Sex Differences in Math-Intensive Fields

Despite impressive employment gains in many fields of science, women remain underrepresented in fields requiring intensive use of mathematics. Here we discuss three potential explanations for women's underrepresentation: (a) male-female mathematical and spatial ability gaps, (b) sex discrimination, and (c) sex differences in career preferences and lifestyle choices. Synthesizing findings from psychology, endocrinology, sociology, economics, and education leads to the conclusion that, among a combination of interrelated factors, preferences and choices-both freely made and constrained-are the most significant cause of women's underrepresentation.     

Sex Differences in Episodic Memory

ABSTRACT— Research shows sex differences in episodic memory. These differences vary in magnitude as a function of the type of material to be remembered. Throughout the life span, verbal episodic-memory tasks yield differences favoring women. In contrast, episodic-memory tasks requiring visuospatial processing result in differences favoring men. There are also sex differences favoring women on episodic-memory tasks requiring both verbal and visuospatial processing and on face-recognition tasks. Thus, there may be a small, general episodic-memory advantage for women—an advantage that can increase by the advantage women have over men in verbal production and can be reversed by the male advantage in visuospatial tasks. In addition, environmental factors affect the magnitude of the sex differences in episodic memory.     

Sex Differences in Right Hemisphere Tasks

We tested the hypothesis that sex differences in spatial ability and emotional perception are due to sex differences in intrahemispheric organization of the right hemisphere. If the right hemisphere is differently organized by sex—primarily specialized for spatial ability in men, but primarily specialized for emotional perception in women—then there should be a negative correlation between spatial ability and emotional perception within sex, and the greatest disparity between abilities should be found in people with characteristic arousal of the right hemisphere. Undergraduate men (N= 86) and women (N= 132) completed tests of Mental Rotation, Surface Development, Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity, Progressive Matrices, and Chimeric Faces. Although the expected pattern of sex differences was observed, there was no evidence for the hypothesized negative correlation between spatial ability and emotional perception, even after statistical control of general intelligence.     

Sex Differences in Adult Moral Orientations

ABSTRACT Gilligan's (1982) hypotheses regarding sex differences in moral reasoning orientation were investigated in two samples of adults In Study 1, adults ages 18 to 75 were interviewed about both hypothetical and personal moral dilemmas Women were more likely than men overall to show Gilligan's care orientation as expected, particularly in personal reasoning However, these sex differences were not as pervasive as Gilligan argues, and were influenced by subject age, subject stage level on Kohlberg's measure of moral reasoning, and the type of real-life dilemma content recalled by subjects for discussion
Study 2 focused on the role of adult parental status as mediator of personal moral orientation differences in mid-life Consistent with the theorizing of Gutmann (1985), adult parents were shown to be sex-role differentiated in both selfconcept and moral orientation, whereas married nonparents were not Further-more, sex differences in reasoning orientations were again found to be linked to differences in the dilemma content presented by men and women These studies partly support Gilligan's theorizing, but indicate less pervasive sex differences in some groups of adults than hypothesized     

Sex Differences in Object Location Memory

The ability to remember where objects were is thought to require multiple separate processes. One has to encode the precise positions occupied, assign the various objects to the correct (relative) locations, and achieve an integration of both types of spatial information. This study examined whether sex differences exist for these selective components of object location memory. Twenty males and 20 females participated in the following task. On a PC screen, they were shown a square with 10 different objects for 30 s. Subsequently, the objects disappeared from the screen, reappeared in a row above the square, and subjects were asked to relocate them in three different conditions. In the object-to-position-assignment condition, the original positions were premarked in the square, so subjects needed only to assign the correct object to the correct position. In the positions-only condition, all objects assumed the same identity. Therefore, subjects had only to reproduce the precise positions. Finally, in the combined condition, subjects were required to replace all the different objects in the square without any of object positions premarked. The absolute displacements between an object's original and its relocated position reflect the integration mechanism. Females did as well as males in the object-to-position-assignment condition and on the absolute displacements in the combined condition, but they were less efficient than males in positional reconstruction per se. Thus, it seems that the male advantage in spatial memory is not a general effect but applies only to certain specific processing components. Moreover, the employment of a dual task during encoding, concurrent articulatory suppression, yielded no significant interactions with sex. This suggests that females' weaker positional encoding does not derive from the use of an inefficient verbal strategy.     

