I read this UK Daily Mail article with a very strong sense of déjà vu again. Didn't I fairly recently write about it? In last September, to be exact.
And indeed I did! Most, if not all, of the piece is recycled from an earlier piece.
Here's one of the glorious quotes from Dr. Mosley:
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, an expert on the brain who I visited at Cambridge University, has done a lot of pioneering work on this. He believes, broadly, that people of whatever gender fall somewhere along a ‘systemiser’ to ‘empathiser’ spectrum.
Systemisters are people who enjoy breaking down and analysing systems. They are more likely to become train spotters or computer scientists.
They are what he has called ‘male brained’ — as these qualities occur most frequently, but far from exclusively, in men.
Empathisers, on the other hand, are more typically ‘female’ brained as they are more typically women.
Although there are exceptions, most men — when tested — come out as more ‘systemising’ than ‘empathising’, while for women it is the other way round.
And this is the picture we are given of systemisers!
I love it! Lovelovelove it! It's a beautiful example of biased thinking. Examples of systemizing behavior are all picked from stuff guys do more and that means systemizing is a male brain thing. But of course many traditionally female hobbies and chores also require good systemizing skills. If you omit all of those and put in a picture of train spotting guys, well, you have made your case.
There's so much wrong with this repeat article. Read my prior post for some of my criticisms and this 2010 post on the digit length comparisons.