One of the things that drives me crazy over on Quora is the folks who deny fundamental differences between men and women. Of course, our culture has done this for decades, so I shouldn’t be surprised by it.

I recently ran across a great article about gender differences in our brains. One of the researchers interviewed said, “…over the past 15 years or so, there’s been a sea change as new technologies have generated a growing pile of evidence that there are inherent differences in how men’s and women’s brains are wired and how they work.”

Among other things, the article points out the bias that has limited science in this area. There was abundant evidence for cognitive differences between men and women, but researchers explained it away as “socialization practices, artifacts and mistakes in the research, and bias and prejudice.”

A few of those differences:

• Women’s reading comprehension and writing ability exceed that of men.
• Women’s verbal ability is much greater for just about everything other than verbal analogies.
• Women beat men in tests of fine-motor coordination and perceptual speed.
• Women are better at retrieving information from long-term memory. (You can tell your husband that, but he won’t remember it!)
• Women have stronger and more vivid memories of emotional events.
• Men are better at juggling items in working memory.
• Men are better at mentally rotating three-dimensional shapes.
• Men are better at tracking moving objects and aiming projectiles.
• Men are better at estimating angles from the horizontal.
• Women usually navigate by landmarks, while men determine location by estimating direction and distance travelled. (See, he’s not lost!)  ;-)

Of course, all of this is based on averages. There are individuals who don’t fall in the normal ranges, but they are exceptions, not the norm.

The bottom line here is you and hubby don’t think the same way and a good part of that is based on you being female and him being male. It’s not some cultural thing, it’s biological. Denying that helps no one; accepting it makes it easier to deal with the very real differences.

~ Paul – I’m XY, and I don’t have to understand Lori to love her!

Reference: Two minds: The cognitive differences between men and women | Stanford Medicine 

Image Credit: © Sangoiri | stock.adobe.com
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