Why Are There Differences in Gender Behavior? 

Brain Differences

Neuro-psychiatrist and controversial author, Louann Brizendine says “…there are his and her brains….There is no unisex brain, and it follows these two brain models can produce quite different behaviors.”

“University of California-Irvine professor Judy Rosener says brain scans prove men and women think differently.”

Sandra Witelson, a neuro-scientist agrees with respect to the differences in male and female brains, saying:

There are clear differences in the brain between men and women, both in structure and chemistry, which includes hormones and neuro-transmitters and what’s connected to what.

Thus, some studies show that, as a result of brain “structure and wiring”

…men use only one side of the brain to process some problems while women employ both sides…

These differences…do not appear to have any influence on intelligence as measured by IQ tests.  It does, however, seem that the sexes carry out these tests in different ways….

More generally, men seem to rely on their grey matter [the nerve cells] for their IQ, whereas women rely more on their white matter [the connections between nerve cells].

Nurture

Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at Rosalind Franklin University,

…immersed herself in hundreds of scientific papers…[in her book Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It] she explains that assertions of innate sex differences in the brain are either “blatantly false”, “cherry-picked from single studies”, or “extrapolated from rodent research” without being confirmed in people.  For instance, the idea that the band of fibers connecting the right and left brain is larger in women, supposedly supporting their “holistic” thinking is based on a 1982 study of only 14 brains.  Fifty other studies, taken together, found no such sex difference—not in adults, not in newborns.  Other baseless claims: that women are hard-wired to read faces and tone of voice, to defuse conflict, and to form friendships; and that girls’ brains are wired for “communication” and boys’ for aggression.  Eliot’s inescapable conclusion: there is little solid evidence of sex differences in children’s brains.

Yet there are differences in adult’s brains….by 4 months of age, boys and girls differ in how much eye contact they make, and differences in sociability, emotional expressivity, and verbal ability—all of which depend on interactions with parents—grow through childhood…. 

…there are indeed structural and biochemical differences between male and female brains.  But since boys and girls, and men and women, live very different lives and are treated differently by parents and then by society, it’s impossible to attribute those differences to innate biology rather than experience….discoveries in neuroplasticity have shown that brains of any age can change their structure and function in response to experience....

Hormones

Canadian psychologist Susan Pinker adds another factor to the reasons for differences in gender behavior.  She finds:

Using the latest neurological and biological findings of brain imaging and sex-hormone studies…adds scientific ballast to the anecdotal truisms…[of differences in gender behavior].