Breaking Bias: Why Gender Equality Matters in Cognitive Research
Written by Joban Chahal
Imagine two women—one living in the United States, the other in rural India. They’re the same age, equally curious, and in similar health. But if you give them the same memory test, one is likely to outperform the other—not because she’s smarter or more engaged, but because of where she lives. That’s the surprising truth coming out of many cognitive studies. Gender inequality doesn’t just impact our wages, rights, or roles, it also affects how our brains work.
Bias — the quiet shortcuts our mind takes and what psychologists call systematic errors in thinking (Kahneman, 2011) — has shaped much of how scientists once studied men and women. For years, scientists explained differences in thinking and memory between men and women by looking inside the brain. But we now realize that to understand those differences, we should have also been looking outside—at the world people live in.
A large international study by Zugman et al. (2023) analyzed brain scans from nearly 8,000 people across 29 countries, ranging in age from 18 – 40 years old. It found that in places with greater gender inequality, women’s brain structures differed more than men’s. In particular, some areas of the brain tended to be thicker in men than in women. These areas are often linked to how we process information and regulate emotions. These weren’t hereditary differences—but ones influenced and shaped by social discrimination, limited opportunities, and lack of resources. But in countries with greater equality, those differences disappeared, and in some cases were even reversed.
A study led by Westrick et al. (2024) compared older adults in the U.S. and India on memory performance. Participants in both countries completed the same verbal memory tests. In the U.S., women performed better than men on verbal memory tests, while in India, women performed worse. The key difference? Access to education. Where girls had fewer chances to learn, that disadvantage showed up decades later in the form of lower memory scores. When societies close those gaps in education and opportunity, the benefits for women’s memory and thinking are clear. In countries that improved gender equality over time, women’s memory and thinking performance has also improved (Women’s Brain Health Initiative, 2025).
Too often, studies on cognitive differences focused only on biology and left out the world where people lived. For example, early research that compared men’s and women’s memory performance rarely considered whether women had the same access to education (Westrick et al., 2024). That gap wasn’t accidental, it reflected a bias in how the research was designed. Instead, many of these differences were attributed to heredity, rather than the unequal opportunities that shaped women’s learning in the first place (Miller et al., 2014). If we only study people in countries where women have fewer rights or opportunities —or if we don’t ask how inequality affects brain development, we risk building an incomplete or misleading science (Miller et al., 2014).
The effects of inequality don’t stop at wages or opportunities; they also show up in the brain. This makes it clear that gender inequality is not just a social issue — it’s a scientific one too. When a girl is told she’s less capable, never given a chance to lead, or lacks access to education, that doesn’t just affect her confidence. It shapes how she solves problems, remembers information, and thinks. So, when a society provides girls with equal access to education and opportunities, not just investing in them, but ensuring they have the same tools as boys, the way her brain works also changes. Studies show that expanding both education and literacy can help close gender gaps in memory that might otherwise persist into later life (Westrick et al., 2024). The simple truth is that our brains reflect our world. And when the world is unfair, it leaves a mark on the mind.
The real story of cognitive differences isn’t about biology. But rather about how equality shapes cognitive abilities—and how building a fairer, more inclusive world might just make us all a little smarter. Recognizing gender equality means reimagining how we study the mind, and realizing that equality doesn’t just change society — it changes science for the better.
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References
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Miller, D. I., & Halpern, D. F. (2014). The new science of cognitive sex differences. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18(1), 37–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2013.10.011
Westrick, A. C., Avila-Rieger, J., Gross, A. L., Hohman, T., Vonk, J. M. J., Zahodne, L. B., & Kobayashi, L. C. (2024). Does education moderate gender disparities in later-life memory function? A cross-national comparison of harmonized cognitive assessment protocols in the United States and India. Alzheimer's & Dementia, 20(1), 16–24. https://doi.org/10.1002/alz.13404
Women’s Brain Health Initiative. (2025). Women show cognitive advantage in gender-equal countries. https://womensbrainhealth.org/think-tank/think-twice/women-show-cognitive-advantage-in-gender-equal-countries
Zugman, A., Alliende, L., Medel, V., Bethlehem, R. A. I., Seidlitz, J., Ringlein, G., Arango, C., Arnatkevičiūtė, A., Asmal, L., Bellgrove, M., Benegal, V., Bernardo, M., Billeke, P., Bosch-Bayard, J., Bressan, R., Busatto, G., Castro, M., Chaim-Avancini, T., Compte, A., . . . cVEDA. (2023).Country-level gender inequality is associated with structural differences in the brains of women and men. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, 120(20), e2218782120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2218782120
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The blog posts are for informational and educational purposes only. The posts should not be considered as any type of advice (medical, mental health, legal, and/or religious advice). All blog posts have been researched, written, and edited by the undergraduate students and alumni of the Lifespan Cognition Lab. As a teaching and research-based lab, we encourage all lab members to help make knowledge more accessible to all communities through these posts.
