Neuroscientist Confirms No Difference in Male and Female Brains

Author of "Pink Brain, Blue Brain" says gender biology does not effect thinking processes.

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There has long been a debate about whether men and women are wired to think differently. But according to Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School and the author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain, you won’t find any innate differences between the sexes.

“People say men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but the brain is a unisex organ. We have the exact same structures,” she said onstage Monday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, according to The Atlantic.“There is absolutely no difference between male and female brains.”

Neuroscientists have not found a single circuit that is wired differently between men and women. She says that the differences we see are best explained by nurture, not nature. For example, Eliot says that Google engineer James Damore, who caused an uproar after publishing a manifesto detailing the various ways women are biologically different than men, has a deep misunderstanding of neuroscience. Though testosterone is linked to aggression, it does not offer a universal explanation for male behavior.

“The average male is more aggressive than two-thirds of females,” she said, according to The Atlantic, “but that also means one-third of females are more aggressive than the average male.”

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