Sexual dimorphism in humans is often used to justify outdated gender stereotypes between women and men. Conservatives and creationists often cite examples of dubious “research” to confirm that women are wired to feel emotions more strongly than men. Now, scientists at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science (RFUMS) in Chicago, have debunked the most commonly held belief that the hippocampus – an important region of the brain that helps in connecting emotions to senses as well as reinforcing new memories – is larger in females than in males.

Lise Elliot, associate professor of neuroscience at the RFUMS medical school, led a student team to meta-analyse volumes of structural MRI that found no remarkable differences in the size of hippocampus between men and women. Meta-analysis is a technique that allows the consolidation of data and findings across various independent studies in one comprehensive review. Seventy-six published papers that involved studies with over 6,000 healthy individuals, were examined as part of the research.

Elliot said, “Sex differences in the brain are irresistible to those looking to explain stereotypic differences between men and women,” Eurekalert reported. “They often make a big splash, in spite of being based on small samples. But as we explore multiple datasets and are able to coalesce very large samples of males and females, we find these differences often disappear or are trivial.”

Hippocampi are located under the cerebral cortex on both sides of the brain. The findings of the team challenge the most common claim that strong interpersonal skills, better verbal memory and greater emotional expressiveness among women are the result of a disproportionately larger hippocampus in the female brain.

“Many people believe there is such a thing as a 'male brain' and a 'female brain,’” said Elliot. “But when you look beyond the popularized studies -- at collections of all the data -- you often find that the differences are minimal.” Elliot also confirms that the corpus callosum – white matter that allows communication between the two sides – shows no difference between the female and male brain. Men and women are also the same in the way language is processed by their right and left hemispheres.

The study has been published in the journal NeuroImage.

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