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Male artists dominate galleries. Our research explored if it’s because ‘women don’t paint very well’ – or just discrimination

<p>In the art world, there is a gaping gender imbalance when it comes to male and female artists.</p> <p>In the National Gallery of Australia, <a href="https://nga.gov.au/knowmyname/about/">only 25%</a> of the Australian art collection is work by women. </p> <p>This is far better than the international standard where <a href="https://nmwa.org/support/advocacy/get-facts/">roughly 90%</a> of all artworks exhibited in major collections are by men. The <a href="https://www.artsy.net/artwork/georgia-okeeffe-jimson-weed-slash-white-flower-no-1">most expensive</a> painting by a female artist – Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 – does not even rank among the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_paintings#List_of_highest_prices_paid">100 most expensive paintings</a> ever sold. </p> <p>Why is women’s art valued so much less than art by men?</p> <p>Some economists <a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/02/why_do_women_su.html">have suggested</a> the greater burden of child rearing and other domestic duties means women have had fewer opportunities to succeed in the art world.</p> <p>Others have blamed the “<a href="https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/report-names-laggers-as-women-artists-win-parity-20191029-p534vy.html">quality</a>” of women’s art. In 2013, German painter <a href="https://observer.com/2013/01/georg-baselitz-says-women-dont-paint-very-well/">Georg Baselitz said</a> “Women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact. The market doesn’t lie.”</p> <p>We wanted to know: is work by women generally valued differently to work by men because it is of a lower artistic quality, or is it just discrimination?</p> <h2>Which painting do you like better?</h2> <p>In <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268122002669?dgcid=author">our new research</a> we showed average Americans pairs of paintings, painted between 1625 and 1979, side by side. Each of the pairs are similar in style, motif and period, but one work was by a male artist and the other by a female artist.</p> <p>Participants were in two groups. One group saw the artists’ names and the other didn’t. We wanted to see whether more people among those who saw artist names preferred the male painting.</p> <p>If seeing the names – and thereby inferring artist gender – causes more people to prefer male paintings, then there is gender discrimination.</p> <p>Before we tell you the results, think about what you would have expected. And <a href="https://rmit.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_e4JBs0wxKeftYF0">take a look</a> at our actual painting pairs and see if you can guess which is the male one (hint: you can’t).</p> <p>We were pleasantly surprised to find our participants did not give a hoot about artist gender. In both groups, 54% preferred the painting from a woman.</p> <p>We repeated this experiment, this time rewarding participants if they could accurately guess the preferences of others – the people in the first experiment. </p> <p>Again, 54% of the people in each group picked the female paintings.</p> <h2>Which painting do you think is worth more?</h2> <p>Next we wanted to find out if people picked male paintings for reasons other than personal taste. Art isn’t just bought and sold on aesthetic value: it is a speculative market, where art is treated as an investment.</p> <p>We conducted two more experiments. In one, participants were rewarded if they picked the more expensive painting. In the other, they were rewarded to pick the one painted by the more famous artist.</p> <p>Gender discrimination emerged in both these experiments. When asked to predict the value of and creator fame of paintings, people suddenly swung towards picking male artists. Preference for female paintings fell by 10% and 9% in these two new experiments.</p> <p>Gender discrimination in art comes not from personal aesthetic preference – Baselitz’ argument that women “don’t paint very well” – but people thinking paintings are more valuable and famous when painted by male artists.</p> <h2>A question of fame</h2> <p>In our fifth experiment, we again rewarded participants who could correctly guess which painting would be preferred by others. This time everyone saw the names of the artists. But only one group was told which of the two artists was objectively more famous – the male artist in 90% of cases.</p> <p>The group with that information was 14% more likely to pick male paintings. People used fame information to predict the painting others liked better.</p> <p>If women artists were discriminated against just because of their gender we would have seen a higher premium put on the male artists even in questions of aesthetics.</p> <p>Here, discrimination only occured when our participants were asked to assign a monetary value to the art works, or when they were given information about the level of fame of the painter. </p> <p>This means our art appreciators discriminated not on gender, but on something closely associated with gender: fame.</p> <p>And because male artists have, historically, been given <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1574067606010234">more opportunities</a> to become artists – and therefore become famous – artwork by men is perceived as having a higher value.</p> <p>Policy is slowly starting to recognise and target institutional factors that perpetuate male dominance because of historical notions of fame, like the National Gallery of Australia’s <a href="https://knowmyname.nga.gov.au/">Know my Name</a> initiative. </p> <p>Discrimination in the arts exists, but it often comes from people’s beliefs about what others care to discriminate about. The task ahead is to change perceptions of people and institutions who do not discriminate – but merely conform to others’ discrimination.</p> <p><em>Image credits: Getty Images</em></p> <p><em>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/male-artists-dominate-galleries-our-research-explored-if-its-because-women-dont-paint-very-well-or-just-discrimination-189221" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Conversation</a>. </em></p>

