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Historically even after the fashion for phrenology had declined by the late 19th century, the science that replaced it – craniometry – assumed that brain size was a powerful surrogate marker for intelligence.
Men’s brains, Paul Broca reported, were on average 14 per cent heavier than women’s. Broca’s data were elegantly picked apart by Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man. Most of the difference is accounted for by differences in height and build between men and women, and once corrected for these, the gross difference evaporates. After Broca’s death – it turned out at his post-mortem that his own brain was disappointingly small – the enthusiasm for relating brain size to intelligence receded
There have been claims that the shape and size of the corpus callosum – the broad tract of white matter that connects the two hemispheres – differs between the sexes, but they have been vigorously contested.
Even if such differences could be unequivocally substantiated no one has the slightest idea what their implications might be for the allegedly essential differences between the sexes. The myth of the left-brain cognitive male and the right-brain affective female still persists, while women’s supposedly thicker corpus callosum has been invoked to explain why men are more single-minded and women better at multi-tasking.
Although there is no significant differercne between men and women's that does not stop the myths persisting.
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