Men!
And women.
For centuries, people have argued ferociously about
whether or not we are born with different brains.
We have different roles in life
and I think that's why our brains are wired differently.
Men are definitely better at navigation and map reading.
- Women panic a little bit more. - From experience? No.
Now it seems we're getting close to an answer.
I thought there must be a mistake.
I'm not used to results of studies coming out as clean as this one.
With new technology, scientists have recently identified
subtle differences in the brains of men and women.
It's more there.
Differences that could help explain perceived strengths and weaknesses.
I was surprised that they were so significantly different.
Come on, Barbaries!
But the research is controversial and raises difficult questions.
Funny, but he's completely uninterested in the dolls.
Are brain differences innate?
Or are they shaped by the world around us?
If somebody says the word "scientist" to you, what comes into your head?
- Man. - A man.
Usually a man.
Yeah, I get the image as well of a man.
We're searching for the truth behind the myths.
DIY doesn't tend to be one of their strong points.
Men just act like they know everything
and they don't necessarily.
We'll be testing the science...
Oh, no! Oh, God!
..and challenging old stereotypes.
No way! It's crazy, no way.
We can go beyond the usual arguments about who's better at parking
or who is better at reading emotions
and have a look at some of the real science.
We're going to look at research which has thrown up
surprising sex differences, which may have important
implications for science and our health.
We live in an age of increased gender equality.
But it often seems the division between the sexes has never been greater.
As soon as we're born,
boys and girls are encouraged to play in different ways.
And all too often the justification is biology.
Well, of course, we've all heard that men are from Mars
and women are from Venus, but it seems that recently
we've been inundated with popular science books and newspaper articles,
all purporting to present us with the latest scientific evidence showing
that there really are differences in male and female brains.
Men are meant to be better at maths,
women are meant to be better at reading
and just about anything emotional, but for me, the really crucial claim
is that these differences are hard wired in our brains.
You might think it's all a bit of fun
but in a country where fewer than three out of ten physics A-levels
are taken by girls, where just 7% of engineers are women,
and where men still earn on average nearly 20%
more than their female colleagues,
these scientific claims are powerful and potentially damaging.
I don't think girls are the only losers in this debate.
Boys face pressures too.
In the modern world, so-called soft skills like communication
and emotional intelligence, understanding what other people
are thinking and feeling, are increasingly valued.
So are boys missing out because they simply haven't had
that side of themselves encouraged,
or is something more fundamental going on?
It's the age-old question -
are the differences between the sexes the results of nature?
Or is it nurture?
I'll be looking at these possible differences
in the brains of men and women and exploring to what extent
they might be affected by environmental influences.
And I'll be investigating the role that genes and hormones play
in shaping our brains and our behaviour.
But are men and women really all that different?
Are men better at some things and women better at others?
We're going to run some tests to find out.
We've brought together six men and six women of different ages
and backgrounds, different interests and professions.
I think definitely men's brains are wired differently,
typically from women's brains.
Driving, I think men are a lot better at.
Quite a lot of things, I think men are better at than women, actually.
I think men don't seem to be particularly organised.
I think women are good at, like, housing skills,
like, obviously, washing up,
but much more than that,
like making sure the house is clean and stuff.
First up, we're going to test a set of skills
which many men believe they're naturally gifted at.
Now, what the tests they're doing are measuring
are visual spatial ability,
the skill you need, for example, to navigate your way
round an unknown city, also useful if you want to be an engineer.
I think I'm pretty good at spatial awareness.
I'm quite good at reading a map, quite a good sense of direction.
Spatial awareness, I like to think I'm quite good.
All men think they can map read and don't want to ask directions
but I do think I'm very good.
They just act like they know everything
and they don't necessarily.
Yeah, well, I'd go straight and find a map of the city,
tourist information, and then you can find your way around.
It's pretty simple.
In this test,
our volunteers must rotate a geometric shape in their heads.
We've presented them with a master shape.
When this shape is rotated,
which two of the other four shapes does it match?
The matching shapes were B and C.
I thought I had it nailed,
the first couple, but then I started to doubt myself
so I found myself getting slower and slower.
You try to turn them in your head and it's quite difficult
and I was sort of like, "Ah!"
Next, the line angle test.
Our volunteers are presented with fan-shaped diagrams
made up of lines placed at different angles.
At the top of the page is a single line which they must then
pick out from the main diagram.
The answer was E.
That angle one, it was quite difficult
because there wasn't that much different in the angle.
Not as obvious as you might expect, you know.
Well, foolishly I was thinking, "Oh, it's different lengths,"
so I'll guess which one is the length,
so I got it completely wrong in my head.
Although there were exceptions,
on average, the men did slightly better than the women.
Similar tests were recently completed online
by over 200,000 people.
Across 53 countries, men significantly outperformed women.
