Are men and women really that different… and if so, what does it mean for our relationships?

A recent TV documentary about gender roles in children shocked me to the core. As a life-long feminist I couldn’t believe a typical seven year old girl’s dream birthday party in 2018 still involves princess dresses, a pink cake, nail varnish and ‘girlie pampering’ while seven year old boys only want to play with construction toys and charge round with guns! It’s almost fifty years since the publication of Germaine Greer’s feminist bestseller ‘The Female Eunuch’, ’yet boys’ and girls’ behaviour seems to be as polarised as ever. In some ways things have even gone backwards since I was a child.

My heart sank further as little boys asserted, “boys are cleverer than girls” and “men are more successful and can do harder jobs… that’s why they get to be president” while little girls suggested “men are better at being in charge” and “if a woman has children, the man has to go out and earn the money while she stays at home with the babies and does the housework”. Have fifty years of equal opportunities initiatives and legislation really achieved nothing? Aaaaaaargh!

The two-part BBC documentary that got me so hot under the collar was entitled, ‘No More Boys and Girls: Can Our Kids Go Gender Free?’. Over several months they filmed a classroom of seven year olds in a state primary school in the UK to explore the extent and causes of gender differences in kids today and investigate whether anything can be done to close the gap before it has negative consequences on children’s life choices.

For as long as I can remember, my attitudes and behaviour have been pretty similar to a lot of the guys I meet and, as far as I’m aware, being female has never held me back at work or forced me into stereotypical behaviour and choices. But it was clear from these children’s earnest comments that the majority genuinely believed boys and girls are fundamentally different… and should therefore take on very different roles as adults, both at work and in their everyday life. And in many cases they felt boys and men were superior.

If, as the documentary suggested, these children were typical of seven year olds today, how many more boys and girls are growing up with fixed expectations about how they should behave and who they can be, based on their gender? As the full force of this hit home, I wondered… why have these perceptions survived so many attempts to break down the gender gap? Is it just because change is slow and difficult to achieve or…

Are males and females really that different… and if so, what does this mean for our life choices… including our romantic relationships?

So I gritted my teeth and watched the rest of the documentary, then started to explore recent research, looking for answers. In the rest of this article I’ll describe what I discovered.

1. Are males and females really that different… and if so why?

At the start of their experiment, the BBC team observed the children’s behaviour and interactions at school and gave them lots of psychological tests to measure a range of characteristics including: self-esteem, empathy, assertiveness, ability to describe their emotions, perceptions of their own intelligence and how good they were at resisting impulses to act – a trait that’s linked to aggression and bad behaviour. They looked for gender differences within the results and what they found was quite significant:

The programme then raised a very interesting question: were these differences due to biology (i.e. boys and girls were born different) or were they learned? The age-old nature-nurture debate.

Until very recently, just about everyone thought biology was responsible – that there were ‘male brains’ and ‘female brains’ – and this was used to explain gender differences in aptitudes, beliefs, interests and achievement. However, recent advances in neuroimaging techniques, (non-invasive ways of scanning the brain) have enabled neuroscientists to study the structure of our brains and how they work, in minute detail… and their discoveries may have turned that thinking on its head.

Interviewed for the documentary, Aston University’s Professor Gina Rippon, one of the UK’s leading experts in neuroimaging explained: “Structurally there appear to be very, very few differences, which is quite a surprise for a lot of people who have assumed for hundreds of years that males and females are different because their brains are different.”

In an article in The Psychologist in December 2016. Rippon described a detailed analysis of over 1400 brains, carried out by Daphna Joel and her colleagues at Tel-Aviv University in 2015. Using MRI scans they looked for ‘male/female’ characteristics in structures and connections within the brain, and at the end of their analysis they claimed there’s no such thing as a uniquely ‘male’ or ‘female’ brain. Instead most brains, regardless of the biological sex of their owner, comprised “unique mosaics of features” some of which were more common in women, some more common in men and some common in both men and women. In other words, unlike our external appearance, you can’t look at a brain scan and know whether it belongs to a male or a female.

