GENDER AND SPECIES DIFFERENCESand more white matter,
which is the insulated,
connective type of neural
tissue. Women’s brains
tend to be less lopsided,
in the sense that functions
are shared more equally
between the hemispheres.
They also have more grey
matter – those areas made
up of densely packed
cell bodies – and more
connectivity between
the hemispheres. One
brain structure that shows particularly striking differences between
the sexes is the hippocampus, which is larger, relative to overall brain
size, in females.
It’s imortant to note that not all studies uncover these results,
and random variation between individuals will often overshadow any
averaged gender differences. Also, as Cordelia Fine warns in her 2010
book Delusions of Gender, we should be cautious when making inferences
about sex differences in behaviour and cognition based on observed sex
differences in brain structure and function. The links between brain
activity and mental processes are far from straightforward and different
brains can use different neural means to reach the same mental ends.
That said, the genders do seem to differ in specific abilities. Although
men and women don’t differ in overall intelligence, women are generally
better at reading facial expressions and superior at certain language tasks
such as spelling and verbal memory. On the other hand, men consist-
ently outperform women on tests of spatial prowess, such as mental
rotation and map work. Bear in mind, though, that, as Fine argues in her
book these differences may well be exaggerated by men’s and women’s
culturally learned expectations of how they ought to perform, given their
sex. Indeed, a 2006 study by Angelica Moè and Francesca Pazzaglia at the
University of Padua found that gender differences in mental rotation
ability disappeared when male and female high-school students were
fed the lie that women are generally considered superior at spatial tasks
(see also p.218).
Another consistent finding in gender research is that the range of male
ability tends to be more spread-out and extreme. That is, many more