Male Brains v.s. Female Brains: New Studies Have More Hype Than Substance

The differences between men's and women's brains are a never-ending source of happy hour discussion, but be careful about the science you cite.

Two studies have recently captured the media's fancy: one compared male and female color preference, and the other compared their food-finding abilities.

The first study involved 200 men and women, about 40 of whom hailed from China, with the rest from Britain. After showing them 750 pairs of color samples and asking them to pick their preferred hue, the researchers observed that women had a preference for pink. Because this was also the case among Chinese viewers, who ostensibly grew up without the Western association of pink with femininity, the researchers concluded that a biological explanation was likely.

That explanation -- women, being gatherers, evolved to notice shades of red, the color of many berries and fruits -- is fascinating and plausible. But the study itself doesn't support the coverage that followed of gender-differentiated biological hardwiring. The number of Chinese subjects was so small, and the cultural influence on British subjects so pronounced, that -- as far as conversation goes -- you'd be better sticking with the evolutionary theory and scrapping the study altogether.

The second study was actually much more interesting than the color study, but received far less attention: I only saw it covered in The Economist. The researchers wanted to know whether hypothesized female gathering adaptations are apparent in everyday modern life.

Blackberry-picking aside, urban humanity does little gathering from the wild these days, so Dr New decided to look at what seemed to him to be the nearest equivalent—shopping at a farmers' market. There is a fair amount of evidence that men are better than women at solving certain sorts of spatial problems, such as remembering the locations of topographical landmarks. Many researchers suggest such skills may have been important in the past for man-the-hunter, who needed to be able to find his way round the landscape. If that is the case, then woman-the-gatherer might have been expected to develop complementary skills not shown by males. And that, as he writes in this week's
Proceedings of the Royal Society, is what Dr New found. [...]

To prove these conjectures he recruited 41 women and 45 men and led each of them individually on a merry dance around the chosen market. In the course of this peregrination, each participant visited six of the
90 food stalls in the market. At each of those stalls, participants were given a piece of food to eat. They were asked their preference for the taste of the food, how often they ate that food in normal life, how attractive they found the stall and how often they had made purchases from that stall in the past. After visiting all six stalls, they were taken to the centre of the market and asked to point toward those stalls, one at a time, using an arrow on a dial. In addition, they were asked to rate their own sense of direction.

Women were, on the average, nine degrees more accurate than men -- and the more nutrient-dense the food, the better both genders, but particularly women, remembered it, even if they didn't care much for the food's taste.

The first part of the finding could be explained by the women's tendency to shop more than men; the second is harder to dismiss, and is the clearest signal in any of these studies that something biological is going on. But the sample size is still so small that I'd be hesitant to take anything more than a conversational anecdote from it.

Then again, there's nothing wrong with a conversational anecdote. After all, do we really want science to nail down the differences between men and women? It's so much more fun to argue when nobody is right.

Sex, shopping and thinking pink [The Economist]

Spatial adaptations for plant foraging: women excel and calories count [Proceedings of the Royal Society]

Biological components of sex differences in color preference [Current Biology]
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Image: Luna*