Art

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“Is this a joke?”: Male finalist in Women in Technology award sparks debate

<p>A list of finalists for an award recognising women in technology and science has sparked controversy due to the inclusion of a male executive.</p> <p>Simon Button, the Group Chief Technology Officer at radiology specialist group Qscan, was announced as one of four finalists for the new 2022 Inspiring Diversity in STEM Award because he “inspires diversity” and empowers women, according to the organisation.</p> <p>The annual awards are run by Women In Technology (WiT), Queensland’s peak industry body for women in technology and life sciences, and aim to “recognise outstanding achievement and give women the recognition they deserve”.</p> <p>WiT Chair Iyari Cevallos said this year’s awards were themed to be a tribute to the contribution of women in defining, shaping and growing the digital economy.</p> <p>“As we celebrate and reflect on 25 years of Women in Technology it is as important to focus on the future,” Ms Cevallos said.</p> <p>“I believe we have the ability and responsibility to dream big, to visualise achievements for the women still to come, to continue to increase our energy and momentum in leading and motivating current and future generations of women.</p> <p>“We've created an opportunity to rally around our outstanding talent, unlock their potential, promote each other and ourselves - impacting our community in a way that creates positivity beyond the event itself.”</p> <p>Mr Button made the finalist list along with Professor Amy Mullens, a psychologist with an interest in marginalised communities, pharmaceutical researcher Dr Jyoti Sharma, and Professor Kym Rae, a physically disabled Research Fellow in Indigenous health.</p> <p>The new award has been introduced to celebrate the “ongoing commitment and tireless efforts of all leaders regardless of gender, age or background”, but some have taken to social media to share their disapproval of the move.</p> <p>“Lol is this a joke,” one woman commented.</p> <p>“That’s a long way to say you reward men for doing the bare minimum,” another said.</p> <p>“Having a male executive is certainly showing someone who ‘leads by example’. It’s just the most common example that already exists in STEM,” a third added.</p> <p>“He sure must’ve been the best pick to be a finalist for someone who ‘inspires diversity’ and creates a ‘sense of belonging’ for WiT out of all the nominees.</p> <p>“I mean, how else would you explain an executive up there with two professors and a doctor?”</p> <p>In a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/WiTqld/posts/pfbid02ajHaMedtDTKmRkWpiKHhqB4sTvEyEYb7w54zckFGcMPmNtmEBGETrthcadKxwKMwl" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Facebook post</a> announcing the finalists, WiT described Mr Button as a “digital leader” who “champions diversity and equity in the organisations he leads”, which includes the not-for-profit Hummingbird House, Queensland’s only children’s hospice that supports kids with life-limiting illnesses.</p> <p>“He thrives to create teams with high levels of diversity to drive increased creativity and higher orders of innovation,” the post read.</p> <p>“Nothing gives Simon greater satisfaction than leading teams by giving people the time and space to develop, learn and deliver outstanding outcomes under his stewardship.</p> <p>“He believes that one of the most important responsibilities modern, contemporary digital leaders have is to lead, mentor and shape tomorrow’s technology and business leaders.”</p> <p dir="ltr"> </p> <p> </p> <p> </p> <p><em>Image: WiT: Women In Technology (Facebook)</em></p>

Technology

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New study reveals fascinating fact about gender balance in books

