Women are popularly believed at being better at finding and remembering words than men, but are the popular science textbooks which proclaim this actually correct? If so, this has relevance for tests such as measures of dementia. Researchers investigated this supposed difference, publishing their findings in Perspectives on Psychological Science.
Marco Hirnstein, professor at The University of Bergen, Norway, is unequivocal about the results. “Women are better. The female advantage is consistent across time and life span, but it is also relatively small.”
Prof Hirnstein is interested in how biological, psychological, and social factors contribute to sex/gender differences in cognitive abilities and what the underlying brain mechanisms are.
“So far, the focus has mostly been on abilities, in which men excel. However, in recent years the focus has shifted more towards women,” said Prof Hirnstein.
Textbooks and popular science books take it for granted that women are better at finding words. For example, when naming words that begin with the letter “F,” or words that belong to a certain category like animals or fruits. It has also been considered “fact” that women are better at remembering words.
Yet, the actual findings are much more inconsistent than textbooks imply: Some studies find a female advantage, some find a male advantage, some do not find any advantage.
“Most intellectual skills show no or negligible differences in average performance between men and women. However, women excel in some tasks, while men excel in others on average.”
Prof Hirnstein and his colleagues point out how their findings can be useful in diagnosis and in healthcare. The results help to clarify whether the female advantage is real but also have relevance for for interpreting the results of diagnostic assessments.
For example, to diagnose dementia, knowing that women are generally better in those tasks is critical to not under-diagnose women, due to their better average, baseline performance and not over-diagnose men. Currently, many but not all assessments take sex/gender into account.
The researchers conducted a meta-analysis of the available literatures, encompassing more than 500 measures from more than 350,000 participants. The researchers found that women are indeed better. The advantage is small but consistent across the last 50 years and across an individual’s lifespan.
Moreover, they found that the female advantage depends on the sex/gender of the leading scientist: Female scientists report a larger female advantage, male scientists report a smaller female advantage.
Source: University of Bergen
