We’ve been labelled ‘anti-sex difference’ for demanding greater scientific rigour | Cordelia Fine and Rebecca Jordan-Young

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Our criticism of gender research has been portrayed as dogmatic feminism – thankfully the scientific community has looked beyond the headlines

At a time when both science and feminism are under attack, there are welcome signs that neuroscience is showing new openness to critiques of research into sex differences. Mainstream journals increasingly publish studies that reveal how misleading assumptions about the sexes bias the framing of hypotheses, research design and interpretation of findings – and these critiques increasingly come with constructive recommendations, discussions and debates.

For example, we, together with other colleagues, made recommendations in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience on best practice in sex/gender neuroscience. Some of the errors and traps we identified included human neuroimaging studies with small sample sizes, and the common “snapshot” approach, which interprets neural associations with sex as a matter of timeless and universal male and female essences, without taking seriously the fact that biological associations might as easily be the effect of social differences as the cause of them.

These charges [against us] would only make sense in a world without shades of grey

Related: Men are from Mars, women are from Venus? New brain study says not

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We’ve been labelled ‘anti-sex difference’ for demanding greater scientific rigour | Cordelia Fine and Rebecca Jordan-Young