Feminist-inspired neurobollocks from Daniel Amen

Not strictly relevant – I just like it.

I’ve written before about Dr Daniel Amen, the owner of a network of private clinics which perform completely unnecessary brain scans using SPECT (a cheap alternative to PET that involves dosing people with gamma radiation) in order to make spurious diagnoses of everything from ADHD to ‘marital problems’. Unsurprisingly, Dr Amen is also a regular contributor to the Huffington Post; the news source second only to the Daily Fail in its tendency towards rigour-phobic science coverage. A couple of articles he’s posted up there in the last few weeks have caught my eye because of their general dreadfulness, but also because of their particular dreadfulness about women.

The first one is titled ‘Is it time to let women take the wheel?’, in which Dr Amen argues that the world would be a better place if more women were in positions of power and influence. This is a pretty well-worn argument, and intuitively it seems like there might well be some value in it, but Dr Amen claims to have some new evidence:

“the inner CEO (the prefrontal cortex) of women is much more active than men. This area of the brain governs things like judgment, forethought, organization, planning, empathy, impulse control and learning from the mistakes you make. These are the very qualities needed to successfully manage a company, lead a nation, mediate crisis, and get people working together toward a common goal.”

A little bit of a leap there, don’t you think Dr Amen? To my utter shock and amazement the data he’s talking about come from an unpublished analysis of data collected in his clinics.

A couple of weeks later, he’s at it again, jumping on the Lean in bandwagon with another piece: ‘Lean in, and why women’s brains are wired for leadership’:

“women are actually wired for success. The “CEO part of the brain” — the prefrontal cortex, which controls judgment, organization, impulse control, and planning — is more active in women, suggesting that women are wired to hold positions of power and run the world.”

Both these articles are pretty transparent attempts to plug his new book Unleash the power of the female brain. The broad thrust of the articles (that we need more women in positions of influence, and that they have a lot to contribute in such positions) is unarguable, however suggesting women are ‘wired for success’ because of differences in cerebral blood flow is patently ridiculous, and a massive generalisation. Clearly some women make excellent leaders, and some do not (just like men).  It’s been known for some time that women’s brains do show somewhat higher blood flow than men’s, however the most likely explanation is that it simply reflects underlying gender differences in Cardiac Index (a body-size normalised measure of cardiac output), which is generally higher in women. In other words, the blood-flow differences in the brain might be a cardiac effect and have very little functional role at all.  There is a very interesting discussion to be had about sex differences in brain function and what they might mean, however the differences are generally fairly subtle and nuanced, and the chain of logic connecting them to (group, or population-level) behaviour is insubstantial.

Making bullshit claims about women based on dodgy science and cherry-picked brain data doesn’t advance the feminist cause one little bit. Furthermore, this approach completely ignores the very real and often highly disturbing social challenges that women face on a daily basis. ‘Neurofeminism‘ is apparently a thing now (haven’t read that book, can’t really comment), but these articles make no useful contribution to that discourse whatsoever.

Another irrelevant, picture; just because I really fucking detest Twilight.