According to Dr. Nick Drydakis, women could benefit in the workplace from thinking like men (thanks Nick). Cue a resurfacing of the female/male brain test where you can work out if you reason like a girl or problem solve like a dude.
There are loads of these tests, and every few months a new one gets pushed to the front page - the one the Mail Online is bandying about at the moment goes a little something like this...
Based on a study done by Anglia Ruskin University of 16,000 Britons, Dr. Drydakis studied participants' salaries as well as whether or not they had a 'male' or 'female' brain, finding that women with 'male' brains earned over 6% more than those with 'female' brains. The validity of such tests are, as you'd expect, argued over by scientists and researchers, and the above one isn't exactly definitive, because it hinges on the concept that 'male' and 'female' brains exist.
But, as it turns out, there could be some truth to it or, at the very least, it's something that scientists haven't yet been able to disprove.
Research from 2014 suggests that the connections and 'flow' in a woman's brain takes a different path than to a man's - but the real question is, should we put this down to an innate difference (a GaGa-esque Born This Way sitch) or are we shaped by our environment (ie we're conditioned to be different, because society keeps subliminally telling us how different we are)? The BBC devoted a whole episode of Horizon to the question, collaborating with world experts to create an online Sex ID test, that's a bit less reductive than the checklist that this isn't as fantastical as you might believe.
READ MORE: Here's The Concise Argument For Why Women Need To Get Into Science
So how accurate are these sorts of tests, then? As in really? The two presenters of the Horizon episode, Dr Michael Mosley and Professor Alice Roberts, can't decide. Dr Mosley believes that, depending on the hormones a foetus is exposed to in the womb (among other factors), brains are either wired male or wired female. Professor Roberts finds this damaging, thinks the Sex ID tests are biased, and is concerned that theories like this discourage women from going into the sciences as a career.
'We live in a country where fewer than three out of 10 physics A levels are taken by girls, where just 7% of engineers are women,' she says on the programme, adding 'and where men still earn on average nearly 20% more than their female colleagues.'
Scientists at the University of Pennysylvania, however, scanned nearly a thousand brains of both men and women, and found some interesting differences. Professor Ruben Gur, one of the researches, explains that they found men to have a stronger connection between the front and back of their brains. This would imply that men 'are better able to connect what they see with what they do, which is what you need to be able to do if you are a hunter. You see something, you need to respond right away.'
Women, on the other hand, connected better from left to right, potentially showing a greater emotional awareness and an ability to multitask. This doesn't, as Professor Roberts points out, explain whether it's a womb-based, innate programming, or the result of environmental differences.But as my chances of becoming a master physicist at this stage are pretty low at this stage, I decide to throw caution to the wind and take the Sex ID test on the BBC website.
It requires a ruler, some concentration and for you not to be hungover. Mainly because it's divided into six parts, each of which aim to test a different part of your grey matter. Part one, for example, looks at your spatial awareness, and you've got to match up these cute little sticks (makes more sense in context), whereas another part has you guessing the emotions from images of people's eyes alone.
There's one section which I scored so badly on, I was convinced the results would be 'You have no brain' (it involves rotating 3D shapes), but thankfully nobody came out of the computer to have a good old laugh at my crapness. You result is, unsurprisingly, fairly fluid – you're placed on a ticker and can compare yourself to the average female score, and the average male score (of which I was directly in the centre of. I'm both a mediocre man, and a mediocre woman. This is like my English Lit degree marks all over again), as well as looking at the individual parts of the test to see which ones you scored 'female' on and which you scored 'male'.
And regardless of whether this stuff is true, or totally batshit, it's fascinating and worth losing 20 minutes of your life to.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.