Gender Differences in the Human Brain

"On measurements of various aptitude tests, the differences betweenthe sexes in average scores on these tests can be as much as 25percent. A difference of as little as 5 percent has been found to havemarked impact on the occupations or activities at which men or womenwill, on average, excel.The area where the biggest differences have been found lies in whatscientists call "spacial ability". That's being able to picturethings, their shape, position, geography and proportion, accurately inthe mind's eye - all skills that are crucial to the practical abilityto work with three-dimensional objects or drawings. One scientist whohas reviewed the extensive literature on the subject concludes, "thefact of the male's superiority in spacial ability is not in dispute".It is confirmed by literally hundreds of different scientific studies.Boys also have the superior hand-eye co-ordination necessary for ballsports. Those same skills mean that they can more easily imagine,alter, and rotate an object in their mind's eye. Boys find it easierthan girls to construct block buildings from two-dimensionalblueprints, and to assess correctly how the angle of the surface levelof water in a jug would change when the jug was tilted to differentangles.This male advantage in seeing patterns and abstract relationships -what could be called general strategic rather than detailed tacticalthinking - perhaps explains the male dominance of chess, even in acountry like the U.S.S.R, where the game is a national sport played byboth sexes. An alternative explanation, more acceptable to those whowould deny the biological basis of sex differences, is that women havebecome so conditioned to the fact of male chess playing superioritythat they subconsciously assign themselves lower expectations; butthis is a rather wilful rejection of scientific evidence for the sakeof maintaining a prejudice.The better spacial ability of men could certainly help to explain themale superiority in map-reading we noted earlier. Here again, theprejudice of male motorists is confirmed by experiment; girls and boyswere each given city street maps and, without rotating the map, askedto describe whether they would be turning left or right at particularintersections as they mentally made their way across town and back.Boys did better. More women than men liked to turn the map round,physically to match the direction in which they are travelling whenthey are trying to find their way.While the male brain gives men the edge in dealing with things andtheorems, the female brain is organised to respond more sensitively toall sensory stimuli. Women do better than men on tests of verbalability. Females are equipped to receive a wider range of sensoryimformation, to connect and relate that information with greaterfacility, to place a primacy on personal relationships, and tocommunicate. Cultural influences may reinforce these strengths, butthe advantages are innate.The differences are apparent in the very first hours after birth. Ithas been shown that girl babies are much more interested than boys inpeople and faces; the boys seem just as happy with an object dangledin front of them. Girls say their first words and learn to speak inshort sentences earlier than boys and are generally more fluent intheir pre-school years. They read earlier, too, and do better incoping with the building blocks of language like grammar, punctuationand spelling. Boys outnumber girls 4:1 in remedial reading classes.Later, women find it easier to master foreign languages, and are moreproficient in their own, with better command of grammar and spelling.They are also more fluent: stuttering and other speech defects occuralmost exclusively among boys.Girls and women hear better than men. When the sexes are compared,women show a greater sensitivity to sound. The dripping tap will getthe woman out of bed before the man has even woken up. Six times asmany girls as boys can sing in tune. They are also more adept innoticing small changes in volume, which goes some way to explainingwomens' superior sensitivity to that "tone of voice" which their malepartners are so often accused of adopting. Men and women even see somethings differently. Women see better in the dark. They are moresensitive to the red end of the spectrum, seeing more red hues therethan men, and have a better visual memory. Men see better than womenin bright light. Intriguing results also show that men tend to beliterally blinkered; they see in a narrow field - mild tunnel vision -with greater concentration on depth. They have a better sense ofperspective than women. Women, however, quite literally take in thebigger picture. They have wider peripheral vision, because they havemore of the receptor rods and cones in the retina, at the back of theeyeball, to receive a wider arc of visual input.The differences extend to the other senses. Women react faster, andmore acutely, to pain, although their overall resistance to long-termdiscomfort is greater than men's. In a sample of young adults, femalesshowed "overwhelmingly" greater sensitivity to pressure on the skin onevery part of the body. In childhood and maturity, women have atactile sensitivity so superior to men's that in some tests there isno overlap between the scores of the two sexes; in these, the leastsensitive woman is more sensitive than the most sensitive man.""The biggest behavioural difference between men and women is thenatural, innate aggression of men, which explains to a large degreetheir historical dominance of the species. Men didn't learn aggressionas one of the tactics of the sex war. We do not teach our boy childrento be aggressive - indeed, we try vainly to unteach it. Evenresearchers most hostile to the acknowledgement of sex differencesagree that this is a male feature, and one which cannot be explainedby social conditioning.The writer H. H. Monro, "Saki", wrote an instructive little storyabout a liberal household where the parents sought to suppress theirson's natural male aggression by refusing him a set of tin soldiers;instead, they supplied a set of tin civil servants and teachers. All,they felt, was going well, until they sneaked into the playroom andsaw that he had set out a battle royal between the regiments of thetoy teachers and his model bureaucrats. The child was lucky, in thathis parents in the end saw the futility of trying to make himsomething he wasn't, nor could ever be."It appears that females are much more drawn to colors as they havebetter distinction between subtleties in color and have better visualmemories. That is a very specific case though since it seems femalesin general have better senses than males. They also mention thatfemales are much better in noticing social subtleties, facialexpressions, etc.Males, on the other hand, are better at visuospatial skills and aremore aggressive.




Home