Man/woman Does science put an end to gender roles?
Men cannot multitask. Women cannot parallel park. Nonsense, according to science. The different domains – biology, neurology and psychology – continuously show that traditional ideas about gender roles are outdated.
By Ans Hekkenberg
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f you study gender roles scientifically, clear definitions will help – the main ones being gender and sex. These terms are not synonymous. Your sex is what the midwife proclaims when you are born: ‘Congratulations, it is a ...!’ In contrast, your gender refers to your identity. What gender do you identify with from a social and a societal perspective? In 2015, researchers from Ghent University reported that 0.6 to 0.7 percent of the population state that their gender is not the same as their sex a ssigned at birth. Furthermore, there are people who do not identify with a binary gender. Gender is a spectrum: man/woman/other. Many scientists are studying the differences between these categories. Are male and female characteristics hidden in
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our genes? That is, is there a biological cause for the gender roles that we recognize in our society?
A brain matter When scientists want to know why people are the way they are, they look at the brain. Is there such a thing as a ‘male’ and a ‘female’ brain? To answer that question, scientists at Tel Aviv University studied the brain scans of 1,400 individuals. When they compiled the data, they noticed that – on average – the sizes of different brain regions differed between men and women. However, when they subsequently studied the brain scans of individuals, they had to conclude that an individual brain is almost never typically male or female. Only a few people, 0 to 8 percent, have brains demonstrating the typical characteristics that you would expect based on their sex.
‘It was a pioneering study,’ says Professor of Gender Studies Anelis Kaiser from the University of Freiburg. ‘We have known for some time that the brain is a type of mosaic of different parts that can each be designated female or male. But what the Tel Aviv study demonstrated was that the sum of the parts is hardly ever male or female.’ Cordelia Fine, psychologist at the University of Melbourne, puts the findings in perspective: ‘The probability of two people of a different sex having the same brain type is approximately equal to the probability of two people of the same sex having the same brain type.’
Typical But if there is no male or female brain, how can there be typically male and female characteristics? Take empathy: women are generally more empathic than men, aren’t
