1. By way of introduction
Personally, I did not want to be considered a typical Latin American macho, when trying to show the intellectual differences between women and men, I do not try in any way to indicate that men are better than women, the fact being the opposite, since that without that beautiful creation man would have no existence.
I only try to show differences that can help Strategic Planners and Social Psychologists, to consider variables when intervening in planning processes with a pure or mixed group of women.
As when I wrote "Floristofilo II" and I was branded as RACISTA, I think that in a very personal way I must take risks on issues where other people do not have the audacity to intervene, for being afraid in the sorrow of other people, in my case for not having the traditional paradigms and without seeking to offend any particular person I wish to present the "Short Critical Essay" hoping that it will be accepted with the same effervescence as on other occasions.
2. Our Beginnings Man vrs. Woman
A hundred years ago, the observation that men are different from women across a range of aptitudes and abilities would have been a truism, a most obvious statement.
But instead, today, it could evoke very different reactions. Said by a man, it would suggest a certain social ineptitude, a hazing in matters of sexual politics, a sad deficiency of conventional wisdom, or a clumsy attempt to be provocative. A woman who ventured such an opinion would be branded as a traitor to her sex, betraying the struggling "victories" of recent decades for a woman who has sought equality of status, opportunity and respect.
When a Canadian psychologist titled an academic paper, "Are men's and women's brains really different?" She understood that the answer to the question was self-evident.
Yes of course. I would be amazed if the brains of men and women were not different given the huge morphological (structural) differences and the often hurtful differences in behavior between men and women.
Most of us intuitively feel that the sexes are different, but this has universally become a secret that is guarded with suspicion and guilt. We have stopped trusting our common sense. The truth is that practically throughout our stay on the planet we have been a sexist species. Our biology has assigned separate roles to the male and female Homo sapiens. Our evolution has strengthened and refined these differences.
Our civilization has reflected them. Our religion and our education have strengthened them.
Still, we both fear and challenge history. We fear it because we are afraid of complicity with the old crimes of sexual prejudice. We challenge it because we want to believe that humanity has finally reached escape speed to abandon the heavy gravity of our animal past and neardenthal certainties. Over the past thirty years, there has been a small but influential collection of well-meaning souls who have tried to persuade us to adopt this challenging new position. They discovered that religion and education were a male creation to keep women in a state of subordination. The discovery may be true. They found that what we call civilization is founded on male dominance and aggression. That is probably also true. Okay so far.
The problem comes when you look at the explanation of why this happened. If men and women are identical, and always have been, in the way and the degree to which they both use identical brains, how is it that the male sex has managed so successfully in virtually every culture and society in the world?,to contribute to a situation where the woman was subordinate? Has it only been the greater musculature and body weight of the male that the feminine kingdom has been an occupied territory in the count of the last thousands of years? Was it because of the fact that until recent centuries women were pregnant most of the time? Or is it because –as the facts suggest– the differences between male and female brains have been the route of the society we have and the people we are? There are some biological facts of life that, with the greatest desire for sexual freedom and the best will in the world, cannot be changed; Wouldn't it be better if instead of fighting helplessly against the differences between the sexes, we knew, understood, exploited, and even enjoyed them?With the greatest desire for sexual freedom and the best will in the world, they cannot be modified; Wouldn't it be better if instead of fighting helplessly against the differences between the sexes, we knew, understood, exploited, and even enjoyed them?With the greatest desire for sexual freedom and the best will in the world, they cannot be modified; Wouldn't it be better if instead of fighting helplessly against the differences between the sexes, we knew, understood, exploited, and even enjoyed them?
In the last hundred years, scientists have grown tired of explaining such differences. However, it must be said that the beginning of the science of the sexual differences of the brain began with a methodology as crude as its claims. The simple measurement of the brain apparently proves that the woman lacks the necessary cerebral volume to cry out for equal intellect. Germans were particularly obsessed with school measurement of head circumference. Bayerthal (1911) found as a minimum requirement for a professor of surgery to have a head circumference of between 52 and 53 centimeters: “Below 52 centimeters, especially significant intellectual performance cannot be expected, while below 50.5 centimeters, it cannot normal intelligence expected."On these relationships he also observed," We do not have to ask about the measurement of the head circumference of a genius woman: they do not exist. "
French scientist Gustave Le Bon noted that many Parisian women had brains closer in size to that of gorillas than that of men, concluding that female inferiority was "so evident that none could refute it for even a moment." And he prophetically warned that:
The day when, misinterpreting the lower occupations that nature has given her, the woman leaves home and takes part in our battles; On that day a social revolution will begin and everything that maintains the sacred ties of the family will disappear.
