The Master Betrayed

Gender and the Hemispheres

Difference invites understanding; denial invites distortion.

Gender and the Hemispheres approaches gender with unusual care, not because the subject is fragile, but because it has been made so. McGilchrist is clear from the outset that much of the confusion surrounding gender and the brain arises from a desire for overly simple answers. The temptation is to map masculinity onto one hemisphere and femininity onto the other, as though the complexities of biology, psychology, and culture could be resolved by a neat division. Reality, he insists, does not cooperate with such shortcuts.

A common assumption is that the right hemisphere is somehow “female” — empathic, nurturing, relational — while the left hemisphere is “male” — technical, analytical, and goal-oriented. McGilchrist understands why this idea appeals. Certain traits are statistically more visible in men, others in women. Yet appealing as this symmetry may be, it collapses under closer scrutiny. Some of the most robust psychological differences between men and women cut directly across this imagined mapping.

One well-established finding is that, on average, women tend to show greater verbal fluency, while men tend to perform better at visuospatial manipulation. These differences are not absolute, nor do they apply to every individual, but they are statistically reliable. The difficulty for the simplistic gender–hemisphere analogy is that verbal fluency is strongly associated with the left hemisphere, while visuospatial skills are strongly associated with the right. If anything, this suggests the opposite of the popular stereotype.

This does not mean that gender differences are irrelevant to brain function. On the contrary, McGilchrist emphasises that they are often poorly studied. In many neuroimaging experiments, data from men and women are aggregated, obscuring important distinctions. In some cases, the same task recruits predominantly right-hemisphere networks in men and left-hemisphere networks in women. When these differences are averaged together, they disappear, giving the false impression that nothing of interest is happening.

What can tentatively be said is not that men or women “use” one hemisphere more than the other, but that they may use the same hemispheres for different purposes. The brain is not a static machine but a responsive organ shaped by development, hormones, and lived experience. Any attempt to impose a single explanatory scheme risks flattening this complexity.

The conversation then turns to the idea of greater male variability — a phenomenon well known in psychology but rarely discussed publicly. While average differences between men and women are often small, differences at the extremes are much larger. Men are overrepresented among both the most impaired and the most exceptional. This pattern appears across domains, from intelligence to risk-taking, and reflects the broader distribution of male traits.

This observation is descriptive, not moral. It does not imply superiority or inferiority, nor does it prescribe how individuals should live. McGilchrist is careful to stress that political conclusions cannot be read directly from biological facts. Nevertheless, refusing to acknowledge these patterns does not make them disappear. It merely pushes discussion into the realm of ideology, where evidence becomes subordinate to theory.

Evolutionary perspectives offer one possible lens through which to understand these differences. From the standpoint of species survival, stability and bonding are critical, particularly in early child-rearing. Risk-taking and experimentation, though costly, also play a role in adaptation. Over time, these pressures may have shaped different tendencies in men and women without fixing them into rigid destinies.

The difficulty arises when societies confuse equality with sameness. Equality means equal dignity and respect, not identical roles or outcomes. When difference is denied, genuine choice is undermined. Individuals are pressured to conform not to tradition, but to a new orthodoxy that treats biology as irrelevant and embodiment as an inconvenience.

McGilchrist is particularly concerned with the moral consequences of this denial. When lived experience conflicts with official narratives, people feel silenced or shamed. Women who wish to prioritise motherhood may feel devalued; men who fail to find identity outside work may feel lost. The tragedy lies not in difference itself, but in the refusal to speak honestly about it.

Throughout the conversation, McGilchrist returns to a familiar theme: the tyranny of theory over reality. To say that something is true does not make it so. The left hemisphere, when dominant, insists that declaration overrides experience. The right hemisphere, by contrast, remains answerable to what is encountered — bodies, relationships, and limits.

In the end, the question of gender and the hemispheres resists final answers. What it demands instead is humility, attentiveness, and restraint. We must be willing to distinguish without ranking, to describe without prescribing, and to listen without rushing to resolution. Only then can conversation remain genuinely human.