But while men seemed to have the edge when it comes
to some spatial skills,
there are other fields where women are said to have an advantage.
Women are better at reading people's emotions.
Guys can be a bit less sensitive
to people's needs or discomforts emotionally.
You know, they just see the outside
and they don't really understand sometimes.
Of course, women are stereotypically meant to be better at emotions
and empathy, but I think we really need
to put that stereotype to the test.
We're asking our volunteers to complete
the Geneva Emotion Recognition Test.
They're presented with a series of video clips of actors expressing
a range of different emotions...
..which they must then identify.
The actors are speaking in a made-up language
so our volunteers must rely on other means to gauge the correct emotion.
The men and women who did our test seemed to have
quite different experiences.
I really enjoyed it, really enjoyed that test.
The tone in their voice and the way they're moving,
the whole body language, you have to take all that on board.
That test for me was much easier than the spatial test.
I found this one easier.
I think I did OK but some parts made me feel quite sad
when people were displaying the more sad or angry emotions.
Couldn't understand what the people were saying, so to actually
pick up people's emotions was a little bit more tricky.
Well, I obviously didn't do very well.
I think that may indicate perhaps that I pay more attention
to the actual words and what people say, than other things
like tone of voice, facial expression, gestures, etc.
When the University of Geneva gave their emotion recognition test
to nearly 300 men and women,
the women scored slightly higher than the men,
a result that's been closely replicated
in similar tests around the world.
Now, I think these behavioural differences
are something we're born with.
I don't think it's that simple.
I think most differences are learned rather than hard-wired.
Right, OK.
Where do we go from here?
So, Alice, do you accept the idea that, on average,
men tend to do better at mental rotation tests
and that women tend to perform better with emotional tests?
Yeah, I think we have to accept that fact.
What I would question is whether those differences
are there right from the beginning.
You know, are they somehow innate? Is it a learned aptitude?
But I find it almost impossible to believe that the hormones
you're exposed to in the womb don't also somehow influence
how your brain architecture forms,
and so that's what I want to find out.
Yeah, we'll discuss it further.
Yeah, maybe a bit of arm wrestling.
There do seem to be some behavioural differences between men and women
but we can't agree on what causes them.
If Michael's right and these differences are hard-wired,
then could there be some physical evidence inside our brains
to support this?
I'm an anatomist, and from what I know about the brain,
it's surprisingly hard to link behavioural differences to anatomy.
Right, this is a female brain and a male brain,
and there's an enormous amount of debate about the differences
between male and female brains,
but there's one thing that everybody agrees on,
and that is that men's brains tend to be larger than women's brains.
But we have to remember that there is an enormous amount of variation
within each sex as well, so in fact, there are some men
with very small brains, and there are some women with very large brains,
and here's an example.
So this is also a male brain,
and in fact it's, as you can see, it's a lot smaller than this brain.
It's also a lot smaller than the female brain
that we've got on the table.
Although male brains are on average around 10% larger than female ones,
scientists have found no difference in levels of intelligence.
In IQ tests, men and women score more or less the same.
As well as differences in the sizes of men and women's brains,
it's been suggested that there are structures inside the brains
that exhibit sex differences as well.
One of them is the larger hypothalamus in a male
compared with a female, so this is the connection
between the brain and the system of hormones
that communicate with the testes in a man, the ovaries in a woman.
So I would expect there to be differences here that relate
to differences in reproductive physiology,
and nobody can deny that those differences exist,
but we don't yet know actually what the differences
in the hypothalamus relate to.
They're not necessarily to do with differences
in the way that men and women think and behave.
This is another area which has been picked up on as being different
in the brains of men and women, and this is called the hippocampus,
and this is involved in memory, and part of this area here
has been shown to be larger in women compared with men.
Unfortunately, when the researchers looked at the differences
in size of the hippocampus that they'd found amongst their subjects,
male and female, and then looked at the performances of those people
in memory tests, they found no link at all.
So I think it's clear that even if we can pick up on differences
in the detailed structure of the brains of men and women,
that doesn't necessarily translate
into obvious differences in behaviour.
The relationship between structure and function in the brain
is incredibly complex,
and we're a long way from understanding the fine detail.
But more important is searching for the reasons for sex differences
and I think it's obvious.
From the earliest age,
there's a clear divide in what's expected of boys and girls.
Children must make stark choices.
Between a world of pink...
..and a world of blue.
Should they play with the digger?
Or with the doll?
Should they be a pirate?
Or a princess?
Well, I've got a one-year-old boy and a four-year-old little girl,
and I think until I became a mum,
I didn't realise just how rigid this gender division was.
It didn't seem to have been as pronounced
when I was growing up, and it does make me worry
because I don't want either of them to be limited in their choices
just because they don't conform
to either the blue or the pink stereotypes.
I'm not sure that cultural forces are as powerful as Alice thinks.
