The seares in full swing with very exciting upcoming events. You can head to harvard. Com and sign up for the weekly email newsletter to learn more including with Jennifer Block on october 12th for a discussion of her new book, everything below the waist, why Health Care Needs a feminist revolution. We also have upcoming ticketed events we and we would love to see you there tonights program will conclude with time for questions after which i well have a book signing right here at this table women also have copies of gender in our brains available for sale at the registers in the next room. And we are pleased to have cspans booktv here taping tonights evented. When asking questions during the q a, please know your questions will be recorded and please wait a moment for the microphone to be passed to you before asking you question. And always i want to take a moment to say thank you for buying books from harvard book store, your purchases support the author series and they do ensure the future of a local independent book store so thank you. Finally just one last reminder to silence your cellphones before the talk begins. Now im very pleased to introduce tonights speaker. As professor of cognitive neuroimaging at ason brain center, genie rippon researches the use of state of the art brain imaging techniques to investigate developmental disorders and of course to demolish sexist myths. She was made an honorary fellow of the British Science Association in 2015 for her contributions to the public communication of science. She is also a member of the inspiring the future initiative, belongs to wise and signs girling and is part of the european and anyone of either sex who cares for children. In the guardian, reach. Cook right it is a highly accessible book and also an porsche one cia apart from how interesting the science contain is, it has the power if only people would read it to do vastly more moore gender equality than any number of fem mist manifestos. We delighted to horse this event here testimony. Join me in welcoming gina rippon. [applause] thank you very much, kate. Welcome, everybody. Im going to stand in front because is i behind that youll only see the top of my head. As kate said, the books that ive written well, ive actually written a book called the gender brain in the uk but the u. S. Publishers decided americans couldnt cope with the term gendered. Thought a nation who turns nouns into verb is was quite surprised to the book is calls gender and our brains and effectively its really an investigation as to how brains get to be different. In fact, its not really i wasnt interested in the sex difference aspect to start win. Im an autism researcher, and one thing in the Autism Community is a statement which says if you met one person with autism youve met one person with autism and i spend my life looking at whole range of different brains vastly different in all sorts of suspects, huge amount of variability. Well, as you will see i will talk about for the rest of the talk the old idea really once i got to it, actually this isnt quite reliable as i thought it was and i started to unpack the chain of argument, actually proved quite unpopular when i started talking about it and writing about it briefly before i wrote the book. Theres a fairly conservative newspaper in the uk called the Daily Telegraph and one one of e writings said my words marked with feminism so i just need to warn you about. I love the idea of being interested in equality is some kind of provers practice. Anyway, on to the provers practice. Sorry about that. Just press the button. What im no. Yeah, thats right. Very simple, very straightforward well established chain of arguments about male and female brain and that is what determined the difference between male and females since we started argument 200 years ago, but some kind of process which produced various differences between males and females, whatever that process was, it also gave them different brains, female body, you had female body, male brain. You had the male body, you had the male brain and with the two different kinds of brains, its important to hang onto two different kinds of skill sets, temperaments, personalities, whatever. If you had female brain, empathy, but rubbish at reading maps whereas if you had men, spacial, cognition, rubbish at understanding emotions and with those skills sets arising from the brains, the empathy, the brain that gave you empathy, wellsuited caring professions, the brain that gave you spacial cognition, a winner of nobel prize, et cetera. I am slightly characterizing but when you look at some of the early literature its not that much of stereotype and so this is a very simple chain of arguments, its for them trying to unpack particularly biological, predetermined link here. I also need to remind you that the term sex and gender in themselves are ambiguous, used to be the idea that the biological sets were firmly attached to your social gender. And so all of the processes were referred to as sex differences. Now it seems to have reversed itself all of this is called gender differences, we dont have sex pay gaps, we have pay gaps and something that we might want to talk about at the end. What we then arrived at was an argument which said, it suggested that there were two different kinds of brain at birth and that you had a male brain which slightly larger and had some skills necessary for the adults and adult end points and role in life. As the brain developed it got more necessary skills, became resilient and well armored and eventually when you win nobel prize or prime minister, part over that given the state of uk and the u. S. Leadership at the moment. [laughter] okay, otherwise you had pink brain, smaller, not necessarily with any of these slightly worrying cognitive skills, the role of the brain to produce a womenly companion of man, quote. The brain got bigger but, again, didnt necessarily have too many of these the kind of unfortunate skills that might interfere with reproductive process. Used to be the case that people were clearly viewed women in syria and later they thought service bit rude, they have complementary skills, but effectively there are different sets of skills and the brain which was labeled had imperfect, characterizing it, the idea that there were two types of brain, female