"Male / Female Brain" may be invalid

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The study it seems to be based on interests me.

http://www.math.kth.se/matstat/gru/godis/sex.pdf

102 neonates (58 female, 44 male) completed testing, drawn from a larger sample of 154 randomly selected neonates on the maternity wards at the Rosie Maternity Hospital, Cambridge.
51 additional subjects did not complete testing due to extended crying, falling asleep, or fussiness, so their data were not used.

Three categories were assigned, based on coded observation of the length of gaze upon each object:
Face Preference
Mobile Preference
No Preference

It is interesting to me that a large proportion of the female infants (46%) showed no preference between the mobile and the face. A smaller, but significant proportion of the male infants (31%) also showed no preference. I also wonder what the sex ratio was in the 51 infants who did not complete the study. And, since this is a relatively small sample size, I wonder what the results would be if a similar, but larger scale study were done.

In fact, I'd be curious to see what would have happened had they repeated that same study, with the same infants, a couple hours after feeding them.

May I complement you on your interests and say that this,

...might be the best sig line, ever?

Interesting. Also I wonder how much of that was related to vision mechanics (rather than say, face recognition), as there are long established gender differences in visual motion perception.

Yes, that is another good point.

Something else I see whenever these studies are cited, especially when the findings are included in support of an argument without including a reference to the original study, is that the significance of the differences is usually exaggerated, and the fact that there is more overlap than there is divergence is left on the cutting floor, so to speak.

I wonder how this relates to the finding that austists are more androgynous than neurotypicals, and also more likely to be transgender?

My working model of gender has been that it's two overlapping bell curves; it's nice to know that it's an accurate model. I suspect that autism shifts the brain towards the centre (as the androgyny findings suggest; I don't think that shift actually causes autism though), so it makes it more likely that an individual would develop a gender identity opposite to their sex (as the statistics tell us happens).

I also wonder how this relates to the idea men being more mentally variant? Is the masculine bell curve wider?

Zoe Brain has been posting studies - most of which show overlapping dual bell curves - for nearly a decade now. She also posts any that dispute that data shape, but has noticed that those tend to not have good methodology. Sift through her blog and you'll find that much of this has been sorted out, expanded and confirmed over the last two decades, down to the level of which genes are expressed, when and what structures are affected (& to what degree they differentiate).

Those findings would seep out into general knowledge quicker but for two things:
1.) People who started building their careers in the 1970's based on the 'Blank Slate' brain theory & rose to positions of influence in their fields.
2.) People who currently have a financial & social stake in the same.

Fortunately, in the first case their careers are nearing an end either due to age or because their pet theories (often in psychology) have been resoundingly disproved in other fields (such as neurology). The fate of the second reason has yet to be seen.

I'm commenting for updates, and to state that the male brain theory is obviously flawed if only that it misses so many people diagnostically. It is imperfect.

I DO find the theory that women with PCOS have a higher risk of having children with Autism. Being a woman with PCOS, who also has excess androgen (testosterone), and seeing as how hormone levels during fetal development are a factor as Edenthiel stated on Page 1, that makes sense.