To back up their claim that there’s no such thing as a uniquely ‘male’ or ‘female’ brain, Joel and her colleagues also looked for evidence of gender differences in how people think and behave – seeing this as a reflection of how their brains work. They studied the personality traits, attitudes, interests, and behaviours of more than 5,500 people and once again found there wasn’t a clear male/female split. Instead, there were many more people who had a mix of both ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ characteristics than people who had only feminine or only masculine characteristics.

The more original studies I read, the more I began to share Gina Rippon’s view that “there really are very few consistent differences between the sexes”. Human characteristics (such as empathy or aggression) shouldn’t be arbitrarily divided into belonging to either men or women. And the variability among different men or among different women is probably at least as great as the average difference between the two genders. As she put it: “We are none of us from Mars or Venus, we are all from Earth!”

This view certainly matches my professional experience. As a psychologist, I’ve worked in depth with thousands of clients, getting to know them really well, and each individual is a unique and complex mix of various amounts of stereotypically ‘male’ and ‘female’ characteristics. It also reflects my experience in relationship… some of my exes have had a far better developed ‘feminine side’ than me and have been surprised by some of my ‘less female’ attitudes and behaviours… while others have been almost off the scale on most ‘male’ characteristics. I’ll come back to this topic a little later in this article.

Of course we can’t deny there are biological difference between men and women, but the evidence is clearly suggesting that at least.

Some gender differences in our behaviour, attitudes and skills are NOT inborn but the result of our experiences, which alter our brain as we go through life

Neuroscientists used to believe our brains were ‘hard wired’ and therefore fixed and unchangeable. However, neuroimaging has also turned that thinking upside down.

Back to Gina Rippon on the BBC: “The other thing we now know about is that the brain is very, very plastic, mouldable, changeable – not necessarily fixed and invariant as people always used to think.” Neuroimaging has shown physical changes in the brain after just a few months of training/practice in a wide range of skills including language learning, taxi driving and spatial awareness. For example: when girls were given the opportunity to play Tetris (a game that involves rotating and fitting together puzzle pieces at speed), intensively for three months, not only did their spatial skills improve but brain imaging showed that parts of their brain had physically changed.

She added, “Brain development is very much entangled with society, experiences and upbringing, and the differences that we’re seeing [between males and females] are NOT because they were determined at the moment of conception. It’s because this hungry brain arrives in the world, and the world instantly plunges it into a tsunami of pink and blue… and I think we have not been aware until recently of how big that influence is.”

Let’s look at an example of how that might work in practice:

And it’s not only our skills that develop differently as a result of our experiences. From babyhood we’re bombarded all day long with overt messages about how we should behave, what we’re capable of and what we should feel, based on our gender – ‘Boys don’t cry’, ‘Girls have to be polite and kind’ etc. Here’s a simple example of how powerful and enduring those messages can be:

At the start of our relationship my lovely partner, Antonio, vehemently refused to dance, claiming he didn’t know how and had no interest in trying. I can’t lie, this was disappointing for me because I love dancing. So shortly afterwards when I saw his legs moving and his feet tapping along to the radio while he was cooking I thought I’d encourage him, “See, you CAN dance”. But instead of agreeing, he looked almost embarrassed and denied it point blank: “I wasn’t dancing”.

The third time it happened I asked him what was going on. He reflected for a while and then remembered his father telling him sternly when he was a little boy: “dancing is for girls”. So Antonio had gone through life holding back and denying himself the pleasure of moving to the music because he didn’t want to look bad… until this ‘abstinence’ became second nature.

When he stopped to think about it, he realised his father’s comment was ridiculous and I saw subtle shift in his attitude. Since then I’ve noticed him having a discrete dance from time to time – at least in the privacy of our own home – and I think he rather enjoys it!

Sometimes the messages are more subtle… but just as influential. In the BBC documentary there was a convincing demonstration of the unconscious gender bias that drives adults to choose different toys and play activities for boys and girls right from the start of their lives:

So experience teaches boys and girls different skills, attitudes and beliefs

2. What are the implications for our life choices?

Gender stereotyping drives our decisions, our actions and our life choices … and this can have negative consequences for all concerned.

