Are Male and Female Brains Actually Different? Neuroscientists Have an Answer.

For centuries, people have tried to draw a hard line between male and female brains—usually to justify some lazy idea about who’s more logical, emotional, or good at reading a map. But modern science isn’t backing those stereotypes up. In fact, researchers say the brain is far messier, and far more interesting, than a binary label.

“I’m not aware of any measure you can make of the human brain where the male and female distributions don’t overlap,” Dr. Armin Raznahan, chief of the Section on Developmental Neurogenomics at the National Institute of Mental Health, told Live Science. If you held two brains in front of you, one male and one female, you probably couldn’t tell which was which.

Still, some real differences do exist. Studies using AI and high-resolution imaging are now picking up subtle variations in brain structure and function—like how white matter is bundled and insulated or how specific regions light up during tasks.

In a recent study led by Dr. Yvonne Lui at NYU Langone, AI models were able to predict the biological sex of young adult participants based on brain scans with up to 98 percent accuracy. “I believe ours is the first study to detect brain microstructural differences between sexes,” Lui said.

But what these differences mean is another story. That’s where things get blurry. Some researchers argue that structural quirks—like females having slightly more gray matter around the hippocampus or males having a larger putamen—may not affect cognition at all. They could simply be the brain’s way of arriving at the same outcome through different routes.

Others say these insights could one day help explain why certain psychiatric and neurological conditions show up differently in men and women. Depression and migraines, for instance, are more common in women. Autism and schizophrenia are more common in men. But teasing apart biology from social conditioning isn’t a simple task.

“It’s actually incredibly difficult in humans to causally distinguish how much of a sex difference is societally or environmentally driven,” Raznahan explained.

Gender adds another layer. Recent studies like the ABCD project are trying to track how gender identity and societal roles might also shape brain development. “The brain differences most strongly tied to sex were found in networks responsible for processing visual stimuli, movement, decision-making, and emotion,” said Dr. Elvisha Dhamala, a neuroscientist involved in the study.

The takeaway? There’s no single brain that’s male or female—just a spectrum of wiring shaped by genes, hormones, experience, and culture. For now, science is less interested in boxing brains by sex and more focused on understanding how each one works.