Today at lunch I began reading a scrumptious new library book called Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, by Steven Johnson. I noticed that when Johnson started writing about gender differences in the brain, my enthusiasm sank. He wrote as if all men have brains different from all women, no cross over. The author's credibility dropped a lot at this point.
Still, I was interested by then in learning exactly what was happening in my brain when I read this - the rise in anxiety, the distrust, the "here we go again - only men can really excel" flash of thought.
So I read on. Thanks to google, I found some of the online tests Johnson mentions. Here are links:
Reading the Mind in the Eyes (a test of how well you perceive someone's emotional state by gazing at their eyes)
Autism Spectrum Quotient (looking at autism as a graduated scale, rather than as a discrete category. I concluded this must be the case after reading an autobiography of an autistic woman.)
Empathy Quotient (how "female" is your brain?) -
Systematizing Quotient (how "male" is your brain?)
The above two tests plus an article on "what type of brain do you have?" are also at the Guardian UK site.
When I took the empathy and systematizing tests, I found that on both I'm more like a man than the average man.
But the two abilities are about even for me. I'm less empathic than most women, and a bit more systematizing than most men, which leaves me with both about evenly balanced.
Of course, years ago Gilligan argued that women and men have different developmental trajectories that converge as both become more mature. In other words, men learn to become more empathic, more concerned about relationships, as they mature. Women learn to become more objective and more self directed as they mature. So perhaps it's not so surprising that my first career dealt entirely with human relationships, and my second is much more concerned with nature and art.
Along with scoring slightly less empathic than the average man, I scored pretty low on the test of ability to read someone's emotions from looking at their eyes. I guess it's lucky that communication is so easy online now. This doesn't keep me from reading and writing.
So far, Steven Johnson is right that understanding more about how our own brains work can be useful in practical life. Now that I know that I don't know what someone else is feeling, I won't be so quick to draw conclusions. Knowing that I don't know can really help. Hey, I might even ask!
1:50:01 PM 
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