We spent a lot of time talking about gender differences last week in class. We discussed what is present in the current research and what we thought should be. Most of the things we mentioned were things that we would have to test and could not look at physiologically. I think it is important to note both sides of this.
It is not important to understand the differences in sexes to answer the ultimate question of which sex is more superior---rather it is best for both sexes involved to learn as much as possible about both sides. I was searching on-line and found the following link that talks about physiological differences that have been found between sexes that I was not aware of. I found the information in "Psychology Today", so its interesting to note who might be reading this type of material. Is it useful? Do we need to understand these differences or does it just polarize the respective genders?
Some of the interesting findings in the article are that women have numerous back-up genes that men don't. The authors speculate that this is the reason why women are less susceptible to mental illnesses (i.e. autism and schizophrenia). We know that women have more gray matter in our brains and really drive home that point, but who knew that men had more white matter and cerebrospinal fluid? The reasoning for this is that it gives men's brains more cushion and protection from the elements when tooling around or battling. Just some food for thought...
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20030624-000003.xml
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I thought that the differences between men and women when it comes to the brain was really fascinating as well. I thought that it was interesting to hear that women are supposedly better multi-taskers than men. I think that depends on the person, but for the most part, I could see how that would be true. This could be true because women evolved from being not only the primary caretakers, but also did most of the cooking and cleaning. In order to be successful, women were forced to evolve to become better at their daily tasks and it is interesting that their corpus callosums evolved as needed.
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