<p dir="ltr">Characters in books are almost four times more likely to be male than female, according to a new artificial intelligence study on female prevalence in literature.</p> <p dir="ltr">Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering used artificial intelligence to examine more than 3,000 English-language books with genres ranging from science fiction, to mystery and romance, including novels, short stories, and poetry.</p> <p dir="ltr">The team used Named Entity Recognition (NER), a prominent NLP method used to extract gender-specific characters.</p> <p dir="ltr">Lead researcher Mayank Kejriwal was inspired to research the topic and was surprised to find that gender bias was prevalent in the books. </p> <p dir="ltr">“Gender bias is very real, and when we see females four times less in literature, it has a subliminal impact on people consuming the culture,” she said.</p> <p dir="ltr">“We quantitatively revealed in an indirect way in which bias persists in culture.”</p> <p dir="ltr">Co-author of the study Akarsh Nagaraj discovered the four to one ratio which showed male characters were more common in books.</p> <p dir="ltr">“Books are a window to the past, and the writing of these authors gives us a glimpse into how people perceive the world, and how it has changed,” she said.</p> <p dir="ltr">“It clearly showed us that women in those times would represent themselves much more than a male writer would.”</p> <p dir="ltr">Using the technology, the team found the most common adjectives used to describe gender specific characters.</p> <p dir="ltr">“Even with misattributions, the words associated with women were adjectives like ‘weak,’ ‘amiable,’ ‘pretty,’ and sometimes ‘stupid,’” said Nagaraj. </p> <p dir="ltr">“For male characters, the words describing them included ‘leadership,’ ‘power,’ ‘strength’ and ‘politics.’”</p> <p dir="ltr"><em>Image: Shutterstock</em></p>

Books

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White male artists dominate US galleries

<p>The walls of art galleries in the US are hung, almost to the exclusion of all else, with the works of white men.</p> <p>That’s the conclusion of a team of statisticians and art historians, <a rel="noopener" href="https://doi.org/%2010.1371/journal.pone.0212852" target="_blank">published</a> in the journal PLOS One.</p> <p><span>The researchers, led by Chad Topaz from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Williams College in Massachusetts, US, examined the public online catalogues of 18 major US museums and extracted records for 9000 named artists.</span></p> <p>These were then given over to a crowdsourcing platform, and with the help of the many people thereon the majority of the artists were successfully identified and biographies built.</p> <p>“Overall,” the authors report, “we find that 85% of artists are white and 87% are men.”</p> <p>Topaz and colleagues position their work in the context of previous studies that have examined diversity in museum and gallery staff, as well as visitor profiles.</p> <p><a rel="noopener" href="https://mellon.org/programs/arts-and-cultural-heritage/art-history-conservation-museums/demographic-survey/" target="_blank">One study</a>, for instance, found that 72% of members of the US Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) identified as white. The same study found that while 60% of museum staff are female, women occupy only 43% of senior positions.</p> <p><span>Other studies have looked at visitors, and identified communities to target through outreach programs in attempts to increase diversity.</span></p> <p>The present work, though, is the first to study diversity among the artists represented.</p> <p>“If museums find knowledge of staff and visitor demographics important for programming decisions,” the authors write, “one might ask if demographics of the artists are important for collection decisions.”</p> <p>They cite “anecdotal evidence” that in the field of contemporary American art some collections are being actively augmented to rectify diversity imbalance, with the welcome effect that “it is now not unusual for these museums to compete with each other for major works of African American art”.</p> <p>However, the big picture – no pun intended – remains overwhelmingly coloured by men who are white.</p> <p>“With respect to gender, our overall pool of individual, identifiable artists across all museums consists of 12.6% women,” the authors report.</p> <p>“With respect to ethnicity, the pool is 85.4% white, 9.0% Asian, 2.8% Hispanic/Latinx, 1.2% Black/African American, and 1.5% other ethnicities.”</p> <p>Introducing greater diversity, however, is perhaps not as difficult as some might imagine.</p> <p>“We find that the relationship between museum collection mission and artist diversity is weak, suggesting that a museum wishing to increase diversity might do so without changing its emphases on specific time periods and regions,” the researchers conclude.</p> <p>They also admit that their analysis is constrained by a couple of limitations. First, a small proportion of artists identified could not be satisfactorily identified by gender or ethnicity. Second, artworks made by more than one artist were not included, and, third, many works of art – those from the Graeco-Roman period, for instance – are not assigned to identifiable individuals.</p> <p><em>Image credits: Shutterstock</em></p> <p><em>This article was originally published on <a rel="noopener" href="https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/society/white-male-artists-dominate-us-gallery-collections/" target="_blank">cosmosmagazine.com</a> and was written by Andrew Masterson. </em></p>

