According to social psychologist Cliodhna O’Connor based at Maynooth University in Ireland, Ruben and Raquel Gur’s study on white matter is a textbook example of how research into sex differences can quickly become absorbed into people’s wider gender stereotypes. When the paper was published in 2014, she decided to monitor reaction to it. What she found was shocking. “It was covered in all the major national newspapers,” she tells me. “The main meaning that was taken out of it was just the fact that men and women are fundamentally different in some very essential, primitive, unavoidable way.”