Maybe the stereotypes have their roots in nature.
I have three sons and a daughter.
Now, my sons do have their sensitive side,
and my daughter really likes maths,
but when they were growing up, the toys they chose to play with,
well, they absolutely conformed to the stereotype.
Across the world, on average, little boys and little girls
are remarkably similar in what they choose to play with.
This is Jasper.
He loves his trucks, sirens, fire engines, ambulances, diggers.
Any wheels of any sort.
This is Hadrian, he's fascinated by cars.
Like, when we go along the street, he's always pointing at them.
This is Eric.
He likes to play with, obviously, cars and anything with wheels.
The bigger, the better.
Anything noisy like double deckers, he loves them.
By 18 months, most boys show a consistent preference
for cars and trucks.
For girls, it's a different story.
Joanna, she loves her dolls and teddies, especially.
She's got a little elephant teddy that she puts her dummy on.
This is Payton and she sort of naturally gravitates towards, like,
she likes her dolls and she likes Teddy.
Joanna's little boy friends, you know,
they are definitely more into the diggers and bashing things.
So are parents responsible for these toy choices?
I never showed him how to use a stick as a sword.
He did it instinctively.
I never said she has to play with dolls.
Automatically, she goes for those toys.
I think it's something that's instinctive.
But are they right?
In 2002, psychologists dreamt up a very clever experiment
to discover answers.
If you want to find out if toy preferences
are in any sense innate, well, you have a big problem,
because children from the earliest age are exposed to all sorts
of pressures, but the scientists did find one group where they could
guarantee they had not been exposed to any gender stereotypes.
Monkeys!
We've come to Woburn Safari Park in Bedfordshire
to try out our own experiment.
The monkeys here are Barbary macaques.
OK, lots of lovely toys.
So we've got a mixture of dolls and trucks in here.
Tom Robson is one of their keepers.
I have a couple of dolls for you.
Marvellous, thank you very much.
In the original experiment,
the psychologists presented the monkeys
with typical boy-type toys, trucks and cars,
and girl-type toys, mostly dolls.
Very hard to believe that monkeys have a sort of,
a toy preference, but we shall see.
The psychologists then observed which toys the monkeys
preferred to play with and for what length of time.
Barbary! Come on!
Barbaries!
Come on, Barbaries!
- Shall I join in? - Yeah.
Come on, Barbaries!
Oh, somebody can hear.
We've got someone coming over.
Male, female?
This is one of the males coming over.
Oh, so we've got a male picking up a truck.
That is quite interesting.
You can see, he's gone for the trucks.
But, yeah, we'll see if he comes...
He's started moving the wheels a bit, which is surprising.
A few more coming over now.
Who's picking up the car over there?
That's another male. Yes, they're spinning the wheels.
Any girls in on the action yet?
Yeah, this is a girl there, so Zoe, going for the doll.
She's quite interested, isn't she?
And then this is also a female here, she's called Blondie.
The way they'll investigate is they'll kind of hold it up,
sniff it, chew on it.
That's a little boy, just there.
Kind of running off with the truck.
Yeah, he's going like, "This is mine now."
Yeah, looks like he might go to the top of the tree.
So is he going to defend his truck?
Yeah, looks like those little males going up.
They all want your truck.
And so far the boys have really only displayed interest in the trucks.
Yeah, they've kind of just picked up the trucks.
- He's climbed on the truck. - Yeah, he's sat on the truck.
He obviously thinks that's kind of a bit like a car, isn't it?
In the original experiment, the male monkeys played with
the male-type toys for twice as long
as they did with the female-type toys.
So that's a little boy that's having a look at that doll there.
- He's not sure, is he? - No.
Our results were even more clear-cut.
The males barely touched the dolls
while the females showed hardly any interest in the trucks.
Trucks don't seem to turn these girls on very much.
No, they're not really interested, are they?
The monkey toy preference experiment was controversial
but it has been repeated twice elsewhere with similar results.
That was really charming but also quite surprising
because those monkeys have not been socialised at all.
They have not been exposed to adverts, they haven't been told
what sort of toys they should play with, and yet the male monkeys
went out there and the only toys they were interested in
were the trucks.
The girls were the only ones who displayed any interest at all
in the dolls, so I think that was certainly very convincing.
The results were also surprising for one of the leaders
of the original experiment.
The results changed the way
I thought about these toys
and, I think, to some extent the way
other people are thinking about these toys.
Previously people had thought that we encouraged children
to play with different toys based on their gender
to prepare them for different gender roles in adulthood.
So, for instance, men usually drive the family car, so people thought,
well, boys are given cars as a kind of rehearsal for that.
Women do most of the child care.
Girls are given dolls as a rehearsal for that.
And this did seem a plausible explanation
for the female monkeys' toy choices.
