Stephen Pollard’s piece in The Times this morning prompted me to email him as one of the things I do to keep the roof repaired upon Worstall Towers is get paid to blog on that very subject of Simon Baron-Cohen’s theories about male and female brains. On that blog an example of how the ideas can be used is here. Further explanations are at Stephen’s from our email this morning.

Baron-Cohen, quite unfairly to my mind, comes in for a fair amount of stick with these ideas. There’s some feeling that he’s perpetuating stereotypes about the sexes by using phrases like "male brain" and "female brain". However, the way I read it is the other way around, that he’s actually helping to get rid of them.

Societally we do indeed have a series of stereotypes, men won’t ask directions, women can’t read maps, women are more caring and empathic and men more interested in machines and systems than people. Baron-Cohen is pointing out that actually, this is nothing to do with the possession of a Y chromosome or not: it’s to do with the possession of a certain brain type, and a significant portion of women (17%) have the male type brain and vice versa. So while the stereotypes might be useful on average we shouldn’t actually use them in the discussion of any one individual for they may well not apply.

Which is of course entirely consistent with a truly liberal world view, we are individuals with our own bundles of talents, skills, desires, and must be treated as such.

In a bit of naked plugging for that other site, try taking the EQSQ tests yourselves: find out whether you have a male, female or balanced brain type.

As to this being a "pithy" blog, I assume that means the stringy bits that get stuck between one’s teeth as one fights to get through to the juicy flesh below?