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Some personality differences are easily observable. Others are more difficult to detect. Here are five lesser-known personality differences between men and women, according to the latest scientific research.
#1: Female extraverts may be less romantically happy than male extraverts
Male extraverts are similar to female extraverts in many ways. Both feed off of the energy of others and both have large social networks — online and in real life.
But there are some important differences. A recent paper published in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science found that female extraverts were less likely to experience romantic happiness and they were less likely to have a high degree of occupational commitment.
This is not to say women extraverts can’t have these two things; it just may come a bit more naturally to male extraverts.
#2: Females are better at recognizing facial displays of disgust
Conventional wisdom suggests that women have a higher emotional quotient (EQ) than men. But is this really the case?
A recent study published in the journal Emotion adds nuance to this long-standing debate. The researchers asked both men and women to evaluate a series of photos of individuals expressing one of five basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, or sadness). Participants were asked to identify the emotion conveyed in each photo. They found:
- Women were significantly better at identifying disgust and sadness.
- Men were significantly better at identifying happiness.
Why? The researchers invoke evolutionary theory as a possible explanation. Because women are the child-bearing gender, they may have a heightened sensitivity to potential contaminants in their environment and might, therefore, be more likely to identify signals of disgust. Conversely, men may show less disgust sensitivity as a way to emphasize their strength and virility.
#3: Men experience more loneliness earlier in life; women experience more loneliness later in life
Stereotypes about loneliness suggest that loneliness increases with age. We begin life with a wide and dynamic social network. Over time, people go their separate ways, and friends and acquaintances become harder to come by.
But does the stereotype match reality? A recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examined the development of loneliness across the lifespan. Interestingly, the researchers found that the trajectory of loneliness across the lifespan depends on one’s gender — men experience more loneliness in midlife and women experience more loneliness in old age.
#4: Men spend more time relaxing than women, according to one study
A recent study measured the amount of time men and women devoted to various leisure activities such as watching television, hobbies, socializing with family and friends, practicing a sport, attending cultural events, or hosting events.
According to the results, men, on average, engaged in approximately 113 minutes of daily leisure activities while women totaled approximately 101 minutes. (These numbers reflect weekday averages, not weekends.) While this might not sound like a big difference, it adds up over time. At this rate, men spend an extra hour and a half per week, or an additional 70 hours per year, engaging in leisure activities.
There is, however, a catch. When asked to report the satisfaction derived from leisure pursuits, women reported significantly higher levels of satisfaction. In other words, while men have more leisure time than women, women actually enjoy their leisure activities more than men.
#5: Men use more abstract language to communicate
In a recent study, a team of psychologists examined the degree to which men and women relied on “communicative abstraction” to verbally convey their ideas and emotions. Communicative abstraction, as defined by the researchers, reflects the tendency for people to use “abstract speech that focuses on the broader picture and ultimate purpose of action rather than concrete speech focusing on details and the means of attaining action.”
Interestingly, they found that men were significantly more likely to speak in the abstract than women.
In one of their studies, the researchers examined over 600,000 blog posts written on the website Blogger.com to see whether men used more abstract language than women. To do this, the researchers computed abstractness ratings for approximately 40,000 commonly used words in the English language. For instance, words that could be easily visualized, such as “table” or “chair,” were given a low rating for abstractness while words that were more difficult to visualize (for example, “justice” or “morality”) were given a high rating. They found that men used significantly more abstract language in their blog posts.
Conclusion: Although men and women are similar in many ways, science suggests there are stable and predictable personality differences between the genders. How wide is the gap? One report found that knowing the personality profile of an individual, without knowing his or her gender, made it possible to correctly guess his or her gender about 85% of the time.
Personality isn’t a dead giveaway to someone’s gender, but it isn’t a bad start either.
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Human behavior is exceptionally complicated at times. It’s influenced by many interacting forces.
Some of the causes of behavior lie in the genetic blueprint that designed our brains, but much of behavior is influenced by people’s personal experiences, how they were raised, and the influence of other people, social groups, and culture.
In trying to understand behavior, psychological scientists struggle to make sense of that large amount of complexity via their research studies, which, however, can only tackle a limited number of variables at a time.
Although it’s relatively easy for researchers to design studies in which they measure many variables and analyze the relationships among them, those kinds of studies usually don’t provide definitive evidence about the causes of puzzling behaviors.
The problem is that, even when we find that variables are related to each other, we often can’t identify which variables cause people’s reactions.
For example, we know a tremendous amount about the characteristics of people who develop problems with alcohol. We know about their backgrounds, experiences, personalities, and even their genetic profiles.
This is a transcript from the video series Understanding the Mysteries of Human Behavior. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
But a complete understanding of alcoholism remains elusive because we can’t tell which characteristics and experiences of alcoholics are causes of their problems, which ones are effects of having problems with alcohol, and which ones are just coincidentally associated with other factors that predict problem drinking.
To understand the causes of behavior, researchers must conduct controlled experiments, but many topics are difficult, if not impossible, to study under controlled conditions.
We can’t conduct controlled experiments on the causes of phenomena such as child abuse, depression, or alcoholism because we would have to subject people to conditions that might cause them to abuse their children, become depressed, or develop a drinking problem.
Ethical and methodological constraints on the kinds of research that scientists can conduct limit the strength of the conclusions that they can draw. Scientists conduct the best research they can, knowing that, in the end, they may often have only a piece of the puzzle.
Learn more about how puzzling aspects of human behavior lie in some of the fundamental characteristics of the human species
Puzzling Facts about Men Versus Women
Consider these facts: Nine out of 10 prison inmates are men; among people who are homeless, men outnumber women by at least 3 to 1; men are 10 times more likely to murder somebody than women are; men are more likely to show up at the low end of distributions of IQ scores—they are more likely to be mentally retarded—than women; men are more likely to abuse and abandon their children, and less likely to take care of their aging parents.
