In the brain research world, there may not be a lot of difference between male and female world, but in the real world men like feminine females. 

Also no brain research explains why powerful political OLD men frequently have affairs with young good looking females but not the other way around. After all there is no difference between male and female brain? 

I absolutely HATE these types of gender stereotypes because it encourages people to have expectations about me that I can't even begin to meet.

I'm terrible at communicating verbally (I prefer writing), I can't multitask if my life depended upon it, and I have all the nurturing instincts of a rock. 

Yet, because of gender stereotypes, people EXPECT me to exhibit these behaviors and when I don't, I get ostracized for it.

Blargh.

Rebecca Jordan-Young is really brilliant. One of the things she discusses is an environmental perspective of the human brain, which has been widely accepted by many neuroscientists and the social work professional for many years and is becoming more and more widely recognized as a more accurate description of brain development. 
She explains that brain development varies across gender, culture, race, and nationality (and we can safely add socioeconomic status in to this) because of the different tasks we learn and experiences we have through out life (especially early life and adolescents). Simply put, our brain is trained for different tasks and from different experiences so, similar to muscle development, different areas of the brain are going to respond and strengthen (or weaken) from use or lack of use. She explains, therefore, you can not accurately do brain studies across these identities and come to the conclusion that there are essential differences (even the influence of hormones is beginning to be ruled out) in brain development as a result of them. 
Jordan-Young's work is incredibly thorough. 

Enlightened by this reality, I hope that Sociological Images will stop censoring women who complain about transgender and transsexual ideology that seeks to define "woman" by an individual's identification with and expression of "femininity."

The graph is perhaps misleading. It looks like a tiny shift, but it can have huge consequences.  I tried to sketch an example (see attached image)-- three blue lines on the graph might correspond to peope at, say, the 15th, 25th and 35th (ish) percentile on some measure (self esteem). The red dots show that the measures for men and women are pretty different.  At that 35th percentile we would expect 25% more women. Similarly, at the 65th percentile, we would expect 25% more men. These are rough numbers, of course, but the point is the same - it "looks" small, but if you read it carefully, it accounts for about a 25% difference in places. That's not "teensy."

It's tempting to think the difference is represented in the green "gap" I sketched in - the tiny horizontal distance between the lines - but it's better represented by the vertical distance between the lines.

If I'm reading the graph incorrectly, please tell me.

So long as you subscribe to the fiction that human brains are designed, you cannot understand cognitive science.

Any expert in brain research will tell you that we understand considerably less about the human brain than we do about, say, outer space.  It's a bold and strident proclamation to describe something false or "very, very" wrong - or as correct for that matter - because the necessary links that point to differences, or lack thereof, have not (yet) been found. 

This doesn't just go for the subject of differences between men and women, it applies to most findings in brain research.  Christof Koch will likely be nominated for a Nobel prize because he found a way to show that a section of the brain lights up when one sees a familiar figure like Jennifer Aniston on a screen.  The field is still taking baby steps.

I was part of a counseling program for people who wanted to transition. Being a "Femmy man' as somebody said had little bearing on who came to the program. Most (not all) of the participants presented as "masculine men" and the general course of progress indicated that they would never be accepted anywhere as a feminine woman or even as a woman at all. Never-the-less, this seemed to be an intense need in the subjects to move forward on this. Some doctors who consulted did believe in the brain sex theory, but how did that account for these subjects who were able to function as males in fields like business and the military without anyone knowing how they claimed to feel. It was most likely some sociological and cultural issues in their lives, but in a public clinical setting this type of research was not possible. Even during and after the process, the subjects continued to display behavior and speech that the culture sees as signals of maleness. I do agree with this article, but my work was not long enough (6 years) to prove anything.  Thank you.

Interesting. What are we to do then, with the very conclusive research in support of same-gendered education by Leonard Sax and others? There is a very clear and well supported body of work that is in favor of separating boy and girls (especially in the elementary years) to accomodate consistent gendered learning styles? Maybe the difference between the sexes average out with age?