Art

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The Wind in the Willows — a tale of wanderlust, male bonding, and timeless delight

<p>Like several classics penned during the golden age of children’s literature, The Wind in the Willows was written with a particular child in mind.</p> <p>Alastair Grahame was four years old when his father Kenneth — then a secretary at the Bank of England — began inventing bedtime stories about the reckless ruffian, Mr Toad, and his long-suffering friends: Badger, Rat, and Mole.</p> <p>Alastair, born premature and partially blind, was nicknamed “Mouse”. Small, squinty, and beset by health problems, he was bullied at school. His rapture in the fantastic was later confirmed by his nurse, who recalled hearing Kenneth “up in the night-nursery, telling Master Mouse some ditty or other about a toad”.</p> <p>The Wind in the Willows evolved from Alastair’s bedtime tales into a series of letters Grahame later sent his son while on holiday in Littlehampton. In the story, a quartet of anthropomorphised male animals wander freely in a pastoral land of leisure and pleasure — closely resembling the waterside haven of Cookham Dean where Grahame himself grew up.</p> <p>In peaceful retreat from “The Wide World”, Rat, Mole, Badger, and Toad spend their days chatting, philosophising, pottering, and ruminating on the latest fashions and fads. But when the daredevil, Toad, takes up motoring, he becomes entranced by wild fantasies of the road. His concerned friends must intervene to restrain his whims, teaching him “to be a sensible toad”.</p> <p>Unlike Toad’s recuperative ending, however, Alastair’s story did not end happily. In the spring of 1920, while a student at Oxford, he downed a glass of port before taking a late night stroll. The next morning, railway workers found his decapitated body on tracks near the university. An inquest determined his death a likely suicide but out of respect for his father, it was recorded as an accident.</p> <p>Kenneth Grahame, by all accounts, never recovered from the loss of his only child. He became increasingly reclusive, eventually abandoning writing altogether.</p> <p>In his will, he gifted the original manuscript of Willows to the Bodleian Library, along with the copyrights and all his royalties. Upon his death in 1932, he was buried in Oxford next to his first reader, Mouse.</p> <p>A ‘gay manifesto’?<br />Biographical readings are a staple in children’s literature, and the criticism surrounding The Wind in the Willows is no exception. First published in 1908 — the same year as Anne of Green Gables and Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz — the novel was initially titled The Mole and the Water-Rat. After back and forth correspondence with Grahame, his publisher Sir Algernon Methuen wrote to say he had settled on The Wind in the Willows because of its “charming and wet sound”.</p> <p>Today, one of the mysteries surrounding the novel is the meaning of the title. The word “willows” does not appear anywhere in the book; the single form “willow” appears just twice.</p> <p>When Willows was first released in Britain it was marketed as an allegory — “a fantastic and whimsical satire upon life”, featuring a cast of woodland and riverside creatures who were closer to an Edwardian gentlemen’s club than a crowd of animals. Indeed, the adventures structuring the novel are the meanderings of old English chaps nostalgic for another time.</p> <p>The four friends, though different in disposition, are bound by their “divine discontent and longing”.</p> <p>Restless enough to be easily bewitched, they are rich enough to fill their days with long picnics and strolls. Most chapters are sequenced in chronological order, but the action revolves around different types of wandering – pottering around the garden, messing about in boats, rambling along country lanes.</p> <p>With the exception of a brief encounter with a jailer’s daughter, an overweight barge woman, and a careless mother hedgehog, there are no women in Willows. And excluding a pair of young hedgehogs and a group of field mice, all male, there are no children either.