So many things come down to connections—especially the ones in your brain.
Women and men display distinctive differences in how nerve fibers connect various regions of their brains, according to a half-dozen recent studies that highlight gender variation in the brain's wiring diagram. There are trillions of these critical connections, and they are shaped by the interplay of heredity, experience and biochemistry.
Broadly speaking, women in their 20s had more connections between the two brain hemispheres while men of the same age had more connective fibers within each hemisphere. "Women are mostly better connected left-to-right and right-to-left across the two brain hemispheres," said biomedical analyst Dr. Ragini Verma at the University of Pennsylvania. "Men are better connected within each hemisphere and from back-to-front."
That suggests women might be better wired for multitasking and analytical thought, which require coordination of activity in both hemispheres. Men, in turn, may be better wired for more-focused tasks that require attention to one thing a time. But the researchers cautioned such conclusions are speculative.
Why Gender Matters
The modern reader will agree that men and women are different anatomically, but we still stumble around when asked if men and women are different in other ways as well.
Professor Steven Goldberg in his book with the provocative title, "Why Men Rule – A Theory of Male Dominance," maintains that men and women are different in their genetic and hormonally driven behavior.
We would stress that this does not mean that one sex is superior or inferior to another but rather that each has different strengths and at the same time different weaknesses. He believes that the high level of testosterone in males drives them toward dominant behaviors, while high estrogen levels in women creates a natural, biological push in the direction of less dominance and more nurturing roles.
To say that men and women are the same is to deny the physical reality. Science makes it plain that males and females are different from the moment of conception. These differences are evident in the chromosomes that carry inherited traits from both the father and the mother. We humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes within each cell. Twenty-two of these are alike in both males and females, however, when it comes to the twenty-third pair, the sexes are just not the same. Every woman has in her cells two of what we call the X chromosome. But man has just one X chromosome. Its mate, being the Y chromosome is much smaller.
It is the Y chromosome who Amram Scheinfield notes in "Your Heredity and Environment" that sets sex development in motion and results in all the genetic differences there are between a man and a woman.
Right down to the cellular level males and females are different. The sex hormones estrogen in women and testosterone in men have a significant impact on behavior.
Men and women are not only markedly different in the hormones that drive them, but they are also different in the way they think. The brains of men and women are actually wired differently.
In recent years, scientists have discovered that differences between the sexes are more profound than anyone previously guessed. Here is what Dr. Leonard Sax, MD, PhD, says:
The female brain develops differently. In women, the language areas of the brain develop before the areas used for spatial relations and for geometry. In men, it's the other way around.
The female brain is wired differently. Women process emotions in the same area of the brain that processes language. So, it's easy for most women to talk about their emotions. In men, the brain regions involved in talking are separate from the regions involved with feeling. Knowing this, it’s not hard to understand why men have such difficult time hearing or expressing feelings.
Men and women respond to stress differently. This is true not only for our species, but also in every mammal scientists have studied. Stress enhances learning in males. The same stress factors impair learning in females.
Not only are men and women fundamentally different in the way their brains are wired, they are also vastly different in their physical strength and endurance. Women, on average, will only have 55 to 58 percent of the upper body strength of men and are only 80 percent as strong as a man of identical weight.
When we add to this our unique personalities, our cultural upbringing, and the environment in which we live and work, we come to appreciate why the sexes view the world differently.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2013 and "When Doing It All Won't Do: A Self Coaching Guide for Career Women"
