I Don’t Need the Shopping List, Honey

At the heart of many controversies around gender equality lies the question of whether men and women have different talents or different abilities. Casual, everyday conversations but also pseudoscientific books are full of bold statements about how "men are better at X" or "only women can do Y," typically flanked by some kind of assertion along the lines of "researchers demonstrated this over and over again." But are such claims true?

While there is a fair amount of research on sex/gender differences in cognitive abilities, such bold statements often do not reflect the more complicated findings from research. A prominent example are the two abilities to memorize words and find words of a specified kind—for example, words that begin with a certain letter or belong to a certain category (such as "animals" or "things made of metal").

Textbooks, scientific articles, and popular science books have unanimously claimed that women excel at these two abilities. At closer look, however, those claims turned out to be less clear: For example, although there are plenty of studies demonstrating the female advantage, there are also several that do not report a sex/gender difference or even found a male advantage.

To finally "settle the score," my co-workers and I located all the studies on the topic we could find. This was a lot, because memory and finding words have been studied extensively. We were able to gather over 500 results from more than 350,000 participants, spanning more than 50 years.

The Female Advantage for Remembering Words is Real

The difference was very consistent, but not huge. Suppose you read a list of 16 words aloud to men and women and asked them to recall those words after a while. Typically, they manage about 10 to 12 words on average. The female advantage we found would roughly translate into a difference of one and a half words.

As for finding words, there was also a female advantage but only when men and women are asked to name as many words as possible that begin with a certain letter. The female advantage in both remembering words and finding words showed up in children as well as older adults and it changed very little over the last 50 years. If the word must belong to a certain category, however, the sex/gender difference was practically zero. This was probably because the male advantage in some categories (for example, "animals") and the female advantage in other categories (such as "fruits/food/vegetables") cancelled each other out.  

So, women are indeed better, but does a small difference matter? We specifically investigated tasks that are routinely used in neuropsychological assessments to examine, for example, whether somebody has dementia. Many of those assessments take sex/gender into account but not all. This could be costly: If a man is just below the cut-off score for dementia, it might not be dementia itself, but merely the disadvantage of being a man. Conversely, actual dementia diagnoses might be missed in women because they have a higher baseline performance, on average.

There are, of course, also abilities in which men consistently excel—for example, when imagining how a complex cube figure would look like when it is looked at from a different angle. Most cognitive abilities, however, show small or negligible sex/gender differences and one should always remember that these effects emerge on average. The best word memorizer might be a man, the best mental rotator of complex cube figures might be a woman.

For Further Reading

Asperholm, M., Hogman, N., Rafi, J., & Herlitz, A. (2019). What did you do yesterday? A meta-analysis of sex differences in episodic memory. Psychological Bulletin, 145(8), 785–821. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000197

Halpern, D. F. (2012). Sex differences in cognitive abilities (4th ed.). Psychology Press, Taylor and Francis Group.

Hirnstein, M., Stuebs, J., Moè, A., & Hausmann, M. (2023). Sex/gender differences in verbal fluency and verbal-episodic memory: A meta-analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(1), 67-90. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916221082116

Voyer, D., Saint Aubin, J., Altman, K., & Gallant, G. (2021). Sex differences in verbal working memory: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 147(4), 352-398. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000320

Marco Hirnstein is a professor at the Department of Biological and Medical Psychology at the University of Bergen and is interested in how nature AND nurture give rise to sex/gender differences and similarities.