</p> <p>Given the novel’s strong homosocial subtext and absence of female characters, the story is often read as an escapist fantasy from Grahame’s unhappy marriage to Elspeth Thomson. Peter Hunt, an eminent scholar of Willows, describes the couple’s relationship as “sexually arid” and suggests Grahame’s sudden resignation from the bank in 1908 was due to bullying on the basis of his sexuality.</p> <p>Indeed, Hunt ventures to call the book “a gay manifesto”, reading it as a gay allegory heavy with suppressed desire and latent homoeroticism. In one scene, for example, Mole and Rat “shake off their garments” and “tumble in-between the sheets in great joy and contentment”.</p> <p>Earlier, while sharing a bed in the open air, Mole “reaches out from under his blanket, feels for the Rat’s paw in the darkness, and gives it a squeeze.” “I’ll do whatever you like, Ratty,” he whispers.</p> <p>For this reason, and others, some critics suggest that Willows is not a children’s book at all, but a novel for adults that can be enjoyed by children.</p> <p>Conservatism<br />Whether we read Willows as a simple animal story or a social satire, the narrative reinforces the status quo. Badger, for instance, resembles a gruff headmaster whose paternal concern for his friends extends to an earnest attempt to reform the inebriate Toad.</p> <p>Toad is a recognisable type of schoolboy, charming and impulsive but wildly arrogant and lacking self-control. In the end, he is punished for his foolish behaviour and forced to forgo his flamboyant egotism in humble resignation at Toad Hall. Similarly, Mole and Ratty are afflicted by wanderlust, but inevitably retreat to their cosy, subterranean homes. All of Grahame’s animals return to their “proper” place.</p> <p>This return to civility and quiet domesticity exemplifies a criticism often levelled at children’s literature: that such stories are more about the fears and desires of adults than those of children. (Alice in Wonderland, for instance, emphasises the importance of curiosity and imagination, but is also an attempt to socialise children into responsible citizenship.)</p> <p>Willows is a story about homecoming and friendship, but also a psychodrama about uncontrolled behaviour and addiction in Edwardian England.</p> <p>Creatures of habit<br />Perhaps the most famous scene in Willows — now also a popular ride at Disneyland — is Mr Toad’s Wild Ride. In the novel, the incautious Toad, who is oddly large enough to drive a human-sized car, is frequently in trouble with the law and even imprisoned due to his addiction to joyriding.</p> <p>At times delusional, the self-proclaimed “terror of the highway” writes off several vehicles before spiralling into a cycle of car theft, dangerous driving, and disorderly behaviour.</p> <p>Eventually, Toad’s motorcar mania becomes so unmanageable that his exasperated friends are forced to stage “a mission of mercy” – a “work of rescue” that contemporary readers might recognise as an intervention. This subtext of addiction underpins the arc of recovery, and is crucial for understanding the novel’s key themes: the limits of friendship, the loss of pastoral security, and the temptations of city life.</p> <p>Interestingly, in Badger’s attempt to help Toad break the cycle of withdrawal and recovery, and in Toad’s temporary abatement and relapse, the text points to another form of addiction: to alcohol.</p> <p>When Toad is banished to his country retreat — a typical “cure” for upper-class alcoholism at the time — Badger stresses he will remain in enforced confinement “until the poison has worked itself out of his system” and his “violent paroxysms” have passed.</p> <p>Again, the biographical foundation of the work is clear. Grahame’s father, Cunningham, was an alcoholic whose heavy drinking resulted, like Toad’s intoxication, in social exile, financial strain, and the loss of the family home.</p> <p>In The Wind in the Willows, Grahame employs animals to render all the ups and downs of human experience. In doing so, he captures the conflict and consonance between freedom and captivity, tradition and modernity.</p> <p class="p1"><em>Written by Kate Cantrell. This article first appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-the-wind-in-the-willows-a-tale-of-wanderlust-male-bonding-and-timeless-delight-151091">The Conversation</a>.</em></p>

Books

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Are there ‘male’ and ‘female’ brains? Computers can see a distinction

