The Female Brain

The Female Brain other is political correctness. I have chosen to emphasize scientific truth over political correctness even though scientific truths may not always be welcome.

I have met thousands of women during the years my clinic has been running. They have talked to me about the most intimate details of events in their childhoods, teen years, career decisions, choice of a mate, sex, motherhood, and menopause. While female brain wiring has not changed much in a million years, the modern challenges of the different phases of women’s lives are remarkably different from those of our foremothers.

Even though there are now proven scientific differences between men’s and women’s brains, this, in many ways, is the Periclean golden age for women. The age of Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato was the first time in Western history that men gained enough resources to have the leisure for intellectual and scientific pursuits. The twenty-first century is the first time in history that women are in a similar position.

We have not only the critical, unprecedented control over our fertility but independent economic means in a networked economy. Scientific advances in women’s fertility have given us enormous options. We can now choose when, if, and how to bear children over many more years of our lives. We are no longer economically dependent on men, and technology has provided the flexibility to toggle between professional and domestic duties at the same time and in the same place. These options give women the gift of using their female brains to create a new paradigm for the way they manage their professional, reproductive, and personal lives.

We are living in the midst of a revolution in consciousness about women’s biological reality that will transform human society. I cannot predict the exact nature of the change, but I suspect it will be a shift from simplistic to deep thinking about the changes we need to make on a grand scale. If external reality is the sum total of the way people conceive it, then our external reality will change only when the dominant view of it changes. The scientific facts behind how the female brain functions, perceives reality, responds to emotions, reads emo162