5 Things You Need To Know About Male-Female Differences

A massive triggering has occurred as a result of a Google memo that explains how biological differences between men and women might be part of the reason as to why there are disproportionately more men in tech fields than women. But the triggering obfuscates the fact that there are indeed differences between males and females, differences that should be embraced rather than ignored for the sake of feelings.

Here are five things you need to know about male-female differences.

1. Male brains tend to be more “mechanistic” while female brains tend to be more “mentalistic.” According to Psychology Today:

The male brain is characterized by systemizing tendencies (to use Baron-Cohen’s term) and mechanistic thinking (to use Crespi and Badcock’s term). “Systemizing” is the drive to analyze, explore, and construct a system. The systemizer intuitively figures out how things work, or extracts the underlying rules that govern the behavior of a system. The purpose of this is to understand and predict the system, or to invent a new one.

In contrast, the female brain is characterized by empathizing tendencies (to use Baron-Cohen’s term) or mentalistic thinking (to use Crespi and Badcock’s term). “Empathizing” is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to them with an appropriate emotion. Empathizing occurs when we feel an appropriate emotional reaction in response to the other person’s emotions. The purpose of this is to understand another person, to predict his or her behavior, and to connect or resonate with him or her emotionally.

The reason for these differences in thinking between the two sexes can be traced back to the early days of mankind, when men began “inventing and making tools and weapons” and would go on lengthy hunting expeditions — activities that are geared toward less empathetic thinking and more toward analytical, materialistic thinking. Women, on the hand, developed more empathetic thinking through the nurturing that comes through motherhood.

Additionally, females also tend to “have a higher density of neural connections into the hippocampus” that causes them to be more emotional than men and have a structural brain advantage when it comes to language since they have verbal centers on the left and right sides of the brain; men typically only have them on the left side, which deals with logic, as opposed to the right side which deals with creativity.

In other words, “people people are women, and things people are men,” per Psychology Today.

2. It should therefore be no surprise that men tend to be in more math-oriented fields while women are in more language-oriented fields. More from Psychology Today:

Men’s greater systemizing and mechanistic skills are the primary reasons why they are better than women at mathematics, physics, and engineering, because all of these fields deal with various rational “systems” governed by rules. Women’s greater empathizing and mentalistic skills are the primary reasons why they are better at languages and why they are better judges of character. Women also dominate primatology, which, like mothering of infants, requires understanding and reading the minds of individuals with whom they cannot communicate by language.

Interestingly, almost 50% of women are math majors, while only 20% are in computer science and engineering fields. The reason: women in math majors tend to go on to be math teachers, which makes sense given the language-oriented nature of women’s brains.

3. Women are better at multitasking than men. This is due to the fact that male brains typically feature more gray matter — parts that process information and actions — while female brains typically feature more white matter, which connects the gray matter to other parts of the brain. Consequently, men tend to zero in on a task to the point where everything else is of little importance, while women can shift between multiple tasks at a time with ease.

4. Men tend to be better than women at visuospatial matters. This means that men typically understand the ins and outs of shapes and calculating various angles of these shapes better than women, as evidenced by studies that show that women tend to navigate based on landmarks while men instead determine “the direction and distance traveled” when navigating.

5. Biological differences between males and females also explain differences in toy preferences at a young age. Via Stanford Medicine:

In a study of 34 rhesus monkeys, for example, males strongly preferred toys with wheels over plush toys, whereas females found plush toys likable. It would be tough to argue that the monkeys’ parents bought them sex-typed toys or that simian society encourages its male offspring to play more with trucks. A much more recent study established that boys and girls 9 to 17 months old — an age when children show few if any signs of recognizing either their own or other children’s sex — nonetheless show marked differences in their preference for stereotypically male versus stereotypically female toys.

The main takeaway from all this is that biological differences do in fact create inherent differences in behavior and skills between men and women, which was the point that was being made in the Google memo. Since men’s brains are more geared toward math and visuospatial skills while women have more language-oriented brains, that could explain why there aren’t as many women in tech fields, not due to some sort of patriarchal oppression against women. Unfortunately, such facts are triggering to leftists to the point where tech giants like Google and YouTube are acting like snowflake social justice warriors on college campuses.

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