Of course, in most primates, females do most of the child care
so these animals will have observed females interacting with babies
more than males interacting with babies, and so that could be
part of the explanation why they spend more time with the dolls.
But the male monkeys' toy choices were baffling.
What is it about a car that a male monkey is interested in?
And we thought it might be the shape.
We thought it might be the colour, but we tested those possibilities
and we don't think that either of those are the explanation.
We think it's probably something about how it can be moved in space,
and we're looking at the possibility that a male brain is more likely
to enjoy watching things move in space.
So what is going on?
What is it that makes males - monkeys, boys or men -
behave in this way?
I've come to Cambridge University to meet Professor Simon Baron-Cohen.
For over 25 years, he's been studying autism, which affects
nearly five times as many boys as girls.
He believes autism represents the extreme male brain
and that hormones help shape brain sex differences.
What's the idea here?
We've got a test which, I guess,
really measures one aspect
of spatial ability.
It's about the number of seconds it takes you to find the target shape
in the overall design.
That's actually surprisingly difficult, looking at it.
It is.
Now, I'm looking at a square there and it's not there.
I think it's there.
That's very good. We can show you, actually.
- OK, yeah. - Which is exactly where you pinpointed it
and you were pretty quick, and research shows that on average
males are faster than females at finding the target shape.
We've also given this test to people with autism
and people with autism are even faster than typical males.
So they seem to be drawn to detail and they love patterns,
and they love to break things down into components,
and this test was one of the starting points for the idea
that there are sex differences, and that people with autism
may simply show an extreme of the typical male profile.
Simon has been gathering compelling evidence
that these behavioural differences could be shaped by what happens
to babies as they develop in the womb.
Well, we've been looking at hormones and particularly testosterone,
the so-called male hormone, although both sexes of course produce it.
But males produce more of this hormone than females
and we're measuring the hormone in the amniotic fluid in women
who are pregnant, and then we wait for the baby to be born
and look at whether there's any relationship between
pre-natal testosterone and the child's behaviour.
And we've been calling in the children pretty much every year
since the late '90s, and it's been a fascinating journey, really.
Simon has discovered the levels of testosterone babies are exposed to
in the womb may affect how they behave many years later.
We found that testosterone shows a positive correlation
- with systemising. - So what is systemising?
So systemising is all about the drive to analyse a system.
And systems come in many varieties.
You know, we've got a computer here as an example of that.
It could be a truck. So you're kind of taking it apart
and putting it together and playing around,
because that's the sort of thing you associate with men, isn't it?
Exactly.
So train spotting, is that systemising?
Well, that's a sort of another kind of system.
You can find that males as a group score higher on the systemising.
Simon's study has also been looking into the impact
of testosterone on social development.
The higher the child's pre-natal testosterone,
the slower they are to develop socially.
For example, they're showing less eye contact at their first birthday,
and it now turns out that if you have higher testosterone,
your brain is said to be masculinised.
That's to say it resembles more a typical male brain.
We've also found that when we've called in the children
to give them tests like this,
that the children with higher levels of pre-natal testosterone
are faster to find the target shape hidden within the overall design.
I thought that was absolutely fascinating.
Simon's research clearly suggests that from the earliest age,
hormones help to shape our behaviour.
But what's going on up here?
Is there any real evidence that men and women are wired differently?
It's certainly a commonly held belief.
I just think men and women were created to be different.
We have different roles in life
and I think that's why our brains are wired differently.
Men are very focused and, you know, they, they are very decisive.
Men are definitely better decision-makers.
I think women can sometimes flip between different options more.
Using my wife as an example, it's a bit more sort of talking,
planning, talking about it, planning, planning some more.
Men are good at one thing at a time.
I think girls are better at multi-tasking.
Whereas women have to do the one thing
and do everything else around it.
She is better at multi-tasking than I am. That is true.
I'm not saying that men can't multi-task
but I think it's something that women are naturally able to do.
I consider myself good at multi-tasking
because I am a drummer and lead singer,
so I'm good at doing different things at the same time, so...
The stereotypes are certainly strong and it often seems
like our brains must be wired differently from birth,
but what's the real evidence?
Well, a team of scientists in Philadelphia has matched
the microscopic connections within male and female brains
and what they've found is astonishing.
I am fascinated by gender differences
because I see gender differences in my day-to-day life, you know.
My guy friends are completely different from my girl friends.
So the idea was to try and find out
whether there is a difference
overall between men and women
in how each part of the brain talks to another part of the brain.
Right, I want to do pretty much the same scan again.
Dr Verma and her colleagues scanned the brains
of over 900 males and females from the ages of eight to 22.
It's more granular on this side than on that side.
They used an established brain imaging technique to create
a detailed map of the connections
between the two hemispheres of the brain,
hemispheres which they believe have quite different functions.
