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Rethinking sex, brain, and gender: Beyond the binary
14 December 2022, 1:00 pm–2:00 pm
Join this event to hear Daphna Joel explore whether the brains of women and men are the same or different, or maybe whether it’s the wrong question to be asking.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Judith Suissa
In this seminar, Daphna will present research which has applied several analytical approaches to study the relationship 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.
This event will be particularly useful for students and researchers working on issues to do with sex and gender.
Due to rail industrial action this event is now online.
UCL Women's Liberation Special Interest Group seminars series
UCL Women’s Liberation brings together academics and other staff from a range of disciplines whose research addresses pressing social and political issues concerning the status and meaning of women’s rights. We aim to generate public conversations and collaborations around these issues in the context of contemporary debates on the nature of sex and gender inequalities and the extent to which they are rooted in biology, social structures and individual identities.
Related links
About the Speaker
Professor Daphna Joel
Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at School of Psychological Sciences and the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel-Aviv University
Her research focuses on questions related to brain, sex and gender, using various analytical methods to analyse diverse datasets, from large collections of brain scans to information obtained with self-report questionnaires.