Evolution and Developmental Sex Differences

From an evolutionary perspective, childhood is the portion of the life span during which individuals practice and refine those competencies that facilitate survival and reproduction in adulthood. Although the skeletal structure of these competencies appears to be inherent, social interaction and play flesh them out during childhood so that they are adapted to local conditions. Darwin's principles of sexual selection, including male-male competition over mates and female choice of mating partners, successfully explain the acquisition and expression of reproductive competencies in hundreds of species. When this perspective is applied to humans, it predicts sex differences that are, in fact, found in the childhood activities of boys and girls and that reflect sex differences in reproductive strategies in adulthood. A few of these differences are described, along with cultural factors that modify their expression. The article closes with a brief discussion of the social and scientific implications.     

Sex Differences In Intimacy Motivation

Affiliation motivation in the literature has been conceptualized as inclusive of both intimacy and sociability needs. It is hypothesized here that the affiliative interests of males and females differ specifically in the strength of the motivation toward intimacy. Using a projective cue with a sample of high school students, highly significant sex differences in Intimacy Imagery were obtained. In addition, it was found that males who showed a stereotypically masculine orientation in their projective responses to two cues were less likely than other males to write stories containing Intimacy Imagery.     

Dreams: Sex Differences in Aggressive Content

The assumption that the extent of projection in projective techniques is a monotonic function of the degree of ambiguity in the TAT is seriously questioned. A review of several studies dealing with ambiguity yielded the conclusion that highly ambiguous TAT pictures were least useful for personality assessment. On the other hand, pictures which are highly unambiguous with regard to what is going on and which contain two or more persons, seem most promising for clinical assessment.     

Age Differences and Sex Differences in some Introvertive and Emotional Traits

Two quantitative experiments involving eidetic imagery, performed in 1928–29 on two girls, ages 11 and 15 years, respectively, were repeated in every detail in 1974 on the same two persons. It was found that minor changes (perhaps unreliable) had occurred in the precision of eidetic projection, and that both Ss retained their ability to project a seen circle onto a target square and compare the two for “goodness of fit.”     

Sex Differences in the Orientation of Body Image

This study examined Erikson's formulation of contrasting psychosexual modes in males and females through the configuration used in the drawing of a tree. It is suggested that an open configuration in the drawing of the foliage expresses the projection of body image in an intrusive mode, while a closed configuration expresses an inclusive mode. In a general sample, males drew open trees while females tended to draw closed trees. A second sample of Ss was preselected for the strong presence or absence of intrusive characteristics, and their results used as a validity test of the inference made from the configuration of the tree. In this sample, intrusively-oriented Ss drew open trees, irrespective of sex, while the nonintrusively-oriented Ss performance was similar to the general sample.     

Salespeople's Perceptions of Sex Differences in Sales Managers

A field experiment was conducted to extend the work of Marshall, Mowen, and Stone (1995) on salesperson selection decision making by adding two types of decision makers. Practicing sales managers and human resource managers evaluated a simulated hiring scenario for an open sales position and indicated their preferences between two job candidates with different levels of risk and performance potential. Experimental conditions were level of decision impact (sales manager or HR manager), decision frame (loss or gain), and time of valuation (outcome of the decision known soon or in the more distant future). The results provide evidence to support the findings of prior research in that an interaction occurred between decision frame and time of valuation such that the higher risk/higher performance potential candidate was preferred when managers framed the decision from a loss domain and the decision outcome occurred in the future. In addition, the higher risk/higher performance potential candidate was more preferred by sales managers than by HR managers. The findings are discussed in terms of their importance to salesperson selection research and practice.     

Sex Differences in Vigilance Performance and Perceived Workload

Female and male subjects monitored the repetitive presentation of a pair of lines for occasional changes in height (spatial task) or duration (temporal task). Perceptual sensitivity for critical signals favored men in the spatial task, whereas no sex differences in signal detectability existed in the temporal task. Measurements of perceived workload using the NASA-TLX scale mirrored these performance effects. Women tended to rate the overall workload associated with the spatial task to be greater in comparison with men. In addition, women found the spatial task to be significantly more frustrating, mentally demanding, and effortful than men did and rated their own performance lower than their male counterparts did. In contrast, no sex-linked differences in perceived workload were noted in regard to the temporal task. The results support the suggestion by Dittmar, Warm, and Dember (1987) that sex differences in sustained attention are task specific.