The left hemisphere is the part of the brain that talks,
understands language and processes the world in an analytic
sequential manner, whereas the right hemisphere is more intuitive,
deals with spatial information, deals with emotional information.
The team's research showed different patterns of connection
between the brain hemispheres of men and women.
The study indicates that those connections
between the two hemispheres are much stronger
and more prevalent in women than in men,
and from here we can conclude that the ability to use both the
verbal analytic and the emotional information is enhanced in women.
So could more connections between the hemispheres explain some
types of typical female behaviour?
The fact that you can connect from different regions of the brain, you
ought to be good at multi-tasking
and if you have multiple regions connected together,
you should be better at an emotional task.
And do they fit certain stereotypes? Perhaps, yes.
The neural pathways in male brains follow a strikingly different pattern.
What we see in males is stronger connections
between the back and the front of the brain.
The back of the brain processes the information
and sends it forward to the brain
and the front of the brain decides what, puts it all together
and decides what to do about it.
So it indicates males have stronger ability to
connect between what they see and what they do
which is essentially what you need to do if you are a hunter.
You see something, you need to respond right away.
The team detected differences in neurological pathways
in male and female brains on a remarkable scale.
I was surprised that they were so significantly different.
When I first saw the figure that came out, I thought
there must be a mistake.
I'm not used to results of studies coming out as clean as this one.
That was quite startling.
But that's not the end of the story.
Although the scientists identified stark differences
in men and women's neural pathways,
they didn't find those differences in children.
The differences only seem to develop in the teenage years which
means they could be the result of social pressure rather than innate.
Most of these differences happened between the age range of 13 to 18
and you could see them very prominently at that time
so there is a whole nature versus nurture issue.
It's very difficult to figure out why the structural
connections happen.
Whether it's due to hormones or stereotyping, you would never know.
You would have to take 600 boys and make them grow up as girls
and girls grow up as boys and then say, "Aha, this is the reason".
So I don't know how to answer that question.
The research in Philadelphia has been heavily criticised
but it does prompt us to ask
when and why do differences between men and women arise.
For me, this is the really critical question.
If we are finding behaviour differences between men and women
that may or may not be reflected in the structure of their brains,
how much are those behavioural differences coming from
basic biology, how much are they a product of the society we live in?
Hello, this is Abi.
Hi, Abi, how are you doing?
'We're staging an experiment.
'We're introducing Ali to baby Abi.
'We want to find out if there's more than just instinct at play
'when it comes to children's toy choices.
'Abi's mum is joining me to see how they get on but there's a twist.
'What Ali doesn't know is that baby Abi is really a little boy.'
So this is really interesting because Ali has just chosen
this little pink girl doll as the first toy to give to Abi.
She's wearing the same colour as you.
It's really cute. Look, he's going to pick the other one up now as well
so he's off to the rag doll.
But he hasn't reached for the ball or the van.
No, he hasn't, has he?
And that little truck that is just there within reach.
It hasn't been touched, has it?
No, I mean, you know he's definitely gone for the dolls first.
"Oh, you're a little girl, you'll probably want to play with dolls."
Hi. Here we go, this is Freddie.
'Next, baby Freddie is being introduced to Hayley.'
Do you want to play with the car?
'What Hayley doesn't know
'is that Freddie is actually a little girl named Freya.'
The fire truck?
- Hello! - What's she doing?
It's been quite interesting so far, actually.
There was a car and so she picked that up
and started playing with it first and then the next toy was
a purple truck and the next one was a cement mixer.
Definitely for the boys, the boys classically.
She really wants her to play with the ball.
She pushed it away!
- That's really weird. - "I'm not playing with that.
"What are you talking about?"
It seems most children have much less choice than you might
think in the kinds of toys they get to play with
and their gender identities are being powerfully shaped
from the earliest age.
What toys was the baby interested in?
I think Abi was interested in the doll at first.
I thought she might be cos I thought it was a model of her a little bit.
So balls and trucks and things, what did she think of those?
I don't really think she was that into them, not so much.
I think most of the girlie toys, I guess.
Yeah. So Abi is actually Alfie.
This is actually a little boy that you were playing with.
- No way! - Yes.
That's crazy, no way!
I have to reveal something to you here.
- That was actually a little girl. - Oh! Interesting experiment.
It is interesting. I'm so sorry to be so sneaky.
So does that make you think differently about the toys maybe?
I would have never thought it. It looked like a little girl.
Yeah.
The toy experiment reveals just how differently
girls and boys are treated.
But what about more subtle forms of gender stereotyping,
stereotyping that perhaps even adults who are very
conscious of trying to avoid gender bias are still prone to?
We're recreating an experiment that explored the degree to which
parents push their children and what they expect of them.
In infancy, boys and girls' average crawling ability is the same
despite small differences in size.
But do we treat boys and girls differently?