brain and male brain and that was biologically determined and determined gender gaps in the world and in society. So effectively just as a little task i set myself in writing the book, all the streaming questions i really need to rook at in understanding and early on. First of all, basic question, differences in the brain. Do we have a female brain or male brain or a brain either pink or blue or in fact, 50 shades of gray matter and thats what i want to call the book but they wouldnt let me do that, period. [laughter] were need to know where they come from. Actually are we looking at some kind of differences determine bid the demands of society. I started looking at that. Its a well well established question that people ask, i thought actually this dichotomy so are we looking at either role or looking at much more complicated process and finally, what are the differences if there are any, do we have people from mars or venus preserving people or things, multitasking skills and do it firmly on whether youre male or female and will explain the kind of gender gaps that the research is about. Okay. A very old question, it didnt used to be a question, it was a statement, mens brains are different from womens brains, it was really at the end of 18th century, beginning of 19th century that neurology as it is called then, brain scientists wanting to explain the status quo, instead of saying lets investigate the brain, there couldnt, really, because you could either look at dead brains or damaged brains or guess about brains or you couldnt see what was going on, they took the status quo and effectively as you can see from the charming statements from well established neurosurgeon at the time so women represent the most forms of Human Evolution and closest children savages than adult civilized man. Im not saying that that think asking in research today. Thats bearing in mind thats where it started from. Difference agenda. Trying to show how womens brains were in syria and thats why men were superior and whole array of really weird metrics filling a skull with birdseeds and what they found early on, on average, important phrase to talk about, is it womens brains were 5ounces lighter than mens, they found the answer, men were more intelligent because they have bigger brains and women in syria were smaller and elephants have bigger brains and more intelligent than human man. Strange technique involving all different skull measurements, up to 5,000 if you can believe it. The aim of the metric was very clear, it date intercept with racial issues, white, top educated male were up in scale, then came women and children and lower class, uneducated classes and racist bottom. Its an interesting insight into the fact that we assume metrics that we are using to inform research are objective, have been well tested, reliable and valid and, again, im not saying that we are still in the era of measurement but it is important to remember that sometimes the story that the metrics tell are not out objectively, they are informing a politically informed agenda. Old question but a question that we are still interested in today and certainly i know that if im looking at the nearest some obscure journal and whole array of different similarities, within a couple of weeks, the popular press would be full of headlines like members in brains, proof at last, women and men are born to be different. Very important to gender for us today and i think part of that is why ive been called names in the press because it sets an agenda attacking. You dont get if somebody has a big not much difference in womens brains, you dont get a headline, we know that mens and womens brains arent that different, strangely enough. Okay. So remember that all of this theory about brains and how they made men and women different were as i said before we could see brains, we didnt really have a good idea on how brains worked. In 1990s, actually not long ago, the kind of energies, think have been around for a long time. These are images, in fact, mainly from my lab, you could look at different structures in the brain so you could continue on how to make difference agenda which has bigger and the whole size matter issues as characteristic of the area of debate applies to brains as well and all you could look at different activities, given different tasks, is this reflected in the activities, the images were very important in actually understanding how the brain worked. This is fantastic opportunity to really go back to old questions like are there male and female brains and investigate quite and to find differences continued. Continued the to hunt the Difference Campaign in comparing male and female brains. There was another problem with the images, looked as though we had a realtime window into the brain, the visible the invisible was being made visible, et cetera. People didnt realize that these are complex images which dont necessarily represent the individual part of the brain activity as a result of huge amount of statistical manipulation and colors are not colors you see in the brain, they are a way of coding the differences that you found and those also reflect different thresholds. But they did have immediacy and produce excitement and there was a phrase in the beginning of this of this century, neuro is the new black and it became much more contemporary and exciting because it looked as though scientists had understood the brain and we could stop to apply that understanding towards different issues, what happened we got a wave of books which sort of jumped on this band wagon and thought, for example, relationships, differences between males and females or people just saying that men are from mars and women from venus, the grand daddy of them all, really. , wholesale without going into too much detail about what they were sharing and using to actually illustrate books and come to conclusions, again, this book in particular and i have said in public before, it will not get sued for slander, its an amazing example of how you can misuse neuroscience research. Theres so many statements and quotation of research, for example, women use language much more than men and they have different characteristics of the particular language and if you track right back to the book and look at reference and if you look at reference youll find out that