• When girls are taught to expect less, it often (but not always) limits their ambition so they achieve less.
• Boys and girls miss out on learning experiences that would widen their career options later on
• Many men and women choose jobs and lifestyles they think they ought to want rather than making choices that fit who they really are.

• I’ve lost count of the number of male clients in their mid-forties who’ve come to me for career coaching to help them identify what they really want to be when they ‘grow up’ (instead of being an accountant!) or who feel weighed down by the responsibility of supporting their family. And female clients who regret not going for more challenging roles or agonise because they’re not sure they want children but think they should.

• The girls, on average, had lower self-esteem and self-confidence, significantly underestimated their intelligence, were more reluctant to speak up and focused a lot on whether they were ‘pretty’ or ‘ugly’
• Every day, women have to choose whether to grit our teeth and say nothing in the face of men’s patronising behaviour or to speak up and be accused of being ‘oversensitive’ or having ‘no sense of humour’. I love the infographic below, created by Kim Goodwin in 2018 to educate male colleagues about ‘mansplaining’. It went viral on social media and the article that goes with it (link below) gives lots of other examples of how gender stereotyping complicates the everyday working lives of women (OK and men too!)
• Women are still paid less than men for work of equal value, our ideas don’t get as much airtime and our career progression is still blocked by the glass ceiling.
• And the skewed power balance between the sexes means that women often feel they can’t speak out against unfairness and ill treatment. The #MeToo movement.[enlace a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_Too_movement] has empowered women around the world to speak out about sexual harassment and assault and the huge numbers who have shared their experiences is testament to how widespread this issue is and how any women are potentially vulnerable… including the rich and famous:
  
  The fact that men feel it’s OK to abuse their positions of power – and voters are willing to support them as candidate for President – shows how far we still have to go… and why the attitudes of those seven year olds worries me so much.
• For the sake of balance, we should remember that men also experience the damaging effects of gender stereotyping. For example, they are ten times more likely to be go to prison than women and they’re significantly more likely to commit suicide – perhaps in part because little boys are taught to bottle up their feelings (apart from anger), put on a brave face and ‘be a man’ in the face of challenging circumstances.

OK so that’s some of the bad news… and doesn’t it make for depressing reading? But we have to remember the good news too…

It doesn’t have to be this way

As a psychologist I’ve dedicated my career to helping people and organisations change – and I’ve also changed myself dramatically over the years. So I have an in-depth understanding of HOW we accumulate unhelpful beliefs and expectations and HOW we can change for the better, given the right tools and motivation. (You can read more about this in my blog post: Lasting change happens from the inside out) [enlace a post del blog – aún no terminado)

We know our brains are changing constantly throughout our lives as a result of our experiences. So by exposing children (and adults) to different learning experiences and different messages, it should be possible to narrow the gender gap, shouldn’t it?

This question was explored in that BBC documentary by introducing some fairly simple modifications in the lives of those seven year olds, both at school and at home:

I really hoped these changes would have a positive impact. More than anything else I wanted to see the girls letting go of their unhelpful expectations and beliefs about themselves before they became a self-fulfilling prophecy and limited their achievements. And guess what…

After only a few months, they re-tested and re-interviewed the children and there was an impressive reduction in the measured differences between boys and girls for example:

Those young children were like sponges… by changing the messages they were receiving and giving them new learning experiences, the marked gender differences and stereotypical ideas they had about men and women were dramatically reduced in a short space of time.

This was obviously a small-scale experiment, edited for TV impact. But it’s backed up by a lot of rigorous published research, which is very promising.