So, Chloe, this is our experiment,
a bizarre looking contraption,
and the whole point of it is that you can raise this end
so you can make the slope steeper
and what we're interested in is how steep a slope Alice will crawl down.
I'd like you to raise it to what you think
she can actually successfully crawl down.
'Baby Alice is 14 months old.
'Her mum reckons she can crawl from a height of 52 centimetres.'
Let's have a go then.
Look, there's a bunny. Look, look, look.
And she did! You were right.
Next up is baby Josh, who's about the same age and weight as baby Alice.
So I think he'd actually be able to manage quite a high ramp.
Yeah - a bit more.
'It looks like Josh's mum thinks he can crawl from a considerably
'higher height than baby Alice, 12 centimetres higher.'
He's quite a fearless boy as well.
That's quite ambitious.
That's 67 centimetres high at this end of the ramp.
Yeah, I definitely think he'd be able to manage that. Come on!
- Yeah! Good boy. - He can do it.
We tried the same test with two slighter younger children of similar ages.
Gracie's mum thought she could cope with a height of 36 centimetres.
Easy! She can do it.
I'm so impressed.
'But Alfie's mum thought
he could climb from a height of 43 centimetres.'
He's doing it, he's doing it really well.
'In fact, in the original experiment with over 100 babies
'who displayed the same average crawling ability,
'parents estimated boys' crawling ability was higher than girls.
'It seems that from a very young age, parents may be
'pushing their boys to achieve in a way they just don't do for girls.'
If this is true of wider society,
what's the effect of that on our children's development?
Could it be limiting their choices in some way?
Could it be affecting what they end up doing in adulthood even?
I was very lucky.
Thinking back particularly to my teenage years, I don't
remember feeling that my choices were at all dictated by my gender.
I've come to Dunraven School in south London to speak to
students studying GCSE science.
I want to find out if they're going to continue with science for A level
and whether perceptions of gender might be affecting their choices.
You're completely segregating yourselves into male and female.
So do you think that boys are better at some subjects than others?
Who likes maths?
So definitely more of you boys.
Most girls that I know do art and dance and drama, that sort of thing.
I don't really know anybody who does maths or physics or science.
The more mathematical and challenging subjects is towards the boys.
Girls tend to choose other subjects instead of like physics and maths.
So what about physics then?
Is that more of a masculine subject then would you say?
I think so because most people think boys like maths more
and in physics there's a lot of maths involved.
I don't see myself doing it as A levels
because I've heard it's quite challenging.
I don't know, it's not my type of thing.
I'm more towards like creative stuff.
I'm not exactly sure what I want to do
but I know I want it to be something creative.
I think I'll probably just take like my interests
and what I like doing which is creative stuff.
Maybe something creative or like a vet because I like animals.
Thinking about careers then,
has anybody thought about science as a career?
My family want me to become a doctor of some sort.
I want to be a doctor as well but I don't really think I'd
do any of the creative stuff because that's not really my kind of thing.
I've wanted to be an architect for quite a while.
- Are you good at maths? - Yeah.
I've always liked maths and computing
so I thought I could be like a finance director.
- I want to be a computer scientist. - Right, OK.
There's a definite division going on here in the group.
Tell me what you think of,
if somebody says the word scientist to you, what comes into your head?
What do they look like?
- Lab coat. - Lab coat.
They're a man.
Yeah, I'd have that image as well of a man.
I think it's because, like, when you're growing up you watch
so much films and you get like a picture of every single job
role, so you get a picture of a scientist, a musician,
dancer, all these different job roles.
There's loads of TV and media like tells us
that a doctor or scientist is usually a man.
It's perceptions like these that are a cause for concern
for professor of cognitive neuro-imaging, Gina Rippon.
At her lab at Aston University in Birmingham,
she searches for links between behaviour and brain function.
She's found that when you interrogate the differences
between men and women, they're less striking than you might imagine.
Thank you!
I've noticed a claim that there are clear differences between male
and female brains and so given that that's the kind of work I do,
I have a look and see where these differences are
and I actually find them very hard to find.
You realise that actually the differences between males
and females are smaller than the differences within
groups of males and within groups of females,
and so searching for something which proves this is a male brain
or a female brain is... You're on a hiding to nothing, I think.
Hi, if you'd like to take a seat, please.
'Gina has set up an experiment where subjects are asked to imagine
'the point of view of another person.'
You will see this person sitting at various
positions around the table and your only task is to judge
whether the red target is on the left or on the right-hand side,
from the person, the other person's perspective.
'The task is made harder because the subject - in this case, me -
'is asked to change their body position throughout the experiment.
'It's testing similar mental rotation skills to our earlier test
'but the different way the task is presented has a significant effect.'
If you actually present a problem not as a mental rotation task
but as a perspective-taking task, so you could say to somebody imagine
you were on the other side of that object, what would it look like?
