Prof. Daphna Joel

In the past decade, I’ve described and tested the ‘mosaic’ hypothesis – the claim that sex/gender differences in the brain do not add up consistently in individuals; rather, most brains comprise both features that are more common in females and features that are more common in males. This is also true for human psychological characteristics – humans possess unique mosaics of the feminine (more common in women compared to men) and masculine characteristics. 

Using the Gender Mosaic Questionnaire (GMQ; https://gendermosaic.tau.ac.il/) we are now creating a very large dataset of the answers of people from diverse populations around the world on a set of psychological and behavioral variables that show large sex/gender differences (the GMQ is available in 9 languages). The postdoctoral scholar will work on a project to map within-individual variability (i.e., mosaicism) in these set of variables as well as group-level differences in mosaicism and in sex/gender differences in gendered characteristics across intersecting variables, such as country, age group, education, gender identity- and sexuality-based groups.