have to be really clear about the message and people talk about gender neutrality and I think the only way forward is gender irrelevance but the trouble is with that's a real kind of white don't think of the white bear problem you know what we must do is make gender completely irrelevant by talking a lot about gender right well we've had a marvellous talk and some marvellous questions I can only apologise to the people who are putting questions that we do not have time for anymore but I hope that that talk from Professor Rippon has got your brain whether it's male female or neutral into action mode and your busy thinking about what she has said so thank you very much for that talk could I just say that I think my email address was at the beginning of the slide so if there's people who's desperately want their questions answered please feel free to email me and I'll do my best to get back to you