I find it interesting to go back to this example from Anne Fausto-Sterling.
She writes: “The winter of 1992 was a hard one.”
We had a hard, tough, cold winter in 1992
and that was probably true just in terms of the weather.
But she means it was a hard winter in the debate
about this “beam” in the brain, the corpus callosum –
That was really hard, with publications for and publications against.
Whatever anyone said was immediately contradicted.
And then it was about this, this … it was the first big debate that broke out
about “Are women’s and men’s multitasking abilities different?”
… and if they are, is it because of their brains?
Because of this part of the corpus callosum,
Not the whole corpus callosum, just this part at the back – the splenium –
which in women, was more bulbous … it extended more into both hemispheres
and in men less, it was flatter.
So is that why women have better connections between their hemispheres?
Is that how they can do many tasks at once?
Those from the right and those from the left and everything that crosses the middle …
and in the men the hemispheres don't talk to each other so well,
so they have to concentrate on one thing at a time?
And so this was debated up and down, in the media and in neuroscience,
in brain research, and it went on like this for a while.
So after the hard winter in 1992, the controversy went on for some years.
Until 1997, when Bishop and Wahlsten did a meta-analysis
and said “No, we can say based on our analysis: The difference does not exist”.
So they did a different kind of analysis.
They took all the publications up to that time and with a certain kind of statistics
they were able to show that in the end this difference doesn’t stand up.
And then it was over.