Debate over women in science continues

In the weeks since Harvard President Lawrence Summers made a number of controversial comments about women in science, the American public has been pressed to find an explanation for exactly why women remain underrepresented science careers.

Previous studies have found pronounced differences between the ways that men and women's bodies work. According to a 2003 article in the magazine Psychology Today, women produce more saliva than men, learn to speak at an earlier age, are more likely to become depressed and are more able to tell how people around them are feeling.

In addition, differences in brain structure give scientists the idea that there may be major differences between the way that men and women think and acquire knowledge. Men typically have larger brains than their female counterparts. However, women's brains possess more grey matter, which consists of highly packed nerves.

The problem with researching differences in the way that men and women think is that it is hard to determine whether these differences come from actual brain disparities or simply cultural trends.

In order to overcome this problem, a team of researchers from Emory and Boston Universities decided to perform their research on a slightly difference population: monkeys. Their study, published in the most recent issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, sheds some light on gender differences in learning and memory.

The team tested 90 Rhesus monkeys with a cognitive test designed to gauge spatial memory and learning skills. The test involved placing food under a small brown disk and allowing the monkey to turn the disk over and get the food.

For each trial, scientists added a new disk with food under it in a different place than all the previous disks. By remembering which disks had already been turned over, the monkey would be able to deduce which disk was new, and therefore which disk had food under it.

In monkeys under the age of 15, males were significantly better at completing the tested task. However, the researchers decided to track what happens when they trained the monkey to complete the task before the monkeys actually attempted to complete the test. What they discovered was surprising.

Male monkeys showed no statistically significant improvement when they underwent training. However, female monkeys had dramatically improved memory and completion of the task when they were trained, making their scores comparable to those of the male monkeys.

Though scientists cannot immediately apply the conclusions reached in monkeys to human situations, these results suggest that the female monkeys have the same learning potential as the males; it simply took some training to get them there.

Another aspect of monkey learning which the scientists chose to examine was what happened as the Rhesus monkeys aged.

By comparing experimental results from monkeys representing a wide spectrum of ages, the researchers determined that male monkeys' memories declined much more rapidly than females' memories. This sex difference in cognitive decline may have important implications in how scientists view neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.

The number of age-old jokes about the differences between male and female brains is countless. So although we joke about these differences, there may be scientific fact behind the laughs.

Male and female brains clearly have demonstrable biological differences. It is now up to scientists to show exactly what these differences are and to work to examine ways to compensate for these differences. By understanding individual brain differentiation, society can understand how to develop different learning methods that give everyone the optimal opportunities to excel.