At dinner with some guys the conversation veered to the unfathomability of womankind. “My daughter asked me to translate from Boy to Human.” “I just always say I’m sorry.” “Women say they communicate more, but when they’re upset you’re supposed to know why. Or to ask.” Lest one gender get all the blame, I see plenty of gender finger-pointing from women as well in questions to advice columnists.
Obviously, there are biological differences between the sexes. The mind being rooted in the physical brain (I’m not a dualist), it is plausible that there might be some biological difference in cognitive processes. However, my impression of the studies that I’ve read in the lay literature—and bear in mind this is a pre-filtered and pre-digested set, not at all a metastudy—is that these differences are small variations in the statistical distributions of various cognitive traits: the distributions are not identical, but there is a large overlap.
I’ll admit that I’m biased here: I start from the assumption that we are all much more alike than we are different, and I find validation for my bias in these studies that say the differences are small. If you start from the opposite camp, though, you’ll certainly find plenty of literature to support (I would say hype) the chasm between the sexes: Mars/Venus and all that.
