The Male Condition

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08baron-cohen.html?ex=1124164800&en=a0093114b49eb0e3&ei=5070&emc=eta1

By SIMON BARON-COHEN
Published: August 8, 2005
Cambridge, England

TWO big scientific debates have attracted a lot of attention over the past year. One concerns the causes of autism, while the
other addresses differences in scientific aptitude between the sexes. At the risk of adding fuel to both fires, I submit that
these two lines of inquiry have a great deal in common. By studying the differences between male and female brains, we can
generate significant insights into the mystery of autism.

So was Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, right when he remarked that women were innately less suited than men to be
top-level scientists? Judging from current research, he was and he wasn't. It's true that scientists have documented psychological
and physiological differences between male and female brains. But Mr. Summers was wrong to imply that these differences render any
individual woman less capable than any individual man of becoming a top-level scientist.

In fact, the differences that show up in brain research reflect averages, meaning that they emerge only when you study groups of
males and females and compare the two groups' averages on particular psychological tests or physiological measures. The evidence
to date tells us nothing about individuals - which means that if you are a woman, there is no evidence to suggest that you could
not become a Nobel laureate in your chosen area of scientific inquiry. A good scientist is a good scientist regardless of sex.

Nonetheless, with brain scanning, we can discern physiological differences between the average male and the average female brain.
For example, the average man's cerebrum (the area in the front of the brain concerned with higher thinking) is 9 percent larger
than the average woman's. Similar, though less distinct, overgrowth is found in all the lobes of the male brain. On average, men
also have a larger amygdala (an almond shaped structure in the center of the brain involved in processing fear and emotion), and
more nerve cells. Quite how these differences in size affect function, if at all, is not yet known.

In women, meanwhile, the connective tissue that allows communication between the two hemispheres of the brain tends to be thicker,
perhaps facilitating interchange. This may explain why one study from Yale found that when performing language tasks, women are
likely to activate both hemispheres, whereas males (on average) activate only the left hemisphere.

Psychological tests also reveal patterns of sex difference. On average, males finish faster and score higher than females on a
test that requires the taker to visualize an object's appearance after it is rotated in three dimensions. The same is true for
map-reading tests, and for embedded-figures tests, which ask subjects to find a component shape hidden within a larger design.
Males are over-represented in the top percentiles on college-level math tests and tend to score higher on mechanics tests than
females do. Females, on the other hand, average higher scores than males on tests of emotion recognition, social sensitivity and
language ability.

Many of these sex differences are seen in adults, which might lead to the conclusion that all they reflect are differences in
socialization and experience. But some differences are also seen extremely early in development, which may suggest that biology
also plays a role. For example, girls tend to talk earlier than boys, and in the second year of life their vocabularies grow at a
faster rate. One-year-old girls also make more eye contact than boys of their age.

In my work I have summarized these differences by saying that males on average have a stronger drive to systemize, and females to
empathize. Systemizing involves identifying the laws that govern how a system works. Once you know the laws, you can control the
system or predict its behavior. Empathizing, on the other hand, involves recognizing what another person may be feeling or
thinking, and responding to those feelings with an appropriate emotion of one's own.


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Men are everywhere that matters!

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