104 Chapter 4FIGURE 4.1 Sample distribution of a hypo-
thetical ability (ability X) for males and females.
You can see a great deal of overlap between the
two distributions. Yet the average of ability X
is slightly higher for males than females. This
illustrates the fact that a sex difference in an abil-
ity does not mean all men differ from all women.
In fact, a statistically significant sex difference
can exist even when most of the men and women
are similar in their ability level.sex difference does not imply all women
differ from all men, which may explain
why you will have some personal expe-
riences that do not fit with the research
literature.
I begin my review of sex compari-
son research by discussing the early
work of Maccoby and Jacklin, who pub-
lished the first comprehensive review of
sex differences in 1974. Although this
book was written a long time ago, it
had a great impact on the field. As you
will see, it also was subjected to serious
criticism. Then I review the more recent
work on sex comparisons that have been
made in several important cognitive and
social domains.
Emily.” My husband, who thankfully was
oblivious to this gender stereotype, dis-
appointed the mother by failing to con-
firm her hypothesis. He said, “They both
seem pretty active to me!” The mother
was clearly disappointed in this response.
If a female and a male take a math test
and the male outperforms the female,
most people will remember this incident.
But if the female outperforms the male,
as discussed in Chapter 3, we will either
forget the incident, decide the female or
male was “different” and not representa-
tive of the group, or make a situational
attribution (e.g., Maria had seen the test
before; Matthew didn’t get much sleep
last night).
As you will see, sex differences have
been documented in some domains.
Unfortunately, a significant difference
in performance between females and
males is often misunderstood to mean
all males are better at taskXthan all
females, or all females are better at task
Ythan all males. An example of a signifi-
cant difference in performance is shown
in Figure 4.1. You can see the mean score
for men is slightly (and could be sig-
nificantly) higher than that for women.
But you should also notice a great deal
of overlap in the distributions of men’s
and women’s scores. Only a small num-
ber of men are performing better than all
of the women, and only a small number
of women are performing worse than
all of the men. Thus even though a sex
difference exists, most women and men
are performing about the same. Keep this
in mind when you read about a sex dif-
ference in this chapter. Remember that a
Distribution of Ability X
Female
MaleM04_HELG0185_04_SE_C04.indd 104 6/21/11 12:27 PM