Women's Brains Summary

Carol S. Dweck's article “Brainology – Transforming Student's Motivation to Learn” offers insights about student's mentality at school and why some students are better off than others. The article claims directly that students generally have two mindsets when it comes to learning; one is “fixed mindset,” a negative trait, and the other is “growth mindset,” a positive trait. Both of these traits contradict each other in terms of meaning. These two mindsets impact students on whether or not they will be successful on their academic road. In “Brainology – Transforming Student's Motivation to Learn,” Dweck explains how these two traits influence the outcome of having one of these two mindsets through

He supports the claim first by thoroughly discussing a number of old experimental attempts to prove the superiority of the male brain to inform the reader of outdated scientific claims, then by explaining the poor experimentation and misinterpretation of these experiments to discredit the claims of Broca, and finally by addressing the social issue at the heart of these experiments using his personal opinion to make the audience accept his opinion based on his display

| Researchers have found that the female hippocampus tends to be larger than the male hippocampus. Based on evidence presented in the Critical Thinking box in the text, “ 'His ' and 'Her ' Brains?” you would be justified in asserting which of the following?1. Because of the differences in the size of the hippocampus, females will be

Assumptions about gender are embedded in scientific bias. In Cordelia Fine’s From Scanner to Sound Bite: Issues in Interpreting and Reporting Sex Differences in the Brain, the author examines four scientific issues that are overlooked about sex differences in the brain. She concludes that there are numerous misinterpretations of neuroimaging research that ultimately influence gender biases, and society should be cautious when reading these articles about sex differences.

As an anthropologist, it was Broca’s job to study the human species. He collected information for years trying to answer the questions on everyone's mind in the 1800’s, what gender is smarter, therefore superior? Broca studied brain sizes to answer that question do to the fact that humans were declared the smartest species because we have bigger brains than animals. Broca declared that women “had smaller brains than men and, therefore, could not equal them in intelligence,” however, I would like to argue that. According to Women's Brains By Stephen Jay Gould, Broca’’s data was inconsistent. He used 292 male brains but only 140 female brains. He did not take in consideration weight, heath, height nor age into his observations, all facts that

There is always a process or stages in which things works or grow. They starts from the beginning and gradually work itself through the correct transformation or process.

Gould proves to his readers the amount of bias that is involved with some scientific discoveries such as Broca’s. Broca was a Physician, who lived from 1824 to 1880. He is most famously known for his realization of the importance in the frontal lobe of our brains, this part of our brain is now known as the Broca. Gould who was an evolutionary biologist, amongst other things, wrote a paper disproving Scientists previous study of women’s inferiority due to their smaller skulls.

      In contrast, Stephen Jay Gould, in "Women's Brains," questions the validity of Paul Broca's study (1824-80), a professor of clinical surgery at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, who used unrefined techniques to prove the lower intelligence of women as compared to men (753). Having been convinced about the direct link between the intelligence of an individual and the size of brain, Broca used his knowledge of craniometry, the method of skull measurement, to make a relationship between the cranial capacity and the development of the brain. As Stephen Gould puts it, Broca based his arguments on his data, which he collected meticulously "from the autopsies he performed in four Parisian hospitals." He found the average weight of "292 male brains to be 1,325 grams, while 140 female brains averaged 1,144 grams, a difference of 14 percent of male brain's weight" (754). Broca took this to mean that women were born biologically inferior to men, whom nature endowed with intellectual superiority. According to Gould, this discovery fuelled acrid misogynist remarks and sarcasms: "The theologians had asked if women had a soul ... some scientists were ready to refuse them

Throughout this publication, Stephen Jay Gould tries to convince the reader of his argument that the claims that Broca made were simply outrageous. Even though Gould comments, “I have the greatest respect for Broca’s meticulous procedure. His numbers are sound.”, he refutes Broca’s, and his disciples, work. Gould uses a large amount of statistical data to counter Broca’s argument. He states that “In an analysis of the data for women, I found that, at an average male height and age, a woman’s brain would weight 1,212 grams. Correction for height and ages reduces Broca’s measured difference of 181 grams by more than a third, to 113 grams.” While Gould uses this to support his own data collection, he also exhibits data collected by Broca himself.

When it comes to the topic of having a growth mindset, most of us will readily agree that students who are praised are motivated to learn. Where this agreement usually ends, however, is on the question of how they are praised. Whereas some are convinced that praising students for their intelligence will motivate them to learn, others maintain that encouraging them for their efforts has a better impact on their motivation.

Kimura’s scientific article Sex Differences in the Brain provides an excellent scientific basis and intermingles social implications with scientific discoveries. It’s use of graphs and tables allow for readers to easily understand each point being driven and makes excellent use of past references to allow a full scope of comparisons. Borchers’ social science article Sociological differences between women and men: Implications for autoimmunity gives genuine insight into the differences of men and women’s abilities regarding everyday tasks and duties but falls short in it’s delivery and scope. I suffers from confusing in text statistics and poorly places graphs that make it difficult for a reader to understand. While of the same topic, the Kimura’s scientific article does a better job of not only presenting ideas but creating them as well. Bringing several different approaches to understanding how men and women function, the scientific article is the superior of the two for this

My score for the BSRI was an 84 in masculinity, and a 118 in femininity. In regards to masculinity, that’s below the average line. This translates to myself having a limited

Stephen Jay Gould analyses Paul Broca’s data of inferior women to superior men through the study of Craniometry in his piece, Women’s Brains. While Broca claims women are unintelligent when compared to men through thorough measurement of the brain; Gould realizes the accusations are false due to their combination of science to social correlation and beliefs. Gould argues that women are not inferior; they are only baring the brunt of unfair scientific research conducted to prove society beliefs. Even the most reliable scientific data and research is not valid within the study of social norms and accepted society stereotypes.

Studies by Broca concluded that, on average, the brain of a women is one hundred and eighty one grams lighter than that of a man, or fourteen percent (Gould, 1978). However, not all researchers are convinced of these findings. Researcher Gould (1978) explains how Broca may not have allowed for variations in height, body shape or degeneration when comparing his measurements. However, Rushton (1997) counters that even Gould’s revision of Broca’s data indicates a difference in relative

Studies have also been carried out into whether or not there are differences between male and female brain size and whether this affects how we relate to each other in terms of gender. Simon Baron-Cohen believes that male brains are wired towards systematic understanding and females are wired towards empathy. In addition he says that this is not necessarily always the case but the majority are wired in this way: “Both sexes have their strengths and weaknesses. Neither sex is superior overall.” (Baron-Cohen, S. 2003).