The Women's Brains By Stephen Jay Gould Summary

The Women’s Brains essay was first published in Natural History in 1980 by Stephen Jay Gould, a geology and zoology professor at Harvard University. In this essay, Paul Broca, a respectable and influential professor of clinical surgery at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, concluded from his research on brain sizes that women “could not equal them [men] in intelligence”. Despite the prevalent acceptance of this conclusion in the nineteenth century, Gould refused to concede and argued against Broca’s claim through a scientific filter, where historical information, quantitative numbers and experts’ opinions were used to present an objective and credible counterargument. The clever manipulation and usage of the evidences effectively substantiated

By doing so, Gould demonstrated exactly his claim as readers saw how Broca’s belief was being continuously agreed upon or challenged by many individuals, and even experts. The diverse opinions on Broca’s research and conclusion proved that the seemingly “scientific truth” were merely based on his own

According to Broca, the average weight of 292 male brains was 1,325 grams and 1,114 grams for 140 female brains. Hence, the average weight difference between male and female brains were 181 grams. The explicit statistics Gould provided may shock his audiences and evoke their curiosity of the reason behind this dramatic difference. Gould then went on to point out the loophole in Broca’s argument that, he “made no attempt to measure the effect of size alone” and claimed that height “cannot account for the entire difference.” Evidently, Broca’s research lacked consideration towards confounding variables that have affected the results and the conclusion he drew from it, and hence his claim of women inferiority was inaccurate. Using convincing quantitative numbers and identifying the defects of Broca’s conclusion, Gould effectively proved that “numbers, by themselves, specify nothing. All depends upon what you do with them.” The science that Broca claimed was merely his own inference from the set of numbers and it did not represent the truth. Gould went on to illustrate the drastic impacts that size and age have on the datas with more quantitative numbers. After correction for height and age, Broca’s measured difference of men and women brain of 181 grams reduced by more than a third to 113 grams. Gould