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Researchers are investigating gender differences in cognitive abilities and language proficiency
"Women are better. The female advantage is consistent over time and lifespan, but it is also relatively small," says Marco Hirnstein, a professor at the University of Bergen, Norway. Hirnstein is interested in how biological, psychological and social factors contribute to gender differences in cognitive abilities and what the underlying brain mechanisms are. Will the results finally end the debates about who is better? So far, the focus has mostly been on skills that men excel at. However, in recent years the focus has shifted more towards women.” Marco Hirnstein, Professor, University of Bergen We thought women were better – …
Researchers are investigating gender differences in cognitive abilities and language proficiency
"Women are better. The female advantage is consistent over time and lifespan, but it is also relatively small," says Marco Hirnstein, a professor at the University of Bergen, Norway.
Hirnstein is interested in how biological, psychological and social factors contribute to gender differences in cognitive abilities and what the underlying brain mechanisms are.
Will the results finally end the debates about who is better?
So far, the focus has mostly been on skills that men excel at. However, in recent years the focus has shifted more towards women.”
Marco Hirnstein, Professor, University of Bergen
We thought women were better - and they are!
The origin of these sex and gender differences; Nature versus nurture – and the possible consequences of these differences have been the subject of major social debates. Do men and women have different talents for different jobs?
Textbooks and popular science books assume that women are better at finding words. For example, when naming words that start with the letter “F” or words that belong to a specific category, such as animals or fruits. It was also considered a “fact” that women were better at remembering words.
However, the actual results are much more contradictory than textbooks suggest: some studies find a female advantage, others find a male advantage, some find no advantage.
"Most intellectual abilities show no or negligible differences in average performance between men and women. However, women excel at some tasks while men, on average, excel at others."
This may sound obvious, but Hirnstein and his colleagues point out how their findings can be useful in diagnosis and healthcare.
Critical relevance to the diagnosis of dementia
The results are relevant in at least two ways. First, they help clarify whether the female advantage is real. Second, knowledge of this sex and gender difference is important for interpreting the results of diagnostic assessments in which these skills are often tested.
For example, to determine whether someone has dementia. Knowing that women are generally better at these tasks is crucial to preventing women from being underdiagnosed due to their better average baseline performance. And for men: that they are overdiagnosed due to their lower average output.
Currently many, but not all, assessments take sex/gender into account.
The method is meta
Hirnstein and his colleagues conducted what they called a “meta-analysis,” in which they analyzed the combined data of all the doctoral theses, master’s theses and studies published in scientific journals that they could find. This meta-analysis included more than 500 measures from more than 350,000 participants.
The researchers found that women are actually better. The advantage is small but consistent over the past 50 years and throughout a person's lifespan.
They also found that the female advantage depends on the gender of the lead scientist: female scientists report a larger female advantage, while male scientists report a smaller female advantage.
Source:
Reference:
Hirnstein, M., et al. (2022) Sex/gender differences in verbal fluency and verbal-episodic memory: A meta-analysis. Perspectives of psychology. doi.org/10.1177/17456916221082116.
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