As with most questions about human nature, the explanation of why men and women behave and think differently and why gender stereotypes persist isn’t straightforward. Physical and hormonal differences may predispose males and females to learn some things more easily, take an interest in certain activities or behave in certain ways. But it’s also very clear there’s huge variability between individuals and a big overlap between men and women… and there’s probably no such thing as a ‘male’ or ‘female’ brain. And it seems pretty clear that the early messages we receive about men and women and our life-long learning experiences are at least as influential as our biology in driving our life choices… if not more so. Which is good news because it means…

Change IS most definitely possible

Children AND adults can learn new attitudes, skills and behaviour in a short space of time (and our brains change physically as a result). By taking positive action we can reinvent ourselves and reshape the learning environment for the next generation, so we don’t have to be trapped in traditional, gender-specific ways of thinking and behaving.

Now you may be wondering why I’ve included this article in a website about relationships; how are studies of gender difference relevant to the relationships we experience as adults?

3. The implications for our romantic relationships

As I reflect on all of this research, there are three key implications that I think are especially relevant for women who would like to improve their relationships:

(a) Women with low self-esteem + men with low empathy = a dangerous cocktail

You’ll remember that, at the start of the BBC experiment, quite a lot of the girls had low self-esteem and self-confidence. They underestimated their capability and value, didn’t speak up assertively and were inclined to let the boys take charge. Meanwhile many of the boys had an inflated idea of their own value and low impulse control… and they struggled with empathy and talking about feelings, with the exception of anger.

Unfortunately this is a combination that I come across all too frequently in my work. Women who are caught up in a pattern of difficult, painful or disappointing relationships often share some characteristics with these girls… and are magnetically drawn to men who resemble those boys in some way.

It’s a dangerous mix because it often create a dynamic where the woman gives too much and receives too little in return… while the guy doesn’t ‘get’ what she needs and would struggle to supply it even if he knew. The ‘power balance’ is all wrong and the woman suffers as a result. What’s more, it can be very difficult to break away from this type of relationship. And every time a woman repeats this pattern she tends to feel a little worse about herself… so she’s even more likely to choose the ‘wrong’ guy, next time around.

If this rings any bells for you – either because you recognise aspects of yourself or someone you care about, or you’re stuck in some other relationship pattern that isn’t working for you – you can be reassured that change IS possible.

For example, if you are too hard on yourself or have low expectations about relationships as a result of painful experiences and negative messages you’ve received over the years, you CAN change your self-perception and beliefs to bring them in line with your real value and potential. But honestly, this kind of deep personal change isn’t easy and there are no quick fixes. In my experience of helping thousands of clients to ‘fix themselves’, you need more than will power alone…. It’s so much easier and more effective to change by working with your unconscious mind. I’ve explained exactly what I mean by this in my ebook:

Take a look

This is why I’ve spent many years developing the unbreakyourheart process. It helps women to repair the emotional damage they’ve experienced in the past so they can break away from their patterns of painful or disappointing relationships and make more positive relationship choices in the future. Interactive tools for following this process – including audio downloads to help you work with your unconscious mind – are now available in my interactive ONLINE PROGRAMME, which is described here.

(b) It’s essential that we choose the right relationship partner

Choosing the right person is obviously important for any woman. But if you have a history of difficult relationship or don’t value yourself enough or you’re really sensitive, it’s especially important to choose carefully because a man who has sufficient empathy, awareness and emotional security can give your relationship the best chance of success. I’ve explained exactly why, with reference to some amazing psychological research, in PART 2 of my ONLINE PROGRAMME.

Women who have a lot of Emotional Baggage are especially likely to make relationship choices that are doomed to failure. They often know, at some level, that a guy isn’t right for them but go for it anyway, allowing their heart to rule their head. There’s a detailed explanation of how this happens, and why women often misunderstand ‘chemistry’ and instant attraction, in PART 2 of my ONLINE PROGRAMME. And in PART 3 there are interactive tools and resources for helping women let go of their Emotional Baggage so they’re free to choose relationships that have the potential for success.

Then, in PART 4: YOUR RELATIONSHIP WISHLIST. I’ve created an interactive, step-by-step process to help women work out what they really need from a relationship partner and then suss out potential candidates to weigh up whether they ‘tick all the boxes’. It’s based on years of experience in evaluating people in my work as a psychologist and it really works – even for women who tend to ‘jump into relationships head first’ and end up with a broken heart.

