[DanaC]

Yes. I read about that. I also read a lot of the criticisms of that study and the implications that were drawn from it.

Here's one that rounds up some of the criticism:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health...e_imaging.html

The study in question, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used a technology called diffusion tensor imaging to model the structural connectivity of the brains of nearly 1,000 young people, ranging in age from 8 to 22.

One important possibility the authors don’t consider is that their results have more to do with brain size than brain sex. Male brains are, on average, larger than females and a large brain is not simply a smaller brain scaled up.

Larger brains create different sorts of engineering problems and so—to minimize energy demands, wiring costs, and communication times—there may be physical reasons for different arrangements in differently sized brains. The results may reflect the different wiring solutions of larger versus smaller brains, rather than sex differences per se.

But also, popular references to women’s brains being designed for social skills and remembering conversations, or male brains for map reading, are utterly misleading.

In a larger earlier study (from which the participants of the PNAS study were a subset), the same research team compellingly demonstrated that the sex differences in the psychological skills they measured—executive control, memory, reasoning, spatial processing, sensorimotor skills, and social cognition—are almost all trivially small.

To give a sense of the huge overlap in behavior between males and females, of the 26 possible comparisons, 11 sex differences were either nonexistent or so small that if you were to select a boy and girl at random and compare their scores on a task, the “right” sex would be superior less than 53 percent of the time.

Even the much-vaunted female advantage in social cognition and male advantage in spatial processing were so modest that a randomly chosen boy would outscore a randomly chosen girl on social cognition—and the girl would outscore the boy on spatial processing—more than 40 percent of the time.

Yet the authors describe these differences as “pronounced” and as reflecting “behavioral complementarity”—scientific jargon-speak for “men are from Mars, women are from Venus.” Rather than drawing on their impressively rich data-set to empirically test questions about how brain connectivity characteristics relate to behavior, the authors offer untested stereotype-based speculation. Even though, with such considerable overlap in male/female distributions, biological sex is a dismal guide to psychological ability.

Also missing from the study is any mention of experience-dependent brain plasticity. Why?
As prominent feminist neuroscientists have noted, the social phenomenon of gender means that a person’s biological sex has a significant impact on the experiences (including social, material, physical, and mental) she or he encounters which will, in turn, leave neurological traces.

Yet the researchers do not pay any attention to the gendered experiences (such as hobbies, subjects studied at school or higher education, or participation in sporting activities) of the young males and females in their sample.

This absence has two consequences. First, the researchers miss an opportunity to investigate whether gendered experiences might influence brain development and enhance the acquisition of important skills valuable to all. The second consequence is that, by failing to look at gendered social influences, the authors guarantee that no data will be produced that challenge the notion of “hardwired” male/female neural signatures.

These characteristics of the PNAS study are very common in neuroscientific investigations of male/female sex differences and represent two important ways in which scientific research can be subtly “neurosexist,” reinforcing and legitimating gender stereotypes in ways that are not scientifically justified. And when researchers are “blinded” by sex, they can overlook potentially informative research strategies.

If you read the whole article, you'll find lots of links for those assertions and criticisms.

This has some interesting stuff to say about it as well:

http://www.jpehs.co.uk/2013/12/03/br...female-brains/

There are also some really good academic responses, but I can't access them from home (the library license is only from on campus).