This is a guest post by Lucy Maddox, Clinical Psychologist and BSA Media Fellow. You can read more from Lucy on her blog,心理学喜悦，在Twitter上@Lucy_Maddox.

在最近的一个大脑联系中的性别差异美国科学院院刊》上发表了一篇文章have caused a media stir. TheBBC reported“男人和女人的大脑的连线方式不同”，这可能会导致每种性别的差异。一个评论的强烈反对debated whether this is a helpful position for gender equality, and whether the media story had covered the science accurately enough.

我们似乎对性别是否有所不同的知识无止境整个期刊专门to studies on the subject. Yet we are also super sensitive when people do find differences. Perhaps this research feels too close to the provocative and limiting ‘men are from mars’ argument.

Maybe there is also something about physical brain data that feels more compelling or ‘true’ than behavioural data. Dr Michael Bloomfield, Clinical Research Fellow at the Medical Research Council Clinical Sciences Centre, and one of the experts who commented inthe BBC article, reflected on the coverage that the PNAS paper had: “examining biological differences between the sexes can perhaps appear to some to be at odds with political movements of equality, as a mental paradox can be formed e.g. ‘If we are different, how can we be equal?’ or vice versa.” Bloomfield referred to wider research on how mental illnesses tend to be expressed differently in men and women, with hopes that this type of research into neuronal sex differences might help us understand this and help more.

The PNAS paper itself is not an easy read, largely due to the amount of statistical manipulation involved in using brain imaging data. Nonetheless the BBC article, in my view, did quite a good job of summarising its findings. The paper did say that they found statistically significant sex differences between men and women, and also looked at different age points and saw these differences developing from childhood. The paper’s authors also suggested that these differences might relate to differences in functional abilities between sexes.

媒体报道可能更加强调的重要警告是，即使该研究报告了两组（男人和女性）之间一般统计学上的显着差异，但两组之间仍然存在重叠，因此并非所有男人都会与所有女性有所不同。PNAS纸也没有报告效果大小，即性别之间的差异或样品重叠的程度。

The study used 949 people, which it described as a “large sample”, but it compared both between sexes and between three age ranges, compromising the size of the differences it could find by looking at more variables. It also gave little information on the participants, other than sex and age, so other confounding variables could have been responsible for the differences seen between the sexes.

此外，正如Bloomfield指出的那样，所使用的技术未考虑神经递质的活动。BBC文章中的进一步专家评论强调了环境影响大脑发育，大脑可塑性的能力以及我们有关连通性研究所暗示的差距的潜力。

The paper didn’t, despite what the BBC article suggested, directly look at associations between different patterns of brain connectivity between the sexes and different performance on cognitive tasks. Instead, the researchers obtained their participants from a larger sample who had undergone behavioural tests and extrapolated their findings to relate brain differences in their subgroup to functional differences in the wider sample. It also wouldn’t follow that all men’s behaviour will be different in all circumstances, because again we’re talking about general differences between samples,.

Without matching data for specific participants it is hard to really relate the brain data and behavioural data in this way. Even if there was an association between brain connectivity and behaviour we still wouldn’t be able to rule out the possibility of environment affecting brain structure through the way different sexes are treated or through more complex epigenetic effects.

最终，本文是我们不完全理解的更大图片的一小部分。这是一个有趣的发现，部分原因是它刺激了它的辩论，但这并不是性别层面上的性别之间差异的结论性证明，甚至不是有关物理层面上有多少差异的足够信息。

For more discussion on this see