On psychological measures of undesirable characteristics, men outscore women on measures of cruelty, closed-mindedness, hostility, narcissism, and self-indulgence. To top it all off, men die earlier than women—about five years earlier on average.
It doesn’t paint a very flattering picture of the male gender. It’s not only an unflattering picture, but it’s a rather puzzling one, particularly puzzling given that we normally assume that men in most societies have it better than women do.
But why would the advantaged gender be so much more maladjusted, antisocial, and unhealthy? That’s an interesting and important question because the answer may tell us something about how to reduce certain social problems that are created mostly by men.
This difference between the genders is an extremely complex issue, and the experts don’t agree on its answer. But it provides a good example for looking at how behavioral scientists think about and confront complex questions.
First, there may be some evolutionary and biological processes at play. These differences between men and women can be seen around the world, and they don’t map easily onto cultural variables.
Some of these differences might be traced to testosterone, for example, which helps to make men more aggressive, dominant, competitive, and willing to take risks than women.
Learn more about how genes have a pronounced effect on people’s personalities
Variability among Genders
Furthermore, there’s evidence that, for some reason, evolution operated in such a way that men show greater variability on many characteristics than women do.
If we measure almost any characteristic—whether it’s a physical characteristic such as height, weight, or a psychological characteristic such as intelligence or extraversion—the scores tend to fall in a bell-shaped or normal distribution.
Most people score around the average, and the number of scores tapers off toward the extremes. This distribution is true for both men and women—most people are in the center of this bell-shaped distribution of scores, and relatively few people have very low or very high scores on whatever we are measuring.
But here’s the interesting thing: On many characteristics, more men score at the extremes—both extremes—than women do.
Let’s take physical height. Of course, men are, on average, taller than women.
But the interesting thing is that men show more variability around the average height than women do. To say it differently, there are more really short men and really tall men, compared to the average man, than there are really short women and really tall women, compared to the average woman.
We also see this effect on birth weight; there’s more variability in the weight of male babies than female babies. Height and weight are important examples because they are determined mostly by people’s genes. These findings suggest that men are naturally more variable than women in terms of height and weight. Biologists disagree about why this occurs, but the phenomenon appears to be real.
But could this extra variability explain why men are more likely to have behavioral and social problems than women do?
It might—at least in part—because we would find more men than women down in the problematic end of distributions of psychological characteristics. The fact that men are more variable than women may naturally lead more men to have problems.
Learn more about the differences in how men and women behave
How Cultures Disadvantage Men
That’s evolution and biology, but culture might also contribute to the high proportion of men who have serious problems.
Much has been written over the years about cultural practices that disadvantage and hurt women around the world, which is true. But less has been said about ways in which cultures also disadvantage and hurt men.
Perhaps the most obvious example involves the fact that, throughout history, men have been the ones who are expected to go to war and risk injury or death in service to their country. Certainly, more women are entering the military than ever before, but men still shoulder most of the fighting.
This fact is relevant to the question of why more men than women show serious dysfunctions. Many of those men are veterans who have experienced psychological problems, developed addictions, or become homeless. Cultural systems may help to create some of men’s psychological problems.
Add to that the dangers of people’s jobs. According to the US Department of Labor Statistics, 92% of Americans who die on the job are men. Why?
Because men are more likely than women to have jobs where they run into burning buildings to put out fires, have gun battles with criminals, work in logging, or construction. Working in dangerous jobs is exceptionally stressful daily, and perhaps those stressors contribute to some of the differences between men and women.
Why are men overrepresented in these jobs? In some cases, it may be due to size or strength; but often it’s a cultural norm that says that these are men’s jobs and that women shouldn’t be doing them. Again, we can see the role of culture in this puzzling pattern of problems.
Men are also more likely to be raised to think of themselves in these kinds of occupations. Here’s where the capacity for self-awareness creeps in.
The fact that people can think consciously about themselves, including their gender and society’s expectations for them, helps to lead men down some of the roads that end in psychological problems. It’s partly a matter of differences in men’s and women’s self-images.
Learn more about why we’re so concerned with others’ thoughts about us
The Complexities of Human Behavior
Of course, women have their own sets of psychological problems—they are more likely to become depressed than men, for example—but men specialize in antisocial, self-destructive, and aggressive kinds of problems.
The direct causes of these differences are difficult to study. Researchers can document the factors that are associated with these differences between men and women. But there’s no easy way to identify precisely what causes them because we can’t do controlled experiments to identify the causes of alcoholism, homelessness, child abuse, or murder.
Behavioral scientists have made great progress in understanding differences between men and women, yet the inherent complexity of human behavior means that some mysteries are difficult to crack.
When we begin to look deeply, even the most ordinary and commonplace reactions are often wonderfully complex.
Happiness, conflict, blushing, love, dreaming, memory, stress, self-esteem—these are the experiences of which our lives are made. But they each also contain an air of mystery.
Common Questions About Gender Differences in Psychology
Q: Are there any differences between female and male brains?
Gender differences in the brain do exist anatomically. The size of the male’s brain is, on average, larger than the female brain. This, however, does not translate to differences in intelligence.
Q: Is there a difference in emotionality between the genders?
Gender differences do exist, with women showing signs of various emotional states more dramatically than men. However, this appears to be largely cultural and not biological.
Q: Are males more violent than females?
Males do tend to act more outwardly violent than females. It appears to have little to do with the brain, but rather is connected to evolutionary roles and cultural conditioning.
Q: What determines gender?
Based on the XY sex–determination system, gender differences appear to be induced by hormones that affect the ratio of x or y chromosomes that the male contributes to the ovum.
This article was updated on December 9, 2020