Females who've had trouble with the mental rotation actually find
it easier and sometimes all you need to do is say,
"Don't think of it as this, think of it as that,"
and there's a kind of "a-ha!" moment.
'Tests like these have been conducted in countries around the world
'and the results have been striking.'
That gender difference disappears in different cultures
so it's showing that any variances is due to different sort of factors.
That's absolutely fascinating
because that suggests that the differences that we see between
men and women approaching this task, they've learned those differences.
It depended on the way that they've been brought up
and the roles that they've adopted in society?
That's right, and it may be nothing to do with the task itself
but it's, there are different ways of solving that problem.
For Gina, the way our brain adapts to its environment is a bigger
factor in sex differences than any kind of biological programming.
We now know that the brain is plastic throughout life
so as time goes on, experiences will change structures in the brain
and what you do will change your brain
and what other people do to you will change your brain as well,
so I think being aware of that is key and recently they've been
talking about differences in pathways, but pathways in the brain
are determined by experience, by, you know,
where you grew up, how you grew up,
how long you were in school, what kind of occupation you've got
now, so all of those things
are going to change the pathways in the brain.
And yet we do still hear that men on average are better at maths,
and that women are better at reading.
Does that make any sense at all?
It doesn't, again it doesn't stack up very well
and the idea that there's a maths brain, that your brain needs
to be configured in a particular way to do maths
flies in the face of all sorts of evidence
of how plastic our brains are.
So girls then get to believe that they're not good at maths
which means they aren't good at maths
and so you then get this self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's time to compare notes.
Now, we agree there are behavioural differences between the sexes.
But we don't agree on what causes them.
I still believe that some of those differences, we're born with.
Whereas I think more than ever that it's something we learn
and that actually the differences are tiny.
So, Michael, would you like to tell me
if this is a male or a female brain, just looking at it?
Well, I'm obviously looking to see the name first of all.
Going for male.
You're actually right but there's no way you could tell that
so you had a 50% chance of being right. I mean...
It's all the stuff I've learned,
I can tell immediately it was a male brain.
It had all the... You're right, it was a blind guess.
But on the other hand, I have been looking at some really
interesting stuff and that has convinced me that there is an
element, some exposure to hormones, that does structurally alter
things although you probably can't see it yet.
I accept that, but I honestly think that it's too much of a step
to say that somebody might have a male brain or a female brain,
that actually it's much more nuanced than that, that the
sex differences are just a tiny bit of the differences
between individuals, and there's a huge cultural, social influence
on the differences that we're perceiving between us as adults,
and I think these gender stereotypes are potentially quite destructive.
But maybe there's something that Michael and I can agree on.
Putting gender stereotypes and behaviour to one side,
there's another area of neuro-science
where sex differences could prove to be very important.
Around the globe, some of the world's leading
scientists are turning their attention, not to sex differences
in the way that men and women think and behave,
but the differences in the way they experience the world, differences
that could in the long term lead to real improvements in people's lives.
Throughout the world, doctors have observed a baffling phenomenon -
on average, women tend to experience pain more intensely than men.
Here in McGill University in Montreal, Professor Jeff Mogil
is trying to find out why.
As part of his research he conducts regular pain tests
and today I'm the competition.
Today we have a cooler of cold water.
I'm going to ask for you to submerge your hand up to the wrist
and so it will be painful but we're going to ask that you
leave your hand in for as long as possible and then when you can
no longer stand that sensation, to remove it from the water.
Yeah, how cold is it? 4.6?
4.6 and so it is going to be cold.
Right, so on the count of three - one, two, three, submerge please.
Oh, that's cold.
At the moment it is just cold.
'There are two parts of the test.
'First, Jeff and I must acknowledge
'when we first start to experience pain.'
OK, I'm in pain now, I think.
It feels like it's freezing. I can't believe that's 4.6.
Yeah, that's starting to hurt now, it's starting to hurt now.
Yeah, ooh!
It really does hurt, doesn't it?
Oh, it really does.
It's surprising.
Oh, no, right OK, I really want to take my hand out now.
'At various intervals during the test, we must also rate our pain.'
OK, I'm going to ask that you rate now the unpleasantness
and the intensity.
It's pretty cold.
It's really cold and it's an, it is an unpleasant pain, isn't it?
It really is an unpleasant...
Yeah, part of the problem is just the sheer coldness
but the other part of the problem is that the cold water is
cutting off the blood supply to your hand
so it's actually causing ischaemia which itself is painful, right?
Sort of a double whammy.
An ischaemia pain is the worst pain
that you can actually put someone in, ethically.
Thanks, thanks!
Now he tells us.
Oh, no! Oh, God.
So I'd be curious if you could actually,
if you could make an X on the line now for a second reading?
Let's see how your pain has changed.
