Country-level gender inequality is associated with structural differences in the brains of women and men
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
ISSN
0027-8424
1091-6490
Date Issued
2023
Author(s)
André Zugman
Luz María Alliende
Vicente Medel
Richard A.I. Bethlehem
Jakob Seidlitz
Grace Ringlein
Celso Arango
Aurina Arnatkevičiūtė
Laila Asmal
Mark Bellgrove
Vivek Benegal
Miquel Bernardo
Jorge Bosch-Bayard
Rodrigo Bressan
Geraldo F. Busatto
Mariana N. Castro
Tiffany Chaim-Avancini
Albert Compte
Monise Costanzi
Leticia Czepielewski
Paola Dazzan
Camilo de la Fuente-Sandoval
Marta Di Forti
Covadonga M. Díaz-Caneja
Ana María Díaz-Zuluaga
Stefan Du Plessis
Fabio L. S. Duran
Sol Fittipaldi
Alex Fornito
Nelson B. Freimer
Ary Gadelha
Clarissa S. Gama
Ranjini Garani
Clemente Garcia-Rizo
Cecilia Gonzalez Campo
Alfonso Gonzalez-Valderrama
Salvador Guinjoan
Bharath Holla
Agustín Ibañez
Daniza Ivanovic
Andrea Jackowski
Pablo Leon-Ortiz
Christine Lochner
Carlos López-Jaramillo
Hilmar Luckhoff
Raffael Massuda
Philip McGuire
Jun Miyata
Romina Mizrahi
Robin Murray
Aysegul Ozerdem
Pedro M. Pan
Mara Parellada
Lebogan Phahladira
Juan P. Ramirez-Mahaluf
Ramiro Reckziegel
Tiago Reis Marques
Francisco Reyes-Madrigal
Annerine Roos
Pedro Rosa
Giovanni Salum
Freda Scheffler
Gunter Schumann
Mauricio Serpa
Dan J. Stein
Angeles Tepper
Jeggan Tiego
Tsukasa Ueno
Eduardo A. Undurraga
Pedro Valdes-Sosa
Isabel Valli
Mirta Villarreal
Toby T. Winton-Brown
Nefize Yalin
ZAMORANO MENDIETA, FRANCISCO JAVIER
Marcus V. Zanetti
Anderson M. Winkler
Daniel S. Pine
Sara Evans-Lacko
Nicolas A. Crossley
Pratima Murthy
Amit Chakrabarti
Debasish Basu
B.N. Subodh
Lenin Singh
Roshan Singh
Kartik Kalyanram
Kamakshi Kartik
Kalyanaraman Kumaran
Ghattu Krishnaveni
Rebecca Kuriyan
Sunita Simon Kurpad
Gareth J. Barker
Rose D. Bharath
Sylvane Desrivieres
Meera Purushottam
Dimitri P. Orfanos
Eesha Sharma
Matthew Hickman
Jon Heron
Mireille B. Toledano
Nilakshi Vaidya
Type
Resource Types::text::journal::journal article
URL Institutional Repository
Abstract
<jats:p>Gender inequality across the world has been associated with a higher risk to mental health problems and lower academic achievement in women compared to men. We also know that the brain is shaped by nurturing and adverse socio-environmental experiences. Therefore, unequal exposure to harsher conditions for women compared to men in gender-unequal countries might be reflected in differences in their brain structure, and this could be the neural mechanism partly explaining women’s worse outcomes in gender-unequal countries. We examined this through a random-effects meta-analysis on cortical thickness and surface area differences between adult healthy men and women, including a meta-regression in which country-level gender inequality acted as an explanatory variable for the observed differences. A total of 139 samples from 29 different countries, totaling 7,876 MRI scans, were included. Thickness of the right hemisphere, and particularly the right caudal anterior cingulate, right medial orbitofrontal, and left lateral occipital cortex, presented no differences or even thicker regional cortices in women compared to men in gender-equal countries, reversing to thinner cortices in countries with greater gender inequality. These results point to the potentially hazardous effect of gender inequality on women’s brains and provide initial evidence for neuroscience-informed policies for gender equality.</jats:p>
Subjects
gender inequality
;
structural brain mri
;
sex differences
;
adult
;
brain
;
female
;
gender equity
;
humans
;
male
;
sex factors
;
adult
;
anterior cingulate
;
article
;
controlled study
;
explanatory variable
;
female
;
gender equity
;
gender inequality
;
human
;
human experiment
;
male
;
meta analysis
;
neuroscience
;
nuclear magnetic resonance imaging
;
occipital cortex
;
right hemisphere
;
surface area
;
thickness
;
brain
;
diagnostic imaging
;
gender equity
;
sex factor