Do men and women have different brains? Do men and women differ in how frequently they get multiple personality? Sex ratio based on study of novelists.

An item in today’s newspaper about whether men and women have different brains reminds me of the usual statistics on multiple personality, which purport to show that it is much more common in women. 

The usual rebuttal to those statistics is that they come from psychiatric clinics, which biases the sample, because women with multiple personality tend to go to psychiatric clinics, while men with multiple personality tend to go to jail or substance abuse clinics.

I don’t know the latest study of the sex ratio of multiple personality, and I’m not motivated to look it up.

However, based on my study of novelists, it looks to me like men and women are equally likely to develop multiple personality.

As to whether women and men have different brains, I think the question itself is an example of sophistry, a fallacious “straw man” argument. The sexes would not have to have uniformly different brains for whatever differences there are to have practical social significance.

But the issue here is the frequency of multiple personality: I don’t see any significant difference between the sexes.