That social revolution has been with us for some time; but accompanied by a scientific revolution in the knowledge of brain differences. Many, perhaps most, of the secrets of how the brain works have not yet been revealed, but the differences between the male and female brains - and the process by which they are made different - are now clear. There is still more to know, more detail and precision to add, perhaps, but the nature and causes of brain differences are now known beyond all speculation, prejudice or reasonable doubt.
But now, just as science can tell us what those differences are and where they come from, we have been led to believe that we should avoid assuming differences as if it were guilty thinking. Recent decades have witnessed two contradictory processes: the development of scientific research on differences between the sexes, and the political denial that such differences exist. It can be understood that these two ideological positions are not a matter of terms. Science knows that meddling in matters of sexual differences is a risk: at least one researcher in the field of gender differences was denied a large part of the support of his research, arguing that “this work should not have been done "Another told us that he had to quit his job because the political pressure (the pressure to the truth) had become too much. On the other hand, some of these works in the field of sexual differences seem to evidence a kind of almost intentional neglect in scientific discoveries, to blind themselves to discoveries whose implications might be very uncomfortable to admit.
The first systematic test to explore sexual differences was conducted by Francis Gatton in 1882 at the South Kensington Museum in London.
He reported finding significant sexual differences favoring men in grip strength, in their sensitivity to the sound of high-pitched whistles, and in their ability to work under pressure. Women were found to be much more sensitive to pain.
Ten years later, in the United States, studies found that women can hear better than men, have more conventional vocabulary, and prefer blue to red. Men prefer red to blue, they have a more daring language and have a preference for general and abstract thoughts, while women prefer practical problems and individual tasks.
Havelock Ellis, in his book Man and You Die, published in 1894, raised immediate interest and even reached eight editions. Among the differences he related was the superiority of women over men in memory, sagacity, dissimulation, compassion, patience and the ability to give news. The work of female scientists was found to be more accurate than that of male scientists, but "perhaps a little inferior in scope and initiative, though admirable within a limited range." A genius woman seemed to need the close support of a man. Ellis offers the example of Madame Curie, who was the wife of a scientist who was already distinguished, and notes that Mrs. Browning's best poems were all written after she had the good fortune to meet Mr. Browning.Ellis found that the woman dislikes the essentially intellectual process of analysis. "They have an instinctive feeling that analysis can destroy the emotional complexity with which they are so deeply moved and to which they appeal.
These observations would have remained mere school curiosities had it not been for the development that began in the 1960s of new scientific investigations into the brain. Paradoxically, the discoveries of gender differences correspond to the political period in which the denial that these differences existed was more pronounced.
3. The origin of the difference
Paradoxically, the interest in these gender differences also came from the scientific interest that originally sought to suppress them. The problem arose with IQ tests. The researchers noted that there were constant and consistent differences favoring one sex over the other in some of the skills tested. The scientific community did not sing a Eureka, in fact it was relegated as a nuisance that muddied the waters of the accurate measurement of intelligence.
In the 1950s, Dr. D. Wechsler, an American scientist who developed the most commonly used IQ test today, found that there were more than thirty "discriminatory" tests in favor of one sex or the other. The simple use of the word supposed that the tests were guilty in themselves for the fact that the different sexes had obtained different degrees of achievement in them.
Wechsler, among others, sought to solve the problem by eliminating all those tests that resulted with results of significant sexual difference. When the difficulty of producing “sexually neutral” results was still seen, they deliberately introduced elements with “male bias” or “female bias” to achieve approximately equal results between the sexes.
This is a way in which scientific studies are twisted, if you do not like the results you get from the experiment, then you arrange the data to produce a more pleasant conclusion. The sporting equivalent would be to roughly match Olympic pole vault athletes by imposing a handicap by adding some lead weights or shortening the poles of others to ensure that the desired truth prevails that all pole vaulters regardless of their feats or agility, they have been created equal.
Still, sex differences stubbornly emerge, like recalcitrant dandelions that persist despite chemically treating a meadow. Wechsler even concluded that from a series of subtests it was possible to measurably prove the superiority of women over men in general intelligence. While, on the other hand, something like 105 tests that measured the ability solving mazes and that were applied to the most heterogeneous sample of individuals worldwide, including from the most primitive to the most highly civilized, in 99% of The cases showed an incontrovertible male superiority.Perhaps the surest and least controversial synthesis that could be made of these discoveries would have been that the girls were too smart to bother with something as absurd as solving a maze. Concerned with finding a IQ measurement technique that was sexually neutral, Wechsler relegated the evidence that the sexes were different as a mere nuisance. Just as Columbus must have relegated his discovery of America as secondary, for he was after all looking for the East Indies. Wechsler observed, almost like a comment in parentheses.Just as Columbus should have relegated his discovery of America as secondary, for he was after all looking for the East Indies. Wechsler observed, almost like a comment in parentheses.Just as Columbus should have relegated his discovery of America as secondary, for he was after all looking for the East Indies. Wechsler observed, almost like a comment in parentheses.