this research was being done on some birds, so you might find a lot about birds but then applying that to females and males is a stretch. A big wave of these kinds of book which i labeled neurotrash. [laughter] i was actually gave this talk in one of the authors and identified in the audience. Did make questions interesting i have to say and i standby it. These becomes are ill informed and they actually sustain stereotypes, they strengthen peoples believes in stereotypes. They have source of credibility. Made very clear statements which i would claim are a bit misleading, theres a book called the essential difference and weve come across before where the idea was, biological essence, but i bet if you stopped any number of people, perhaps not in harvard areas, if you stopped a number of people and you say what essential means, they would say really important, we have to have it, so the essential difference carries a different message or ambiguous message if you like and this isry is a researcher like me. The book start with a statement the female brain, so there is one, its hard wired, underlined for empathy. The male brain is hard wired for understanding system, its a clear statement right at the beginning to have book. Kind of passing comment in fact, that you dont have to be a women to have a female brain or a man to have male brain and thats the point at which you think you know, language matters in this area, you really have to be careful what youre saying because youre talking to people who have children and who are teachers, who are employers, et cetera, and therefore sustaining these kinds of stereotypes even if you could then say thats not really what i meant, i was just pointing this out is something that we need to be careful of. Although we had direct access to the mule brain, different agenda being played out and still Firm Statements about differences in the brain. I would also point out very basic question, are there any differences in the brain and how big are they and quick look at the research literature, you see thousands and thousands of papers, you see differences in adult human brain or various statements like that, Good Research and fantastic techniques, Interesting Data but the focus is on finding the sex difference, if you go into these papers you can see the large, large numbers and measures being taken and the ones that are being reported on are always in the minority where they find differences. Also the case if you scan through all of the papers, yes, they find differences but strangely differences in different parts of the brain, so one will suddenly say have bigger compass, and then another set of papers will come out and say, well, weve looked at all the studies measures and we havent found any difference between those at all, however, we have found a different difference, so although differences are being reported, i have to say, i have to put my hands up that we have done lots and lots of research and still no consistent pattern or structures or networks which reliably distinguishes male brains from female brains. I could look at the brain image and i might be able to have a pretty good guess if i knew what the size of the brain associated, because theres a sex difference, on average, come back to that, this is what this is about, mens brains are about 10 bigger than womens, but thats actually because men are on average about 10 bigger than women, they have about on average bigger hearts, livers, kidneys, but i dont imagine any time soon, i stand correctly somebody standing up and talking about sex differences in the liver, for example, so thats an issue to remember. Another thing to to remember to overstate the case that they find, if they find a sex difference, you get the titles, sex differences in the structural but you will also find that the measures that they report are tinny, tinny proportion of the whole measures they took and this is quite a study which looks at the impact for the public understanding of neuroscience because it was a Firm Statement and the researchers themselves taken results revealed fundamental differences in the structural architecture of the human brain. Actually they didnt, they did show that there was some characteristic patents of wiring between males and female, males appear to have stronger pathways. But not all the pathways were like that, this were Something Like 134 different pathways, 75,000 different comparisons, still could be important, im not denying that there are sex differences and i would say thats another thing that ive been called from the more polite things, denier, there are sex differences in the brain but they are very tinny and the story behind, the emphasis we need to look, the kind of differences we are talking about are very, very tinny, the use of the word different, you assume distinct, characteristics which reliably template thats the male brain and template of female brain, when you look at the data you will find that the two groups males and females, theres a huge variability within each group and you get this typical bellshaped curve but if you put the data of the two groups together, theres a huge amount of overlap and this is, in fact, the biggest difference that this particular study found, so very, very tinny, the focus is always on the average difference here which statistically is different, in other words, we need to look at, ignores the fact that we have a huge variability here, huge amount of variability, the focus has been on the tinny differences here and always important to remember sex supporters will acknowledge the difference that is we are talking about. You think about, its not very useful to know whether men female or male, to guess how they will do on special cognition task, thats important to remember as well. This is where it gets into the work that ive been doing, looking at different ways of understanding how the brain work s. The 3ps here, brains are reprotected, its like we used to believe and they are that brains are amazing Information Processing systems but they were receiving that Information Processing it and driving the owner through the world appropriately, what we now know that the brain is actually quite proactive, it is out in the world gathering rules, making predictions quite scary to think that we are being driven but through the world by