Are men and women really two planets apart? In "Brain Storm," Rebecca M.

Jordan-Young, a Barnard College professor of women's studies, sets out to debunk the proliferating "brain-organization" studies that attempt to explain in purely biological terms (since XX and XY seem not to be enough) why males and females differ in one way or another. Or, in some cases, fail to differ. Issues of gender understandably provoke a lot of red-faced uproar in all sorts of warring quarters. Neuroscientist Simon LeVay's 1991 report in Science locating male homosexuality in an area of the hypothalamus and Lawrence H. Summers' suggestion, while he was still president of Harvard, that the unequal number of tenured male and female scientists indicates "a difference in aptitude" are signal examples. Jordan-Young, a sociomedical scientist (it's a portmanteau field, embracing psychology, sociology, anthropology and health policy), was particularly troubled by LeVay's findings, which she found "interesting but also puzzling. How could gayness take a single identifiable form in the brain when it takes such varied forms in people's lives?" The book resulting from her puzzlement is a refreshing and sensible look at the conduct of an area of science that is perhaps not as empirical as it should be. Part of the reason is that brain-organization research when humans are the subjects must confine itself to what Jordan-Young calls "quasiexperiments." That is (to simplify a great deal), while you can pump hormones into a rat and watch what happens, you can do no such thing with a human being. When it comes to the effects of prenatal hormone exposure a focus of brain-organization studies on sex-typed predilections, and also Jordan-Young's focus researchers must collect data from th

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The study involved 311 men and women with an average age of 23. In order to better understand aspects of social networking behavior, the researchers looked at the amount of time subjects spent managing profiles, the number of photos they shared, the size of their online networks and how promiscuous they were in terms of friending

behavior. The participants completed a questionnaire designed to measure self worth and were asked about their typical behaviors on Facebook. There were differences between women and men. Overall, the results suggest that, compared with men, females identify more strongly with their image and appearance and use Facebook to compete for attention, said the lead author of the study, Michael A. Stefanone, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Buffalo. The women who had the largest social networks and posted more photos of themselves were more highly vested in their appearance. The results suggest persistent differences in the behavior of men and women that result from a cultural focus on female image and appearance, Stefanone said in a news release. [I]t is disappointing to me that in the year 2011 so many young women continue to assert their self worth via their physical appearance in this case, by posting photos of themselves on Facebook as a form of advertisement. Perhaps this reflects the distorted value pegged to womens looks throughout the popular culture and in reality programming from The Bachelor to Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The authors also speculated that posting a lot of photos of oneself in the company of other people may serve to communicate the importance of particular relationships because these bonds may provide security regarding ones appearance and self worth. The people who tended to base their self worth on things like academic competence, family love and support, and being a virtuous or moral person spent less time online and showed less interest in attentionseeking through social media. The study was published this week in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking. Here's a You Tube explanation of the study.