Our discoveries confirm what novelists and poets have often claimed, and that most people deep down believe that men not only act, but think differently than women.
What an early British pioneer of sexual differences has called "a conspiracy of silence surrounding the topic of human sexual differences" was soon manifested by a chatter of sociological explanations. Children, it was argued, were born psycho-sexually neutral; But then, parents, teachers, bosses, politicians and all the social malice get to work on the innocent virginity of the mind.
The main group championing the theory of neutrality was led by Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University in the United States of America.
Sexuality is undifferentiated at birth and… it differentiates itself from male to female in the various experiences of growth.
So if men and women were different, it must have been the result of social conditioning. Society had to be blamed, which, in the view of sociology, is usually very common.
If there is still dispute over how sexual differences emerge, there is now no argument in the scientific community as to whether such differences exist. It could not be overstated that this book in itself is concerned with how most men differ from most women. In the same way that we could say that men are taller than women.
When looking around any room full of people, this will be obvious. Of course, some women are taller than some men, and it is possible that the tallest of all women may become taller than the tallest of all men. But statistically, men are seven percent taller than women on average, and the tallest person in the world, regardless of what happens in the room, is certainly a man. What we will explore here are the statistical variations in sex differences, in abilities, aptitudes or weaknesses, which are much greater than they are with regard to height; Although there will always be the exception to the average, the person with exceptional “wrong sex” abilities, but the exception does not invalidate the general rule of the average.These differences have practical and social relevance. In measurements of various aptitude tests the difference between the average scores between the sexes reaches up to 25%. A difference as small as 5% has been found to have a profound impact on the occupations or activities in which average men or women will be able to succeed.
The area in which the greatest differences are found has been found to be what scientists call "spatial skills." This is being able to mentally visualize things, their shapes, position, geography, and proportions accurately; all the skills that are crucial to the practical ability to work with three-dimensional objects or drawings. A scientist who has reviewed extensive scientific literature on this aspect concludes that: "The fact of male superiority in spatial ability is not in dispute." This is confirmed by literally hundreds of different scientific studies.
A typical test is the measurement of the ability of men and women to assemble a three-dimensional mechanical device. Only a quarter of the best managed to do the task better than the average male. In the first ten of the mechanical fitness scale there were twice as many men as women.
From the school years onward, boys generally perform better than girls in areas of mathematics involving abstract concepts of space, relationships, and theory. At the highest levels of mathematical excellence, according to the largest test ever done, the best of all boys totally outshines the best of all girls. Dr. Julian Stanley and Dr. Camilla Benbow, both American psychologists, worked with the most highly gifted students of both sexes. Not only did they find that the best of the girls can never beat the best of the boys; They also discovered an alarming proportion of brilliance in math: For every exceptional girl there will always be more than thirteen exceptional boys.
Scientists know that they stand on brittle ground when they venture any theory of human behavior. But researchers in the field of sexual differentiation are becoming increasingly impatient with politics trying to find a social explanation for these differences.
As Camila Benbow now says about her studies showing male superiority in boys with mathematical skills. "After 15 years searching for an environmental explanation and getting zero results, I gave up."
She has already admitted to us that she believes this difference in ability is biologically based.
Men also have superior eye-hand coordination, which is necessary for sports where a ball is used. These same abilities mean that they can more easily imagine altering or rotating an object in their mind's eyes. It's easier for boys than girls to build structures with building blocks from two-dimensional planes, and to correctly point out how the level of the water surface in a jug will change angle when the jug is tilted at various angles.
This male advantage in noticing abstract patterns and relationships (which may be called strategic generality rather than detailed tactical thinking) may perhaps explain male dominance in chess, even in a country like the former USSR, where gambling was a national sport played by both sexes.
As an alternative explanation, more acceptable to those who will deny the biological basis of sexual differentiation, women are said to have been so conditioned by the fact of male superiority in the game of chess that they subconsciously assign themselves less expectation; but this objection to scientific evidence is nothing more than a willing attempt to maintain prejudice.
