Wonderful article!

But this is not really what that study shows.

People measured parts of male and female brains, forgot that they were different sizes, and announced: we found differences between male and female brains! Well, yes, they did. Then they supposed, without any evidence, that this caused some differences between how males and females think. Bad logic, that. Especially bad logic because variation in the sizes of brain regions have not correlated particularly strongly with behavior or capability in most tasks.

Lise Eliot's team has shown fairly convincingly that most of the supposed differences were because the brains themselves were different sizes. People have since used machine learning to demonstrate that even so, there are systematic structural changes that are enough to tell the difference between male and female brains most of the time. But the logic about whether it matters is still just as bad.

Your own brain, with exactly the same (gross morphological) structure doesn't produce the same behavior when you're hungry as when you're fed. It doesn't produce the same behavior when you're sleepy as when you're well-rested. Or if you're drunk as compared to sober.

So, it's good to understand how sexually dimorphic the human brain is--structurally, not so much, even if you can train a machine learning system to pick out enough subtle clues to make the right call most of the time (way better than size alone could). Oh, and you can pick out trans women and trans men from cis women and men, too, and from each other, at least some of the time (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7132951/).

But this never told us whether brains are operationally dimorphic. We don't know that there's "no difference". We only know that when studies had claimed that there were some structural differences, they were mistaken about what and how large.

So we're still left to puzzle out operational differences from behavior--neuroscience can't help us that much, because if we find a variety of differences in, say gene expression (we do) and hormones (we do), we can't tell whether the changes cause differences between male and female cognition (plausible), whether they act to compensate for each other and prevent differences (also plausible), or whether they are irrelevant to cognition (also plausible--maybe they're important for maintenance functions, or maybe they do literally nothing but since they don't matter that they're accidentally there is of no consequence).

If the bottom line is equality, none of this matters. We live in society, and certainly society plus biology yields some systematic differences--and equality is the right way to structure society, regardless. Just pass the bill already! And act on it.

(And be prepared for acting on it to be complicated. For instance, if you have a 20-year-long career ladder to climb, and the source of the problem is at the bottom of the ladder, you won't naturally fix the top until 20 years after you fix the source of the problem.)