- It's not nice. - Wow!
OK, seven minutes.
'The test is stopped before Jeff and I can suffer any serious damage.'
Let's compare ratings. You OK?
Oh, it's hurting more now.
Yeah, it's going to hurt, it's going to hurt more for a minute or two.
- Oh, God! - But then you'll be fine.
Well, you can see the colouration.
'We both last the distance
'but was there any difference in our experience of the pain?'
So for you, your unpleasantness score was about a 7.5 on 10, so it
was very unpleasant, very unpleasant for you whereas Jeff gave a
rating of about, it looks about a 4, a 4 on 10 so it was less unpleasant
for you so the psychological component for you was more intense.
It was more unpleasant, I should say,
so it's interesting that there's a difference there.
In tests around the world, women report higher scores than
men for both pain intensity and pain unpleasantness.
Why do you think that is?
There are a lot of people that have studied sex differences in pain
that think it's due to the fact that it
is important for men to be macho and to be stoic in the face of pain.
And women, although they might want to,
they're certainly forgiven by society for not being stoic.
When little boys injure themselves in the playground,
mothers and fathers tell them to suck it up
but they don't do that to their little girls, right?
So some people think that that's all that sex differences
- in pain comes down to. - Do you think it's more than that?
Yeah, we think, we think it's more than that.
There's all kinds of reasons to believe now that there's
different neural systems in the brain in males and females.
Jeff has discovered that in some mice, the neural pathways
used to process pain are different in males and females.
He thinks the same could be true in humans.
I actually think that the pathways are probably right in the same
place but that the male system and the female system are different
and they're running parallel to each other,
and we have evidence that certain genes are involved in pain or pain
inhibition in one sex and simply not involved in the other sex.
- Not at all? - Not at all.
You can take them out and nothing changes in the other sex.
I think there's five or six or seven genes where people think
the involvement in the one sex s different than
the involvement in the other sex.
So the fact that there are these real physiological differences
in the way that men and women are experiencing pain, that
must have quite big implications for the way that drugs are developed.
Yeah, I think that's the key.
There's lots of drug development going on and if any of those
drugs ever make it to the market and get approved, my expectation
will be that they will work in one sex and simply not work in the
other sex, and if that ever happens that'll be a first in medicine.
I don't think there's an example of that yet.
I think we've only barely scratched the surface here
and that there's a big iceberg hiding under the water that we
and others are going to mine for some time to come.
Back in the UK, we're already seeing the first signs of that.
Scientists are doing research that could revolutionise medical treatment
for Britain's third biggest killer, stroke.
When I was a medical student,
I worked on a ward where a lot of people had had strokes.
Most of them were women.
We know that particularly after the menopause women are much more
likely to have a stroke than men and the outcomes tend to be worse.
Why?
Hormonal factors may play a part but Dr Claire Gibson
of the University of Leicester thinks there may be another cause.
She's been studying how brain cells die when strokes occur.
We have discovered that there are differences in the mechanism
of cell death that occur in the brains of males and females,
in disorders such as stroke.
Strokes happen when a clot or haemorrhage cuts off blood
to parts of the brain.
Cells die and some bodily functions are lost
but Claire has discovered that the pattern in which these cells die
is different in men and women
and may have important implications for future treatment.
Currently, the only treatment which is available
is for both men and women,
and it may be that some treatments may be more effective in men than
women, and it may be a possibility that we will be able to identify
treatments that only work in one gender and don't work in the other.
This research could have wider implications.
I think this notion that one size is going to fit all probably
isn't true and this would be the same for a lot of complex
brain disorders such as Huntington's disease,
Alzheimer's disease as well.
These diseases are very complex and therefore it's unlikely that
we're going to find one single drug that acts to benefit all patients
that experience that disorder so I think it's very likely that it
could result in gender-specific treatments down the line.
For me, this is why sex difference research really matters,
helping us find more accurate and effective ways to tackle disease.
Claims about the differences between male and female brains
may always be controversial
but at the end of our investigation, are our views any closer?
So what do you think then?
Well, I must admit I thought it really, really interesting.
I think probably the biggest surprise for me
was the stuff around pain and around stroke,
and certainly the most sort of fertile area going forward.
I thought that was really fantastic and really quite extraordinary.
I think the really important thing that's come out of this
though is the malleability, the plasticity of the brain.
The brain is responding to the environment it's in
so we're getting gender differences appearing
because of gender stereotypes which will affect our children's brains.
I still think there is some influence of hormones
on behaviour and I find that quite compelling.
I'm not saying there aren't any innate differences
but they are small
and they only explain a tiny bit of the variation between individuals.
Yeah, absolutely, I must admit I agree
so I have a confession to make.
I am really not from Mars!
I'm definitely not from Venus!
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re-sync and edted by tangaraz ndalem Kamomonan, Jogja