Summary
What's to blame for girls' math setback in puberty - estrogen or social expectations? [Cynthia Forehand, Ph.D.] believes it's both. "I think you have to step back from the time when people wanted to believe that all differences were from social pressures," she says. "It's just not true. Male and female brains are different. If you don't give your boys guns, they will turn sticks into guns. If you don't give your daughters dolls, on average, your daughters will make babies out of other things. The question is: Do those differences reflect innate ability, or do they reflect environmental niches that we have grown up in, as a species? I think it's more likely the latter."
Since the 2001 NIH studies, "The Heart Association has been really good at getting the public to recognize that females feel heart attacks completely differently from men," Forehand says. "But all medicine is like that. A lot of mental illnesses are sexually dimorphic" - that is, they play out differently in the two sexes. "So we're really interested in looking at, how does your sex affect how you handle diseases?"Understanding the sex-specific factors in disease could improve both diagnosis and treatment. So why has it taken us so long to start studying them? "It wasn't that long ago that all the research subjects at NIH were 70-kilogram males - white males at that," Forehand points out. Fearful of inadvertently harming a fetus, scientists used to exclude women of childbearing age from their studies. "That's changed dramatically, though it's been slow," Forehand says. "Two-thousand-one seems pretty late to me to finally say we've done this study and sex matters."See the full content of this document
Extract
Sex On the Brain
You think you have gender identity issues? You've got nothing on the gynandromorph. "It's a mosaic, an animal that might have some female parts and some male parts," says Cynthia Forehand, a professor of anatomy and neurobiology in the University of Vermont College of Medicine. She demonstrates with a photo of a zebra finch that sports pimped-out male plumage on one side of its body and drab female feathers on the other. The bird's not a hermaphrodite with ambiguous equipment; it's ...
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