UCL Women’s Liberation SIG Autumn Term 2022 – Daphna Joel

***12/12/2022: Please note this talk will now take place online. Zoom details below.***

Rethinking sex, brain, and gender: Beyond the binary

Prof. Daphna Joel

Are the brains of women and men the same or different? Or maybe it’s the wrong question? In the past decade we applied several analytical approaches to study the relations between sex and the brain. These analyses revealed that group-level differences between women and men in specific brain measures rarely add up consistently within individuals to form ‘male’ or ‘female’ brains. Instead, most brains are comprised of both features that are more common in women and features that are more common in men. This is also true of human psychological characteristics – humans possess unique mosaics of feminine (more common in women compared to men) and masculine characteristics. Further studies revealed that the brain architectures typical of women are also typical of men, and vice versa, and sex category provides very little information regarding how one brain will differ from or resemble another brain.

UCL Women’s Liberation are delighted to welcome Prof. Daphna Joel.

Prof. Daphna Joel is a professor of Neuroscience and Psychology, at the School of Psychological Sciences and the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel-Aviv University. In the past decade she has been studying questions related to brain, sex and gender, using various analytical methods to analyze diverse datasets, from large collections of brain scans to information obtained with self-report questionnaires. She is also the author of Gender Mosaic: Beyond the Myth of the Male and Female Brain (Octopus, London).