<p>How useful are the well-known and hotly contested categories of “male brain” and “female brain”?</p> <p>Among experts, nobody really questions that anatomical sex differences in the brain exist. But since the advent of brain science, the scientific community has been divided over how many differences there are, which ones have been definitively proven, how large or small they are, and what they actually mean.</p> <p>And, over the past several years, a new debate has been brewing among experts. Do anatomical differences in the brain “add up” to two clearly recognisable (sex-specific) brain types? Or do they rather “mix up” and form idiosyncratic combinations or “mosaics”, independent of sex?</p> <p><strong>A mosaic of male and female features</strong></p> <p>The mosaic hypothesis was supported by the results of a <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468">ground-breaking study</a> published in 2015 by Daphna Joel and her collaborators at Tel-Aviv University.</p> <p>Using brain scans of more than 1,400 participants, Joel and company identified the 10 regions showing the largest differences in size between men and women. Next, they classified each region of each brain as “male-typical”, “female-typical” or “intermediate”.</p> <p>Most of the brains turned out to be “mosaics” of male-typical <em>and</em> female-typical features, rather than being consistently male-typical (“male brains”) or female-typical (“female brains”). Joel concluded that brains “cannot be categorised into two distinct classes: male brain/female brain”.</p> <p><strong>Algorithms can ‘predict’ sex from brain data</strong></p> <p>Critics of the mosaic brain theory, however, point to <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hbm.24462">machine-learning algorithms</a> that can use a brain scan to “predict” an individual’s sex with 80 to 90 percent accuracy.</p> <p>If an algorithm can classify brains into sexes so easily, the argument goes, it must be recognising some underlying difference.</p> <p>To some extent, this is a disagreement about what the terms “male brains” and “female brains” should entail. For Joel, using these categories would only be justified if, for example, knowing somebody had a “female” or “male” brain allowed you to predict other things about their brain’s features.</p> <p>But for Joel’s critics, the important thing is predicting the individual’s sex. It doesn’t matter whether or not slotting somebody’s brain into a sex category gives you more information about its structure.</p> <p>Most machine-learning classification algorithms are “black boxes”, which means they don’t reveal anything about <em>how</em> they combine brain features to define “male” and “female” brains. Despite the accuracy of the algorithms, their definitions may not even be consistent: <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00399/full">some evidence</a> suggests the algorithms use different brain features when classifying different subpopulations of females and males.</p> <p><strong>Algorithms’ sex prediction may depend on head size</strong></p> <p>And now even this classification accuracy is under challenge. A research team led by one of us (Carla Sanchis Segura) published <a href="https://rdcu.be/b50w1">a new study</a> that considers a neglected complication. On average, women have smaller bodies, heads and brains than men.</p> <p>In the early days of brain science, these differences in body and brain were mistakenly taken as evidence of (white) men’s intellectual superiority. But in recent years, it has been recognised that head size variation poses a problem for neuroscientists interested in sex differences.</p> <p>When you see a female/male difference in the size of a brain region, how do you know if you are seeing a specific effect of sex? It might simply be a difference between larger brains (more of which belong to males) and smaller brains (more of which belong to females), or a combination of the two.</p> <p>Neuroscientists try to solve this problem by statistically “controlling” for head size. But exactly how is this done?</p> <p>There are several different statistical methods in use. The current “gold standard” for assessing their validity is comparing the sex differences in the brain they find with those obtained in selected groups of females and males matched to have similar head sizes.</p> <p>Using this “gold standard”, the Sanchis-Segura research team found, <a href="https://bsd.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13293-019-0245-7">in an earlier study</a>, that not all currently used methods are effective and valid. They also found that the method used has a major impact on the number, the size and even the direction of the estimated sex differences.</p> <p>Having worked out which statistical control techniques are the most valid, Sanchis-Segura and her team were able to investigate an important question: to what extent does the high accuracy of “brain sex” classification depend on head size variation?</p> <p>The researchers tested 12 different sex-predicting machine-learning algorithms with data that had been properly adjusted for head size variation, data that had been poorly adjusted, and data that had not been adjusted at all.</p> <p>The algorithms delivered highly accurate results when using both raw data and poorly adjusted data. But when the same 12 algorithms were fed with properly adjusted data, classification accuracy dropped to 10% above ‘chance’, at about 60% accuracy.</p> <p>One particularly deflationary finding of the study was that the algorithms achieved high accuracy if they were given just one piece of information – namely, head size!</p> <p>These new findings continue to challenge the usefulfness of the categories “male brain” and “female brain”. Sex certainly affects the brain, and sex effects are important to study. But current attempts to classify brains into the categories “male brain” or “female brain” using machine-learning algorithm seem to add little beyond what has been known since the inception of modern science – that men, on average, have larger heads.</p> <p><em>Written by Cordelia Fine. Republished with permission of <a href="https://theconversation.com/are-there-male-and-female-brains-computers-can-see-a-distinction-but-they-rely-strongly-on-differences-in-head-size-143972">The Conversation.</a> </em></p>