Men's increased spatial ability can certainly help explain masculine superiority in reading and interpreting maps that we noted earlier. Here again, the prejudice against women behind the wheel is confirmed by experimentation; boys and girls who were each given maps of the city, were asked, without rotating the map, to describe where they would turn right or left at certain particular intersections if they mentally took a tour of the people there and back. The boys did better. More men than women had to turn the map to physically match the direction they were mentally traveling when trying to find their way.
While the male brain provides men with the facility to deal with things and theorems, the female brain is organized to respond more sensitively to all sensory stimuli. Women are better than men on verbal ability tests. Women are equipped to have a much broader range of sensory information reception, to connect and relate that information more easily, to prioritize personal relationships, and to communicate. Cultural influence can reinforce these feminine strengths, but their superiority is innate.
The differences become evident in the first hours after birth. Newborn girls have been shown to be much more interested in boys and faces than boys; children seem equally happy with a person or with an object placed in front of them.
Girls say their first word and learn to speak in short sentences sooner than boys, and they are generally much more fluent in their preschool years. They also read sooner and are better at handling language units such as grammar, punctuation, or spelling.
Boys outnumber girls in a four-to-one ratio in remedial reading courses. Later, for women, mastering foreign languages is easier, and they are more efficient in their own language, with a better command of spelling and grammar. They are also more fluent: stuttering and other speech defects occur almost exclusively among children.
Girls and women hear better than men. When the sexes are compared, the woman shows a greater sensitivity to sound. The noise of a leak will get a woman out of bed long before the man has even woken up. Six times more girls than boys can sing intonation. They are also much more adept at noticing small changes in volume, which somehow explains the greater sensitivity of women to "that tone of voice" that their male partners are so frequently accused of adopting. Men and women even see some things differently. Women see better in the dark. They are more sensitive to red tones at the end of the light spectrum, seeing more shades of red than men, and have a better visual memory.
Men see better than women in bright light. Intriguing results showed that men tend to be literally screened, see in a narrower field of view, such as through a screen with a smooth tunnel vision effect, with much greater concentration in depth. They have a greater sense of perspective than women. Women, meanwhile, have almost literally greater vision. They have a much wider peripheral field of view, because they have more rods and receptor cones on the retina at the inner back of the eyeball, to receive a greater arc of visual information.
The differences extend to other senses. Women react faster, and more acutely, to pain, although their total resistance to long-term discomfort is greater than that of men. In a sample of young adults, women “overwhelmingly” showed increased sensitivity to pressure on the skin anywhere on the body. In childhood and in maturity, women have a tactile sensitivity so superior to that of men that in some of the tests the results of both sexes do not overlap; in them the least sensitive of all women is more sensitive than the most sensitive of all men.
There is strong evidence that men and women have different senses of taste. The woman is more sensitive to bitter flavors such as cinchona and prefers higher concentrations and a greater spread of sweet things. Men score higher in differentiating salty flavors.
But above all, in any case, the evidence strongly suggests a greater delicacy and feminine perception in the sense of taste. Should there be more great female chefs? Or is it that many of the great male chefs have more feminine sensibility than they admit?
Women's sense of smell, like their palates, is much more sensitive than that of men. A separate case is her perception of the exaltoid, a synthetic aroma associated with men, but hardly noticeable by them.
Women find the scent attractive. Interestingly, this higher sensitivity increases just before her ovulation, at the critical moment of her menstrual cycle, the biology of women makes her much more sensitive than men.
This superiority in so many of the senses can be measured clinically; it may be this that provides the woman with an almost supernatural "intuition". Women are simply better equipped to notice things where the man is comparatively blind and deaf. There is no witchcraft in this higher perception; it is extra-sensory only in the sense of the male sensory limits, which are much narrower. Women are better at noting social hints, recognizing important variations of intention and meaning in tone of voice or intensity of expression.
The man is often exasperated at the female reaction to what he says. He does not realize that the woman is probably "hearing" much more than he thinks he is "saying". Woman tends to be a better judge of character. Older women have a better memory for names and faces and a greater sensitivity to perceive other people's preferences.
So men are more self-centered; Any other news? The novelty is that genre folklore, which is always vulnerable to disqualifying and politically motivated opinion, has in fact been shown to have a scientific basis.
Many people oppose the explanations that we propose through biology for so many of the differences between the sexes, but they are willing to believe, in a much vaguer way, that such differences probably have "something to do with hormones."
That is half the truth. Hormones, as we have seen, determine the distinctive organization of the brain in male or female as it develops in the womb. We share the same sexual identity only the first few weeks after conception.
But from there, inside the womb begins to change the structure and pattern of the brain, beginning to take a specific male or female form. Throughout childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, the way the brain was formed will have subtle interactions with hormones, with fundamental effects on the individual's attitudes, behaviors, and emotional and intellectual functions.