The more research I have read about gender differences, the more I’m convinced that each of us needs to find the right balance of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ when choosing a partner, and this should be included in our wishlist. There’s more about this in my blog post: Why do we find the ‘wrong’ guys so irresistible?

From experience I know that I need a man who has a well-developed ‘feminine side’ so he’s naturally empathic (i.e. able to understand the world from other people’s perspective and feel for them), as well as being sensitive and compassionate. But equally he needs to have sufficient ‘masculine’ energy to create that essential spark of sexual attraction… otherwise we end up as ‘just good friends’ (a phrase that strikes terror into most men’s hearts!).

Equally we need a partner who’s happy with us just as we are… I learned a long time ago that if a guy needs an unassertive woman who wants him to take charge and is willing to be told what to do and think… I’m definitely not the woman for him!

I’m not saying it’s easy to find a man who offers the perfect balance of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ qualities or who ticks most of your boxes… but I know from personal experience that it IS possible… and it’s definitely worth taking the time to find him.

(c) Our brains are ‘plastic’ so we CAN improve how we ‘do relationships’
As we’ve discovered, the brain is constantly developing and capable of change throughout our lives so we can certainly learn new ways of ‘doing relationships’ at any stage.

Sometimes we need to learn new skills to help us navigate relationships better – especially in the early stages, for example:

• Creating rapport with new people we meet (great for dating)
• Becoming a better listener (great for everything!)
• Adapting how we communicate to get our message across more easily
• Learning about ‘what makes people tick’ – so we understand ourselves and other people better

Sometimes it’s about unlearning or breaking old ‘bad habits’ that are messing up our relationships (trying too hard, over-reacting and nagging are typical examples). And often this means clearing out Emotional Baggage from the past that’s driving these patterns of behaviour. I’ve explained what I mean by that in my ebook and in PART 2 of my ONLINE PROGRAMME.

If you’ve been in a relationship for a while and it’s OK but could be better or you’re going through a tricky patch and would both like to get things back on track, you and your partner might need to learn different ways of interacting with each other. For example he might need to learn to be a bit more empathic, express his feelings better or listen more without trying to fix things while you might need to learn to be a bit more assertive or to give him more space to do his own thing while developing your own independence.

For this to work there are two essential requirements: first, that there isn’t too much Emotional Baggage getting in the way. And secondly that you’re BOTH motivated to work at it. So many times I’ve seen couples go for counselling or therapy together when a relationship is in trouble… where one of the partners is initiating it and the other is going along sulkily but their heart isn’t in it… and it just doesn’t work.

Now I can’t resist repeating that old joke:

How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one… but the light bulb really has to want to change

If there are ongoing issues in your relationship and your partner isn’t willing or able to adapt and change, you can try making unilateral changes in your own behaviour – which can be effective if the relationship is basically OK and just needs tweaking or bringing back on track. But if the issues are more serious and that’s not working, you might decide you’re not willing to try so hard and instead decide to walk away… (and hopefully trade him in for someone who ticks more of your boxes).

I have created many interactive tools to help you (and your motivated partner if you have one) to ‘do relationships’ more effectively in PART 5: THE RELATIONSHIP TOOLKIT. They are based on exciting long-term psychological research into what actually works in relationships, together with more than twenty five years’ experience as a psychologist, during which I’ve helped thousands of clients to change their skills, beliefs and behaviour and improve their relationships.

There’s more about how I developed the unbreakyourheart process and the benefits clients have experienced as a result on our ABOUT page.I’ve also described how this process enabled me to leave behind a long track record of disastrous relationships, fix myself and find love with a wonderful man who ticks just about all of the boxes on my wishlist… and makes me very happy.

So if you’d like to leave your Emotional Baggage behind, build your self-esteem, break out of a pattern of difficult relationships, choose a partner who’s right for you or improve how you ‘do relationships’, why not check out our website by clicking the link unbreakyourheart.

Whether you’re seven years old or seventy-seven or anywhere in between, change is always possible… you just need the right tools.