ReviewNeuroscience and biobehavioral reviews2021
Dump the "dimorphism": Comprehensive synthesis of human brain studies reveals few male-female differences beyond size.
Review in Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 164 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
164 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Country-level gender inequality is associated with structural differences in the brains of women and men.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Pooled it
- Handedness and midsagittal corpus callosum morphology: a meta-analytic evaluation.Brain structure & function · 2022Pooled it
- Brain-based sex differences in autism spectrum disorder across the lifespan: A systematic review of structural MRI, fMRI, and DTI findings.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2021Pooled it
- Sex matters for the enhancement of cognitive training with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).Biology of sex differences · 2023Trial
- The relevance of rich club regions for functional outcome post-stroke is enhanced in women.Human brain mapping · 2023Trial
- Volumetric and Intrastructural Characterization of the Substantia Nigra Using Optimized Synthetic MR Images Derived From Quantitative T1 Maps at 3 T.NMR in biomedicine · 2026Article
- Clinical validation pipeline of a deep learning model for segmenting and quantifying intracranial and ventricular volumes on computed tomography.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Substantial evidence against sex differences in bed nucleus of the stria terminalis volume in the human brain.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Adversity and adolescent brain development: differential associations with grey and white matter across two longitudinal cohorts.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Neonatal estradiol influences regional gene expression for early sex-specific inflammatory responses in the 5xFAD mouse model.Biology of sex differences · 2026Article
- Regional sex differences in human cortical anatomy vary in their morphometric bases and overlap with sex chromosomal and gonadal influences.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Predicting stress response trajectories: Differential contributions of limbic and prefrontal regions to cortisol and affective responses.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Visual field map size constrains working memory precision.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- From Developmental Timing to Clinical Visibility: An Integrative Narrative Review of Sex-Related Neurocognitive Development.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Robust but independent sex differences in human brain function, structure, and behavior.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Brain charts for neuroanatomical sex differences across the human lifespan.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- An Investigation of the Correlation Between Total Intracranial Volume and Body Mass Index.Saudi medical journal · 2026Article
- Unraveling sexually dimorphic offspring behaviors: maternal premating stress and the neuro-microbial-metabolic network.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- Sex-specific changes in the hippocampal proteome of Negr1Biology of sex differences · 2026Article
- Predicting brain volumes from anthropometric and demographic features: insights from UK biobank neuroimaging data.Brain structure & function · 2026Article
104 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
With the explosion of neuroimaging, differences between male and female brains have been exhaustively analyzed. Here we synthesize three decades of human MRI and postmortem data, emphasizing meta-analyses and other large studies, which collectively reveal few reliable sex/gender differences and a history of unreplicated claims. Males' brains are larger than females' from birth, stabilizing around 11 % in adults. This size difference accounts for other reproducible findings: higher white/gray matter ratio, intra- versus interhemispheric connectivity, and regional cortical and subcortical volumes in males. But when structural and lateralization differences are present independent of size, sex/gender explains only about 1% of total variance. Connectome differences and multivariate sex/gender prediction are largely based on brain size, and perform poorly across diverse populations. Task-based fMRI has especially failed to find reproducible activation differences between men and women in verbal, spatial or emotion processing due to high rates of false discovery. Overall, male/female brain differences appear trivial and population-specific. The human brain is not "sexually dimorphic."
Indexed as
Identifiers
33621637What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.