In a recent Contrarian about the latest humiliation of Larry Summers, I suggested the possibility of innate differences between inquisitive academics and the closed-minded kind. It turns out something along those lines has already been done. Dave Jorgensen, a friend of the Pacific Research Institute, suggested I consult The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine, Ph.D., a neuropsychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco. She is very qualified, in more ways than one.

"I had gone to college at the peak of the feminist movement," Dr. Brizendine explains, so her explanations of a two-to-one ratio of depression in women versus men ran toward the political and the psychological.

"I took the typical 1970s stand that the patriarchy of Western culture must have been the culprit," she says. "It must have kept women down and made them less functional than men. But that explanation didn't seem to fit: new studies were uncovering the same depression ratio worldwide. I started to think that something bigger, more basic and biological, was going on."

It was indeed. In the same vein: "In the 1970s at the University of California, Berkeley, the buzzword among young women was 'mandatory unisex,' which meant that it was politically incorrect even to mention sex difference. There are still those who believe that for women to become equal, unisex must be the norm. The biological reality, however, is that there is no unisex brain."

The Female Brain documents the biological realities in an entertaining way, such as this comment: "Hippocampus: the elephant that never forgets a fight, a romantic encounter or a tender moment — and won't let you forget it either. Larger and more active in women."

According to Dr. Brizendine, "Just as women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion while men have a small country road, men of O'Hare Airport have a hub for processing thoughts about sex, whereas women have the airfield nearby that lands small and private planes."

Further, "There is no unisex brain … Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys." Men and women "use different brain areas and circuits to solve problems, process language, experience, and store the same strong emotion."

Remember, this is all about biology, not politics or psychology.  As she explains: "The amygdala is the brain center for fear, anger, and aggression, and it's physically larger in men than in women, whereas the anger, fear, and aggression control center — the prefrontal cortex — is relatively larger in women. As a result, it's easier to push a man's anger button."

We can find an exception to that in the angry feminists who refuse to even consider sex differences. Larry Summers only alluded to possible differences and it forced him to resign the presidency of Harvard, and got him disinvited to speak at the University of California. 

"Summers was and wasn't right," Dr. Brizendine explains. In the teen years, math and science differences are nonexisent. However, when boys and girls begin deciding the trajectories of their careers, "girls start to lose interest in pursuits that require more solitary work and fewer interactions with others, while boys can retreat alone to their rooms for hours of computer time."

It is a hormonal issue, not one of "female brain deficiencies in math and science." Summers, she says was wrong to imply that more women do not wind up in science and engineering positions "because of lack of aptitude." Actually, Larry Summers didn't say that, and the author supplies the full quote that got him in trouble.

She also says that Summers enraged his colleagues and the public. As we noted, some of his colleagues strongly supported him and his speech did not become a raging public issue. Those enraged were militant feminists, the politically correct kind Dr. Brizendine describes so well. They may be 1970s vintage, and out of step with science, but as Larry Summers knows, they still wield plenty of clout on campus.

The Female Brain strikes me as the sort of serious material Larry Summers had in mind for discussion. In future works, I hope Dr. Brizendine examines whether the male or female brain is better at processing political correctness.