Gender Differences

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"Men and women are different".

This statement is obvious, and has been pondered on for many years by psychologist and researchers. In this research paper you will see that I have come up with through much research, information that describes, discusses and explains this statement.

Men and women are indeed different. We are different -not only by our obvious physical appearances like, an average man is taller than and average woman,

Men usually have more body hair than women. , On average, men are stronger than women, particularly in the upper body, region; however females develop into puberty approximately two years before males, Female fertility declines after the age of thirty-five and end with the menopause whereas with men they are capable of fathering children into their old age. Men "s skin tend to be thinker than that of females because they have more collagen than there female counterparts, Women generally have a smaller waist-to-hip ratio and a greater body fat percentage than men do,

Men and women have different levels of certain hormones; take for example Men have a higher concentration of androgens while women have a higher concentration of estrogens, it also stated that, In men, the index finger tends to be shorter than the ring finger while in females the second tends to be longer than the fourth,. Last but not least the obvious where men and women have different genitalia men have penis and women have vagina, females also develop breast when they reach puberty.

But, aside from the obvious specific physical attributes and traits such as those mentioned above there are also many other subtle non physical differences between men and women. These differences have also been widely studied and heavily debated over the years

Our habits and the way we act to environmental stimuli and even with the way we spend our leisure time; believe it or not differs with gender, when it comes to many of our non physical traits and attitudes my personal observations have uncovered many of these same non physical differences between men and women.

Emotional and psychological differences, such as nurturing, competitiveness, academic abilities, and communication skills, and aggression also are all non-physical attributes that are widely accepted as differences between men and women.

Over the years researchers and scientists carried out several intriguing investigations scientists were skeptical about the role of genes and of biological differences, because cultural learning is very powerful and influential among humans.

Are girls more prone to play with dolls and cooperate among themselves than boys, because they are taught to be so by parents, teachers and social peers, or is it the reverse order? Nevertheless certain trends are found where Men are more physically aggressive although women were once held to be less aggressive and competitive overall, modern experts such as Rachel Simmons have suggested that women simply tend to express aggression and competition in less physical ways. Research shows that in many situations men are more prone to risk taking than their female counter parts.

Some researchers question whether differences in gender are influenced by social pressures of human culture,

To address this question Melissa Hines of City University London and Geri Anne M Alexander A&M University turned to monkeys one of our closest animal cousins. The researches presented a group of vervet monkeys with a selection of toys including rag dolls, toy cars and some gender neutral items such as picture books.

They used these animals because vervet monkeys are unlikely to be swayed by the social pressures of human culture, they found that male monkeys spent more time playing with the "masculine" toys than their female counterparts did and female monkeys spent more time playing with toys typically preferred by females, however both the female and male monkeys spent equal amount of time playing with the gender neutral toys like the picture books, These results imply that the toy preferences in children result at least in part from innate biological differences and also that gender differences are already apparent from just a few months after birth, when social influence is still small.

It turns out also that male and female differ quite a bit in brain architecture and activity. Over the past decade or so investigators have documented an astonishing array of structural, chemical and functional variations in the brains of males and females using non evasive imaging techniques such as positron -emission tomography(PET)and the functional magnetic resonance imaging commonly known as the MRI which can go into the brains of living subjects was used one of the things the researcher found was parts of the frontal cortex the seat of many higher cognitive functions are bulkier in women than in men as are parts of the limbic cortex which is involved in the emotional responses

In men the part which is involved in space perception the parts of the parietal cortex are bigger than that of women as is the amygdala which is an almond shape structure that responds to emotionally arousing information.(for example a traumatic site /witnessing an accident).

Another previous study by the same group led by Dr. Godfrey Pearlson has shown that two areas in the frontal and temporal lobes related to language the areas of Broca and Wernicke, were significantly larger in women, thus providing a biological reason for women's notorious superiority in language-associated thoughts and comprehension. Using the same magnetic resonance imaging, (MRI) the scientists measured gray matter volumes in several cortical regions in 17 women and 43 men. Women had 23% in Broca's area, in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and 13% in Wernicke's area, in the superior temporal cortex more volume than men. These results were later corroborated by another group of researchers from the University of Sydney

On the other hand, additional evidence comes from research showing that the corpus callosum, a large tract of neural fibers which connect both brain hemispheres, is enlarged in women, compared to men, although this discovery has been challenged recently.

At the university of Cincinnati in Canada another research group presented yet another morphological evidence that while indeed men have more neurons