r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Sep 09 '24

Neuroscience Covid lockdowns prematurely aged girls’ brains more than boys’, study finds. MRI scans found girls’ brains appeared 4.2 years older than expected after lockdowns, compared with 1.4 years for boys.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/sep/09/covid-lockdowns-prematurely-aged-girls-brains-more-than-boys-study-finds
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u/sculpted_reach Sep 09 '24

Sex was the only variable they distinguished upon? Their hypothesis was that lack of social interaction caused that, but no variable for measuring of they had varying levels of social interaction were done.

I would want to know if some video face time usage made a difference or household size... or if their families even followed lockdown guidelines...

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u/NoticedGenie66 Sep 10 '24

Sex was the only variable they distinguished upon?

As with most research there is a huge emphasis placed on sex disparity, even as we find males and females are so much more similar than different in many cases and differences are mainly due to socially constructed factors based on presumed gender differences. This is an aside, but it really is interesting to see how things like male normatives and selective publishing biases (to skew toward publishing supported hypotheses) affect the overall perception of the amount of actual difference between males and females. Or disheartening depending on how you look at it.

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u/sculpted_reach Sep 10 '24

Perhaps consider it this way: Sex is examined to ensure there is not a disparity between women and men.

How do we know if we are being treated the same, unless we ask?

If we never ask, we would never know, and would have to rely on faith that things are equal and that we are similar.

We can't undo existing male normative bias if we do not measure if it exists, right?

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u/NoticedGenie66 Sep 10 '24

Sex is examined to ensure there is not a disparity between women and men.

For sure, and I'm not saying we should stop that at all. I'm saying that there is way too much emphasis and incentive placed on trying to find and publish minute differences with small effect sizes, while instances where this is not the case far outnumber them.

Not measuring it is a surefire way to reinforce current biases, but doing research with the explicit inent to only find differences (which can lead to bias in study samples as well as in experimental design) is also not a good thing.

This is a much more prevalent issue in fields like psychology for example, but is inherent in all facets of science because it is ingrained in our culture and the way we operate as a society.