GENDER
DIFFERENCES
REVISITED
It's Still a Mars/Venus
route to communication

By ROSEMARY J. STAUBER

For the March/April 2003 issue of SAN ANTONIO WOMAN I wrote about gender differences in communication. I cited John Gray (Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus) and Deborah Tannen, who have written extensively about the differences in the way the sexes communicate with each other.
I wrote about the major differences stemming from different life views in that women are more connection oriented, and men are more “agentic.”

I also wrote about a biological difference: “Actually, women are biologically constructed to be more efficient in communicating. They typically have a larger corpus callosum than men do.  The corpus callosum is the connecting membrane which allows us to go back and forth between the right and left brains.”  

This information was in keeping with the knowledge of the day, and my explanation was in keeping with the theory of natural selection. In the Ice Age, the women who were good at reading nonverbal signals (right brain activity) and then switching to left brain to analyze and plan were more likely to survive. Their genes would be passed on to their progeny, increasing the likelihood that future generations of girl babies would have larger corpus callosa, as well.

In the last four years, two important books have come along which strengthen the idea that there are many biological differences between the brains of women and men. They help to explain the life view differences. Both are titled The Female Brain. One, by British author Cynthia Darlington, was published in 2002 in London and New York by Taylor and Francis. The other is by Louann Brizendine, M.D., and was published in 2006 by Morgan Road Books. It has become a best seller and was hyped on the cover as likely to produce “brain envy” in men.  

Both authors discuss the history of research into the brain and stress that in the past only men’s brains were studied because, as Brizendine quoted a (male) professor of hers, women’s “. . . menstrual cycles would mess up the data.” Yet the data gathered from the male-only research has been applied to females!  In the past 20 years (perhaps because more women are entering scientific fields and because modern technology allows for examining live brains in action), research focusing on female brains and the differences between the genders is occurring.

Darlington concentrates more on the structure of the brain in both genders than Brizendine does, and she confirms that the corpus callosum is larger in women. She does not speculate about the reasons or the function of that larger corpus callosum. The explanation I used in the 2003 article may have been too simplistic. Darlington points out that the corpus callosum shares data from both hemispheres of the brain, and it’s difficult to tell which side the data comes from.

She confirms that the previous view of the functions of the two hemispheres was in line with my view: Left brain is language, analytic, verbal, amplifies small-scale information and categorical representations, and right brain is visual-spatial representation, holistic, spatial, amplifies larger-scale information, prosody and topographical properties. She writes, “In truth, the distinctions are far more subtle and interesting!”

Brizendine speculates about women’s superior ability to “mirror” nonverbal cues and therefore gain understanding about underlying emotions of the people they are communicating with. While previous authors have described this as right brain activity, she cites the female’s emotional neuron network, calling the female brain a “high-performance emotion machine — geared to tracking, moment by moment, the nonverbal signals of the innermost feelings of others.” She explains that the woman then switches to the cerebral cortex to analyze the data she has gathered. This has been written about as left brain activity.

In a recent American Society of Clinical Hypnosis conference I attended, the speakers concentrated more on the emotion centers and the cerebral cortex than on right brain/left brain differences.

Brizendine focuses extensively on hormonal differences. While some critics praise her for writing in very accessible language, others criticize her for “dumbing down.” (I like the accessible language.)  She writes: . . . scientists have developed an astonishing array of structural, chemical, genetic, hormonal and functional brain differences between men and women.

With modern technology, the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Positive Emission Topography scans allow the brain to be examined while in use.

Here are some of the differences cited by Brizendine:
Males and females have different brain sensitivities to stress and conflict — men tend to enjoy conflict and derive an emotional boost from it, whereas women tend to avoid it because they fear losing the connection.
Males and females use different brain areas and circuits to:

Solve problems — typically they come out with the same answers and use different brain circuits to arrive at the answer.

Process language — women have 11 percent more neurons in the brain centers for language and hearing than men do. Women use approximately three times as many words a day as men do.

Experience and store emotions — the hippocampus, which is the hub for emotion and memory formation, is larger in females. So is the brain circuitry for language and observing emotions in others. This helps women remember more details of an emotional experience (such as a first date) than men do.

Experience sexual drive — men have 2.5 times the brain space devoted to sexual drive that women do. (Men think of sex approximately every 52 seconds, while women do so only once a day. Is anyone surprised by that one?)

Move toward action and/or aggression — the amygdala, which registers fear and triggers aggression, is larger in males than in females. (Darlington says that this is so only until approximately age 20, when the size evens out.)

I closed the 2003 article with: “It isn’t that either is ‘broken.’ They are different. She is not a broken he. Nor is he a broken she.” Brizendine says that the operating systems of the two genders are “mostly compatible and adept, but they perform and accomplish the same goals and tasks using different circuits.”

This column doesn’t offer enough space to begin to cover this topic adequately. Part II will focus on the specific phases of a woman’s life and how the brain and the hormones it generates affect those phases.
         
Rosemary J. Stauber, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in San Antonio and founding director of the Bexar County Women’s Center.