The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [155]
In 2003, Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, published a book that attempts to anchor readily observed differences in male and female behavior in the brain. In The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male and Female Brain, Baron-Cohen admits that “the subject of essential sex differences in the mind is clearly very delicate” and that his theory could “provide grist for those reactionaries who might wish to defend existing inequalities in opportunities for men and women.” Nonetheless, Baron-Cohen believes that compelling data exist to show that the brains of the average man and woman are skewed to perceive and respond to the world differently. On average, he says, females spontaneously empathize (identify and respond to another’s emotions and thoughts and respond to them with an appropriate emotion) to a far greater degree than males. The average male, on the other hand, spontaneously systematizes (analyzes, explores, and constructs systems) to a greater degree than the average woman. Baron-Cohen is quick to point out that neither of these modes of interacting with the world is better or worse than the other—they are just different.
Systematizing and empathizing are wholly different kinds of processes. You use one process—empathizing—for making sense of an individual’s behavior, and you use the other—systematizing—for predicting almost everything else. To systematize you need detachment in order to monitor information and track which factors cause information to vary. To empathize you need some degree of attachment in order to recognize that you are interacting with a person, not an object, but a person with feelings, and whose feelings affect your own. Ultimately, systematizing and empathizing depend on independent sets of regions in the human brain. They are not mystical processes but are grounded in our neurophysiology.
Calling the two types of brains E for empathizing and S for systematizing, Baron-Cohen stresses that not all women have the E type and not all men have the S type. The evidence does suggest that more women are E and more men are S, however, and Baron-Cohen marshals much behavioral data to support his claim. When it comes time to explain the neurobiological mechanisms that might create this difference, he cites some of the same evidence that I have presented in this book, including the effects of hormones on the sexual differentiation of the brain. Indeed, he points to studies of DES sons that found the youngsters “likely to show more female-typical behaviors—enacting social themes in their play as toddlers, for example, or caring for dolls.” Studies of male-to-female transsexuals show “a reduction in ‘direct’ forms of aggression (the physical assaults that are more common in males),” Baron-Cohen points out, and “an increase in indirect or ‘relational’ aggression (the style of aggression that is more common in females). This is strong evidence that testosterone affects the form the aggression takes,” he concludes. He also explores evidence for an anatomic and/or genetic basis for the E/S distinction.
Most provocatively, Baron-Cohen characterizes autism, a relatively rare condition in which a person shows abnormalities in social development and communication and displays obsessional interests, and As-perger’s syndrome, a more common and less disabling version of autism,