Have you ever wondered why it seems that your prowess in a particular field may not compare to that of others? Over the years, science has uncovered various factors which play a central role in shaping one’s strengths and weaknesses. One of the most prominent of these features is actually the sex you are born with! Throughout history, there has always been a disparity in the skillsets of men and women. Yet, while most people understand that one’s biological sex greatly influences what tasks one may excel in or struggle with, many lack substantial claims as to why this is the case.
Let’s quickly get to it then. Men and women have different brain anatomies. This gives rise to a variety of physical and mental differences. The brain consists of 2 different types of tissue — gray matter and white matter. While men tend to process information with gray matter, women process information primarily with white matter.
Gray matter, named for its pinkish-gray color, is home to neuronal cell bodies, axon terminals, and dendrites, as well as all nerve synapses. It conducts, processes, and sends information to various parts of the body. Meanwhile, white matter is composed of bundles of axons. It conducts, processes, and sends nerve signals up and down the spinal cord. In doing so, it helps interpret sensory information from various parts of the body.
Research from the University of California in Irvine has found that men generally have 6.5 times more gray matter than women. In contrast, women have close to 10 times the amount of white matter present in men. This finding may explain why men and women excel in different tasks.
Many argue that there is no difference between the male and female brains and that any differences that arise are due to the cultural upbringing of said person. However, there is proof that this is not the case.
In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, males strongly preferred toys with wheels, whereas females were drawn towards plush toys. Another study indicated that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing their own or other children’s sex — show differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys.
While infant girls respond more readily to faces and begin talking earlier, boys react earlier in infancy to experimentally induced perceptual discrepancies in their visual environment. In adulthood, women remain more oriented to faces, while men are to things.
Men tend to have larger brains, but women’s hippocampus, critical to learning and memorization, are larger than those found in the brains of men. Conversely, men’s amygdala, associated with the experience and recollection of emotions, is bigger than those found in women. In the year 2000, Larry Cahill, a professor at UC Irvine, conducted a study where he scanned the brains of men and women using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) as they were exposed to highly aversive or emotionally neutral slides. The aversive slides were expected to cause strong negative emotions in the amygdala. As predicted, activity in the amygdala during the viewing experience correlated with the subjects’ later ability to recall the viewed clips. However, while in women, this relationship was observed only in the left amygdala, in men, it was only found in the right amygdala.
Another factor responsible for these differences is the presence of different sex-steroid hormones. Females tend to have large quantities of estrogens, along with another molecule called progesterone. Men, on the other hand, have more testosterone and a few look-alikes collectively known as androgens. Males developing normally in utero get hit with a big mid-gestation surge of testosterone, permanently shaping not only their body parts and proportions but also their brains.
Generally, brain regions that differ in size between men and women (such as the aforementioned amygdala and hippocampus) tend to contain exceptionally high concentrations of receptors for sex hormones. There are also the chromosomes that make up a person’s sex, with women having XX chromosomes and men having XY chromosomes. The Y chromosome is what gives men’s bodies and brains their male characteristics. This difference in chromosomes and hormones may be the reasoning for the structural and physiological differences between men and women.
Knowing all this, women excel in several measures of verbal ability — pretty much all of them, except for verbal analogies. Women’s reading comprehension and writing ability consistently exceed that of men, on average. They outperform men in tests of fine-motor coordination and perceptual speed. They’re also more adept at retrieving information from long-term memory. Men, on the other hand, can more easily juggle items in working memory. They have superior visuospatial skills, which means that they’re better at visualizing what happens when a complicated two or three-dimensional shape is rotated in space, correctly determining angles from the horizontal, tracking moving objects, and aiming projectiles.
Accordingly, men have more potential to excel in tasks that require localized processing, such as mathematics. On the contrary, women have more potential in activities that require the integration and assimilation of information from different brain regions, which helps them excel at language skills. This doesn’t prove, however, that one sex is more intelligent than the other. Researchers found that men and women perform equally well on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as intelligence tests.
Having potential is not the same as having skill. More often than not, the work we put into an activity will allow us to excel. Men and women may think differently, but that does not mean that one is better or more intelligent. Ultimately, one’s ability to reach one’s full potential culminates in initial potential and hard work. Never accept yourself merely from what you may appear to be; instead, dare to reach for what you could be!
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