TY - JOUR
T1 - Country-level gender inequality is associated with structural differences in the brains of women and men
AU - Zugman, André
AU - Alliende, Luz Maria
AU - Medel, Vicente
AU - Bethlehem, Richard
AU - Dazzan, Paola
AU - Seidlitz, Jakob
AU - Ringlein, Grace V.
AU - Arnatkeviciute, Aurina
AU - Asmal, Laila
AU - Bellgrove, Mark A.
AU - Benegal, Vivek
AU - Bosch-Bayard, J. F.
AU - Bressan, Rodrigo A.
AU - Busatto, G.F.
AU - Chaim-Avancini, T M
AU - Czepielewski, Leticia Sanguinetti
AU - de la Fuente-Sandoval, Camilo
AU - Di Forti, Marta M.
AU - Díaz-Caneja, Covadonga Martínez
AU - Du Plessis, Stefan
AU - Fornito, Alex
AU - Freimer, Nelson B.
AU - Gadelha, Ary
AU - Gama, Clarissa S
AU - Garcia-Rizo, Clemente
AU - Gonzalez-Valderrama, Alfonso
AU - Guinjoan, Salvador M.
AU - Holla, Bharath
AU - Ibanez, Agustin
AU - Jackowski, Andrea P.
AU - León-Ortiz, Pablo
AU - Lochner, Christine
AU - López-Jaramillo, Carlos
AU - Luckhoff, Hilmar
AU - Massuda, Raffael
AU - McGuire, Philip
AU - Mizrahi, Romina
AU - Murray, Robin
AU - Ozerdem, Aysegul
AU - Pan Neto, Pedro
AU - Parellada, Mara
AU - Phahladira, Lebogang
AU - Ramirez-Mahaluf, Juan P.
AU - Reckziegel, Ramiro
AU - Reis Marques, Tiago
AU - Reyes-Madrigal, Francisco
AU - Roos, Annerine
AU - Rosa, Pedro
AU - Salum, Giovanni
AU - Serpa, Mauricio H.
AU - Undurraga, Juan
AU - Undurraga, Eduardo A
AU - Valli, Isabel
AU - Villarreal, Mirta
AU - Yalin, Nefize
AU - Winton-Brown, Tobias
AU - Zanetti, Marcus V.
AU - Winkler, Anderson M.
AU - Pine, Daniel S.
AU - Evans-Lacko, Sara
AU - Crossley, Nicolas A.
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to all researchers who shared their data on different open-access platforms. The list of references acknowledging their work is found in Dataset S1. This work utilized the computational resources of the NIH HPC Biowulf cluster (http://hpc.nih.gov). Funding from the different studies included can be found in SI Appendix.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2023 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. This open access article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY).
PY - 2023/5/16
Y1 - 2023/5/16
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85158077844&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1073/pnas.2218782120
DO - 10.1073/pnas.2218782120
M3 - Article
SN - 0027-8424
VL - 120
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
IS - 20
M1 - e2218782120
ER -