Gender stereotypes have made numerous headlines around the world recently. First there was an Israeli finding that men are categorically not from Mars and women not from Venus; then there was the earth-shattering backlash from academics in Norway, who found that men are better at assembling IKEA trolleys than women.
So what should we believe? It’s a minefield out there, but here to clear things up are six gender stereotypes scientifically proven (by at least one person with a BSc, we promise) to be true:
1. Men are better at navigating
This week a study was released proving that, when it comes to finding their way at least, men are naturally superior. Scientists at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology asked 18 men and 18 women to make their way through a virtual maze, completing various tasks along the way. Men were able to solve 50pc more of the problems than women, and displayed a difference of method that could help understand why asking for directions is seen as a female option.
While men favour ‘cardinal’ directions (those of the compass), women prefer to think more specifically, creating a path to follow.
“If they’re going to the Student Society building in Trondheim, for example, men usually go in the general direction where it’s located,” said Dr Carl Pintzka, who worked on the study. “Women usually orient themselves along a route to get there, for example, ‘go past the hairdresser and then up the street and turn right after the store.'”
The explanation? The report argues that these distinctions originated in caveman times (here we go), when men were out hunting and gathering while women stayed and tended to the cave. Not only do women have better memories to be able to follow directions, then, but they can locate things nearer to them more easily. Men, on the other hand, like to be flexible and spontaneous in their navigational exploits, making them better over long distances.
2. Women just talk, talk, talk
According to a well-peddled psychology book by Dr Luan Brizendine, women speak an average of 20,000 words each day, more than double that of the average monosyllabic man. They also talk faster, learn to speak younger and devote more brain cells to conversation.
More recently, researchers from the US offered a more detailed explanation, mainly involving the presence of a protein called Foxp2. In a study conducted by the University of Maryland, scientists separated four-day-old rats from their mothers and then experimented with how often the rodents responded, varying the amount of Foxp2 each gender produced. Whichever had more of the protein, they found, became more vocal.
Moving on to humans, scientists then discovered girls have 30pc more Foxp2 than boys.
3. Women care more
In unsurprising news, scientists have found that men lack powers of empathy in relationships. They don’t care, essentially, and tune out when listening to their partners problems, only showing a strong connection to their emotions when they are themselves the victim.
The Australian researchers conducted a survey of more than 20,000 men and women to discover how their feelings change based on their partner’s experiences. Women admitted to being considerably affected, but men showed no particular change.
“It is not that men are unemotional or uncaring, since they are quite strongly affected by what happens to themselves, but they simply are not very emotional when it comes to the feelings of their partner,” the study’s lead author, Dr. Cindy Mervin, said.
4. Men are funnier
This one comes with a telling caveat: men are funnier, a study found, but largely because they insist on doing all the joke-telling. In 2011 Professor Laura Mickes and a team of psychologists from the University of California asked men and women to caption cartoons in The New Yorker magazine. Without knowing the author, a mixed gender panel favoured male jokes. Challenged to recall who wrote what later in the day, too, the sample generally assumed funny captions were penned by men, even when they weren’t.
Various theories are at play, and almost all of them relate to common social constructs. The psychologists argued that men employ humour to woo women, who in turn are attracted to a GSOH and thus indulge the male ego by listening. Men, meanwhile, find other men funnier because their humour matches – or at least they believe it does.
“Men’s view that men are funnier could be a result of their actually finding the humor they produce funnier, as well as their biased recall of funny things as having sprung from men’s minds,” the authors wrote. “Women laughing more at men, when the gender is known, may be largely due not to superior humor, but to more social influences.”
5. Women can multitask
The tired old cliché is, it seems, true. Psychologists at the University of Herefordshire proved in 2010 that that when faced with a problem, women are infinitely superior to men at balancing their remaining commitments.
The study gave 50 male and 50 female students eight minutes to perform three tasks at the same time: maths problems, finding restaurants on a map, and sketching a plan for locating a lost key in an imaginary field. To make it worse, they all received an optional phone call as they worked. If they picked up they were given a telephone general knowledge test to add to their pile.
Women, it turned out, were easily capable of managing all four tasks at once, while men fell down when it came to the looking for the key.
“Men are supposed to have better spatial awareness than women, so they should have outperformed the women on that task,” the lead researcher, Professor Keith Laws, said. “It shows that women are better at being able to stand back and reflect for a moment while they are juggling other things.”
6. Men make better drinkers
It may depend on what you define as ‘better’ (some would view the female disadvantage as value for money), but men do certainly have a biological advantage when it comes to handling their booze.
Women lack a crucial component of the isozymes (gastric alchohol dehydrogenase, to be precise) used to break down alcohol in the stomach. As a result of this deficiency – exacerbated by generally having a smaller body mass – a survey found that women “absorb about 30% more alcohol into their bloodstreams than men do.”
And some that aren’t so true…
Don’t get too comfortable in your staid gender perceptions; for every stereotype verified by science, scores have been debunked. For reference, then, women are just as competitive and aggressive as men, better at driving, and no worse at mathematics.
Men, on the other hand, are more clingy in relationships, no less faithful, make worse bosses and are more prone to faltering under stressful conditions.