That's weird. Just a few weeks ago Soc Img had a post about how there are so many different genders you can "identify" with, and now you're saying there's none at all?
Make up your minds.

When a culture forces children to only "like" certain things , it limits potential for growth and expermentation. Going back to the Fifties, students were required to take gender specific courses like woodshop for boys and home economics for girls. When a boys team messed up in the coaches eyes, some coaches called them "girls".  Gender roles were culturally mandated in the media. Remember "Guys and Dolls" or "Luck be a Lady Tonight"?  All three male leads in "Giant" were Gay, a secret well guarded by the studios.  Although things may not be as rigid on the surface in 2012, gender roles are still policed by the culture and peole still have their opportunities curtailed.  Gender stereotyping must be ended, but the question is how.

How do people like Iamcpr even find this site?

How does this relate to Autism?

What a horribly biased article. 

First of all, how is a difference defined as "small"?  Isn't "small" a subjective term unless it is defined by some standard?  I would imagine that almost any characteristic of the brain would have a significant impact on their behavior? 

You say things like "on 78% of characteristics, she found teensy differences or none at all."  What, scientifically, does "teensy" mean?  And what about the other 22% of characteristics?  Why are you ignoring the science that doesn't support your predetermined ideology? 

It always gets me that men are "allowed" to be whatever they like: loners or party animals; but women _should be_ carers and talkers (or whatever they are *told* to be). Isn't it amazing? Explaining the explainer's brain. 

Since when do women have brains? Fundamental problem with this.

I've been seeing ted videos, one from a neuroscientist who openly called bollocks on the idea that men and woman are the same, based on MRI images, the other claiming that what separates us from bonobos is not cognition, but culture.

In a competitive environment, an 8% difference can mean a lot. You would need to give an evolutionary explanation of why the brains anatomical gender differences seem to try to reduce the effects of those differences... my current guesses rely on evolution trying to reduce past differences, which were harmful in the past 100, 000 years or more.

Wait.

There are actual human beings who think that men are loners and women are talkers? I.e. they don't know that people can be introverts or extroverts and it doesn't depend on gender?

Wow. I started reading the comments, expecting them to be about the supposed "war on men" that this was originally about, but found myself immersed in arguments about ontological gender. Okay. But I wanted to just say one thing about Venker's original argument (in her original post), which is about why men don't want to get married. She argues that women have made men feel badly about themselves, have made them feel "unmanly" because the women have pushed them out of the male role and taken it over themselves. Why get married if you can't be the boss? She says that men are not the breadwinners in their families because feminist women have insisted on being the breadwinners. This is a most extraordinarily ignorant statement; are the only actors here husband sand wives? Are there no employers? No economy? If women are now out-earning men, it is not those women who decided their husbands' wages. Men's wages have declined, not because feminist women have insisted on it, but because of economic decisions being made by mostly male managers and employers. If one looks at American wages overtime, one sees that women's wages as a proportion of total household wages have increased, NOT  because feminist women have demanded it, but because mens' wages have declined. If husbands used to earn on average, $35,00/year, and wives earned $17,000/year, then if women's average wages stayed even, at $17,000/year, but men's wages declined to $32,000/year, then women's wages as a proportion of the total household income increased.It's simple arithmetic, decided by employers, not gender politics. Wives son't decide men's wages. And if the fact that women have been earning college degrees at higher rates than men has finally resulted in a real increase in women's wages, so that many of them now out-earn their husbands, that also  has nothing to do with married-gender politics, but with economic choices being made by both young men and by employers. But the economy has no place in Venker's world. Struggling families who absolutely NEED two incomes do not exist in her world. Only made-up stereotypes of feminist women who insist on out-earning their husbands and being the boss, counter to their supposed nature, and meek, brow-beaten men who have allowed themselves to give up their own "true nature" as "the boss," exist. And so if women would just stop insisting on being paid more than their husbands, all the problems would be solved (except their households would have to make do on less income). This is just a ridiculous argument, and exhibits such an extraordinary shallowness of thinking that it is stunning that anyone would pay attention to it. But then, Fox audiences are being systematically trained to accept illogical arguments as fact.