More and more neuroscientists and researchers of the mysteries of the brain, such as the American neurologist Dr. Richard Restak, are now prepared to make this confident statement.
It seems unrealistic to continue denying the existence of differences in the male and female brain. Just as there are physical distinctions between men and women… there are equally dramatic differences in brain function.
The way our brains are made affects the way we think, learn, see, smell, feel, communicate, love, make love, fight, succeed, or fail. Understanding how our brains and those of others are made is not a matter of little importance.
Children are not blank sheets on which we outline instructions for proper sexual behavior.
They are born with their own male or female minds by themselves. They have literally shaped their minds from the womb, safe from the legions of social engineers waiting impatiently for them.
Recent years have brought us the elements to build a new framework for understanding sexual differences through two independent and converging scientific breakthroughs.
The first is the gigantic progress that has been made in understanding how the brain works; the second, new discoveries about how - biologically and behaviorally - we are what we are: men or women.
4. The differences are not only external
Scientists such as Doreen Kimura, Sandra Witelson or Eleanor Maccoby have been drawing attention since the 1970s to the biological differences that exist between the brains of men and women. In fact, MRI and tomography techniques allow you to verify that males and females activate different areas of their brain to pass the same exam. However, both end up obtaining, on average, identical results.
"The worst thing that can be done is to generalize", says the expert in Psychoneurobiology José Antonio Gil Verona, from the University of Valladolid. This researcher recognizes that statistical studies show different intellectual abilities regarding sex, but clarifies that "global intelligence is the same".
For Hugo Liaño, head of the Neurology Service at the Puerta de Hierro Hospital in Madrid, "male and female brains are prepared differently", but "the differences in intellectual capacities are very small and can be overcome by culture and level Learning". Thus, the essential difference between the brain of men and that of women is that in the first "each area is more specialized." However, "talking about advantages or disadvantages" between one sex and another "is nonsense." Some of the differences have already been scientifically studied.
| Sciences and letters. | Male | A series of tests conducted by American students between 1960 and 1992 resulted in boys being more qualified for mathematics and, in general, science subjects. On the contrary, men are somewhat more clumsy, on average, when it comes to handling language. Their memory is less to learn word lists, and they also take longer to find different words that start with the same syllable or contain a certain letter, for example. |
| Woman | The aforementioned study points to females as more suitable for literary understanding and expression. Furthermore, women have shown a higher average aptitude to overcome stress situations. They also have more manual dexterity. |
| Hemispheres. | Male | Males often use a single cerebral hemisphere (usually the left) to process linguistic information. For this reason, they suffer from speech disorders more often than women when they have suffered an injury to the hemisphere that is responsible for language. Also, they take longer to recover, as it takes more work to use other areas of your brain. |
| Woman | Females improve their memory in verbal tasks when their blood circulates faster in their brains, something that apparently does not happen in males. Your memory is also better when you have to remember other people's faces. | |
| Hormones | Male | Some experts believe that testosterone and other male hormones are responsible for certain male abilities such as a sense of direction. Differences between boys 'and girls' toys have also been linked to the action of hormones. |
| Woman | During ovulation and menstruation, there is usually a greater linguistic ability, characteristic of women, at the same time as the ability to perform spatial tasks, typically male, is reduced. | |
| Size Matters? | Male | It has a somewhat larger brain than that of women, on average, just like the rest of the body. It also tends to have a larger hypothalamus, the area responsible for regulating reproductive behavior in both males and females. In contrast, men have a smaller limbic system, which hinders their ability to express feelings. Man is on average much more aggressive. |
| Woman | According to the Israeli scientist Ruben Gur, they have more gray matter (cells) in their brains and men have more white matter (nerve fibers). This would explain why, despite having a smaller brain, they do not perform worse on intelligence tests. |
| Evolution. | Male Female | In another controversial study, Gur concluded that men obey their limbic region more, present in animals such as reptiles, while women act more according to their unique bark, which only monkeys and humans. Therefore, women are more evolved than men. For this reason, and according to Gur's research, the majority of people who kill or commit suicide are men, while women have a greater capacity to understand the feelings and emotions of others. |
5. Bibliography
www.elmundo.es/cronica/2005/484/1106434812.html
www.inteligencia-emocional.org/aplicaciones_practicas/
historico.elpais.com.uy/Suple/DeLosDomingos/05 / 01/30 /
N. Angier and K. Chang of The New York Times
Melgar, M. Floristofilo II "Influence of Race on Territorial Development" Melgar, M. Floristofilo III "Influence of Religion on Territorial Development"
