Sex difference studies are 'edgy'. You see a lot of them get posted on Reddit in the science subreddit because some morons think it contradicts gender equality on some level when in fact in the long run a lot of the actual neural and non-neural differences (and these are averages from normally-distributed samples; when someone commits the ecological fallacy I want to hit them with my statistics textbook) are negligible in the great scheme of things.
I'm one of those people that gets a little pissy when (especially that dti fMRI pre-pub) gender-based stuff starts popping up. I don't think people are morons, that's not really a working dialogue, but I find that a lot of those people are responding to the interpretation itself, where this information stands in a social context, because there absolutely are shitheads that will use that information as some veneer of 'truth' to support their already pre-disposed notions (which is why I don't like it when people say "of course there are differences between men and womens brains," regardless of the side of the debate they are on). It seems like sometimes both sides are debating about implications of the ecological fallacy (and you have to remember not everyone gets a stats book along with implications, and even in my stats class we were discussing before, philosophy or interpretation weren't even considered to be worthy of a footnote), and that in and of itself is important. The social dialogue hardly ever matches up with the scientific discussion because they have different contexts, but they are most definitely not isolated from one another.
Absolutely, this really is the issue that should be talked about more, but even within the scientific world, gender doesn't exactly get the treatment (silly economists) it deserves. If you don't read it already, I really enjoy the neuroskeptic blog, he does a nice colloquial (enough) analysis that I enjoy, but without being voracious, especially in concern to fMRI and related imaging methodology, which I also tend to be heavily skeptical of. Just an aside. ...some morons think it contradicts gender equality on some level ...
in the long run a lot of the actual neural and non-neural differences are negligible...
I had to review that damn DTI fMRI pre-pub for my honors seminar. There's excellent criticism of it all over the internet. My neuroscience textbook sums it up best: none of these differences we've observed have so far been traced to anything biological and it's very likely that at least half of the reason for the observed difference is sociocultural.