Is Your Brain Male or Female? Horizon

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.

-THEY LAUGH

-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.

SHE LAUGHS

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 is 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!