by Louann Brizendine
ISBN: 9780767920100
Buy on Amazon
Found in 3 comments on Hacker News
temphn · 2013-12-29 · Original thread
The fundamental upstream question here is whether men and women should show the exact same patterns of ability and interest given their measurably different organs, hormones, chromosomes, lifespans, physiology, and so on. Much of the rest of the body differs systematically, visibly, and predictably between genders; it is unlikely a priori that the brain would remain invariant. Here's the late Doreen Kimura of McGill and Simon Fraser on the topic:

http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/class/behavior/sexdif1.htm

  Men and women display patterns of behavioral and cognitive    differences that reflect varying hormonal influences on    brain development    By Doreen Kimura (May 13, 2002)    Men and women differ not only in their physical attributes    and reproductive function but also in many other    characteristics, including the way they solve intellectual    problems. For the past few decades, it has been    ideologically fashionable to insist that these behavioral    differences are minimal and are the consequence of    variations in experience during development before and    after adolescence. Evidence accumulated more recently,    however, suggests that the effects of sex hormones on brain    organization occur so early in life that from the start the    environment is acting on differently wired brains in boys    and girls. Such effects make evaluating the role of    experience, independent of physiological predisposition, a    difficult if not dubious task. The biological bases of sex    differences in brain and behavior have become much better    known through increasing numbers of behavioral,    neurological and endocrinological studies.    Sex differences in problem solving have been systematically    studied in adults in laboratory situations. On average, men    perform better than women at certain spatial tasks. In    particular, men seem to have an advantage in tests that    require the subject to imagine rotating an object or    manipulating it in some other way. They also outperform    women in mathematical reasoning tests and in navigating    their way through a route. Further, men exhibit more    accuracy in tests of target-directed motor skills--that is,    in guiding or intercepting projectiles.    Women, on average, excel on tests that measure recall of    words and on tests that challenge the person to find words    that begin with a specific letter or fulfill some other    constraint. They also tend to be better than men at rapidly    identifying matching items and performing certain precision    manual tasks, such as placing pegs in designated holes on a    board. 
A graphic accompanies the full article:

http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/images/00018E9D-879D-1D06-8E49...

Here is Louann Brizendine of UCSF:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine/dp/...

  Review 1: Louann Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist at the    University of California, San Francisco, explores    groundbreaking issues in brain science...Brizendine    graduated from the Yale University School of Medicine and    draws on research done at the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood    and Hormone Clinic, which she founded at UCSF in 1994.    Review 2 :This comprehensive new look at the hormonal    roller coaster  that rules women's lives down to the    cellular level, "a user's guide to new research about the    female brain and the neurobehavioral systems that make us    women," offers a trove of information, as well as some    stunning insights. Though referenced like a work of    research, Brizedine's writing style is fully accessible.    Brizendine provides a fascinating look at the life cycle of    the female brain from birth ("baby girls will connect    emotionally in ways that baby boys don't") to birthing    ("Motherhood changes you because it literally alters a    woman's brain-structurally, functionally, and in many ways,    irreversibly") to menopause (when "the female brain is      nowhere near ready to retire") and beyond. 
There are tens of thousands of papers in this general area on Pubmed.

temphn · 2013-05-13 · Original thread
This is utterly devastating and long overdue. Sandberg makes $845 million in a year (at a company she didn't found), lives a charmed life, and is promoted aggressively by men...yet has managed to convince herself that the world is/was biased against women.

But even Greenspan is prevented by polite convention from making the obvious point: women and men have different chromosomal structures, lifespans, organs, and hormone levels. There's also substantial evidence[1,2] that they differ in average levels of spatial, verbal, and mathematical reasoning ability (with women generally having an advantage in verbal and men in visuospatial/mathematical). We should not expect them to have the same outcomes on average.

Women also can only have at most 10-20 children over their lifespan, whereas men like Genghis Khan[3] can have a virtually unbounded number. This is why males have a greater evolutionary payoff for high-risk, high-reward behavior: intrinsically higher reproductive variance.

But hey. That's evolution, and even though it provides a consilient explanation for a variety of allied phenomena, everyone knows that doesn't and couldn't apply to human beings (we all well know what happens to people who propose that a behavior has genetic influences). It is instead easier to pretend that humans aren't biological creatures with hard biological constraints.

Yet if your premises are wrong, one is simply practicing fashionable creationism. And that is where we are today, presented with the spectacle of a privileged billionairess who lashes out at phantasms rather than wrestling with the realities of molecular biology. Why not lean in to a publication on behavioral neuroendocrinology, for a change?

[1]: http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/class/behavior/sexdif1.htm

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine/dp/0767...

[3]: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0214_030214_...

[4]: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-diff...

temphn · 2013-04-05 · Original thread
Might men and women actually be neurologically different? Louann Brizendine and Doreen Kimura (neuroscientists both) sure think so, and present copious evidence to that effect:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0767920104 http://www.science.ca/scientists/scientistprofile.php?pID=10

Men and women have systematically different muscle masses, lifespans, even organs. Yet it is taboo to imagine that their brains might be different too, on average. Indeed Ryan is persecuted for the indirect implication that women, on average, might be less technically inclined! If this generalization was actually untrue it would not be necessary to scream at people like Larry Summers to "disprove" it. The zeal of people invested in the denial of biology is astonishing; they seek to personally destroy anyone who even indirectly endorses anything related to gender difference.