Gender differences

“Like many-handed Hindu goddesses, women are better jugglers (in my experience), sweeping through their lives performing several tasks at once, while men seemingly do things sequentially—a division of labor that certainly prevails in our household.”
– Linda Marsa, in her article, ‘He Thinks, She Thinks’, Discover Magazine, July 2007

Genders differ – not just physiologically, but mentally and emotionally as well. This, as you can guess, is not a profound statement by me; but, rather, a reflection of all the scientific research that is available and my experiences in life. While reading up on gender differences in the workplace, earlier this month, I came across an article on the Internet from Discover Magazine which deals with the issue of gender differences from a scientific perspective.

The article, ‘He Thinks, She Thinks’ by Linda Marsa says, for instance, “men process their strong emotions differently from women and tend to act out and take action…” Ms Marsa, then, goes on to examine why this is so. Apparently, “findings offer tantalizing hints that even gender behavior differences once attributed solely to nurture—women are more emotionally attuned, while men are more physically aggressive—stem in part from variations in our neural circuitry.”

I quote from the article:

“The brain is divided into two hemispheres that play different roles in perception and behavior. The right side is relatively more involved with visual and spatial control, while the left is the seat of language. There is evidence that the male brain uses either one hemisphere or the other and relies on specialized brain regions when performing a task. Women, meanwhile, call on both hemispheres regardless of the task, resulting in greater communication between the two; they also enlist more brain regions to process information. When at rest, male minds appear to be more attuned to the “external world,” while there may be a “differential tilt toward the internal world” in female brains, says Larry Cahill, a neurobiologist at the University of California at Irvine.”

Got all that? Why not read the entire article online on Discover Magazine?