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Transgender man loses legal battle to be recognised as the child’s dad

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A transgender man has lost the legal battle to be recognised as his child’s father, despite being legally recognised as a man when he fell pregnant and gave birth.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Freddy McConnell, 22, lives in the UK and has lived as a man for several years.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">However, when he fell pregnant and gave birth in 2018, he encountered an issue with his parental role.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">McConnell had undergone chest surgery in 2013 and started testosterone treatment but retained his reproductive system, which included his uterus.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">He then went off hormones in 2016 in order to fall pregnant.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">McConnell was already legally recognised as male and wanted to be registered as his child’s father, but the fact he had been able to biologically conceive and give birth to the child raised questions.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Andrew McFarlane, president of the High Court Family Division, ruled that McConnell is still the child's mother and should be recognised as such, regardless of his status as a man.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"There is a material difference between a person's gender and their status as a parent," the judge said in his ruling, according to </span><em><a href="https://honey.nine.com.au/latest/transgender-man-not-allowed-to-be-childs-dad/5e800269-58aa-458d-adae-07061de7570c"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nine Honey</span></a></em><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"Being a 'mother', whilst hitherto always associated with being female, is the status afforded to a person who undergoes the physical and biological process of carrying a pregnancy and giving birth."</span></p> <blockquote style="background: #FFF; border: 0; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 540px; min-width: 326px; padding: 0; width: calc(100% - 2px);" class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned="" data-instgrm-permalink="https://www.instagram.com/p/B21Z0Xxn1Hu/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" data-instgrm-version="12"> <div style="padding: 16px;"> <div style="display: flex; flex-direction: row; align-items: center;"> <div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 50%; flex-grow: 0; height: 40px; margin-right: 14px; width: 40px;"></div> <div style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex-grow: 1; justify-content: center;"> <div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; width: 100px;"></div> <div style="background-color: #f4f4f4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; width: 60px;"></div> </div> </div> <div style="padding: 19% 0;"></div> <div style="display: block; height: 50px; margin: 0 auto 12px; width: 50px;"></div> <div style="padding-top: 8px;"> <div style="color: #3897f0; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 550; line-height: 18px;">View this post on Instagram</div> </div> <p style="margin: 8px 0 0 0; padding: 0 4px;"><a style="color: #000; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;" rel="noopener" href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B21Z0Xxn1Hu/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" target="_blank">“Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words And never stops at all.” . - Emily Dickinson</a></p> <p style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 8px; overflow: hidden; padding: 8px 0 7px; text-align: center; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;">A post shared by <a style="color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px;" rel="noopener" href="https://www.instagram.com/freddy.mcconnell/?utm_source=ig_embed&amp;utm_campaign=loading" target="_blank"> Freddy McConnell</a> (@freddy.mcconnell) on Sep 25, 2019 at 5:36am PDT</p> </div> </blockquote> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"It is now medically and legally possible for an individual, whose gender is recognised in law as male, to become pregnant and give birth to their child," the judge continued.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"Whilst that person's gender is 'male', their parental status, which derives from their biological role in giving birth, is that of 'mother'."</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">McConnell is now considering appealing the court's decision, as he fears the ruling will set a precedent against transgender parents and will uphold outdated family and gender roles.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"It has serious implications for non-traditional family structures," he told </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Guardian</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">, where he works as a journalist.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"It upholds the view that only the most traditional forms of family are properly recognised or treated equally. It's just not fair."</span></p>

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Female and male models used for Mona Lisa

<p>Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile draws millions of viewers from across the world, all eager to see the art world's most famous female face. But is it?</p> <p>An Italian art detective is arguing that research backs his long-standing claim that Leonardo Da Vinci used both a female and male model to create the acclaimed portrait that hangs in Paris' Louvre museum.</p> <p>While the identity of the woman is not certain, historians believe Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, sat for Da Vinci for the painting.</p> <p>But Silvano Vinceti, who heads Italy's National Committee for the Promotion of Historic and Cultural Heritage, says he used infrared technology to examine the painting and made key findings in its first layer.</p> <p>“In that layer we can see that she was not smiling and joyful but looked melancholic and sad,” he said, adding the second model was Gian Giacomo Caprotti - Da Vinci's male apprentice, known as Salai.</p> <p>Using Photoshop, Vinceti compared the Mona Lisa face to other Da Vinci works Salai is believed to have posed for, including St John the Baptist.</p> <p>“We have used all the paintings in which Leonardo used Salai as a model and compared them to the Mona Lisa and certain details correspond perfectly; so he used two models and added creative details which came from his own imagination,” he said.</p> <p>“I believe that this goes with a long-time fascination of Leonardo's, that is, the subject of androgyny. In other words, for Leonardo, the perfect person was a combination of a man and a woman.”</p> <p>Vinceti also bases his theory on claims by 16th Italian art historian and painter Giorgio Vasari that Gherardini's husband hired clowns to try to make her smile for the sitting.</p> <p>Salai's name has in the past been linked to the Mona Lisa, but other historians have dismissed the claims.</p> <p>Have you ever seen the Mona Lisa? What did you think about Da Vinci’s masterpiece? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.</p> <p><em>First appeared on <a href="http://Stuff.co.nz" target="_blank"><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Stuff.co.nz.</span></strong></a></em></p> <p><strong>Related links:</strong></p> <p><a href="/entertainment/art/2016/04/the-highest-selling-artworks-of-all-time/"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em><strong>The highest selling artworks of all time</strong></em></span></a></p> <p><a href="/entertainment/art/2016/01/classic-art-reimagined-in-modern-times/"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em><strong>Artists reimagines classical paintings in modern times</strong></em></span></a></p> <p><a href="/entertainment/art/2015/12/artists-childhood-photos/"><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em>Famous artists share their childhood photos</em></span></strong></a></p>

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Joey born at Taronga Zoo without a male

<p>It sounds like the plot of a soap opera, but more than a year after the last male roo left Taronga Zoo, a mother has given birth to a joey. The newborn came as a huge surprise to keepers, who weren’t planning for another joey given that mother Mica had given birth to one just eight months previously.</p> <p>So, who’s the father of the miracle baby? As it turns out, the same male roo who fathered the last joey. Tony Britt-Lewis of Taronga Zoo explains the surprise birth is due to “embryonic dispause”. “It’s an interesting survival mechanism that allows the mother to delay the development of the embryo in drought conditions or if she already has a joey in the pouch,” Britt-Lewis told <a href="http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2016/04/surprise-endangered-joey-birth-at-taronga-zoo" target="_blank"><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Australian Geographic</span></strong></a>.</p> <p>Since her pouch was already home to one joey, the remaining embryo remained dormant until Mica gave birth. The new joey, whose sex has not yet been determined, is estimated to be around six-months old and has already been delighting zoo visitors.</p> <p><strong>Related links:</strong></p> <p><a href="http://www.oversixty.co.nz/travel/international/2016/03/kids-meet-kangaroos-for-the-first-time/"><strong><em><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Kids meet kangaroos for the first time</span></em></strong></a></p> <p><a href="/news/news/2016/03/bizarre-moment-man-sees-kangaroo-driving-a-truck/"><strong><em><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Bizarre moment man sees kangaroo driving a truck</span></em></strong></a></p> <p><a href="/news/news/2016/02/adorable-joey-is-desperate-for-food/"><strong><em><span style="text-decoration: underline;">This adorable joey is desperate for food</span></em></strong></a></p>

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