Gender Stereotypes: Cognitive Differences

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Cognitive Differences
Gender roles are ideas of how a certain gender should behave determined by the society. They help us tell the difference between a male and a female, for example the fact that boys generally play with transportation and building toys. Gender stereotypes, on the other hand, are rigid beliefs about how a gender should behave. Gender stereotypes are gender roles that become watered down and fixed, for example ‘all boys play with Legos’. (Rathus, 2010)
Cognitive and behavioral differences between males and females have diminished over the years, but biological differences still remain for the most part the same. Obviously, males and females have different sex organs, but they also differ in secondary sex characteristics …show more content…
Many used to think that men were intellectually superior to women, but over time the difference in abilities has diminished because of equal educational opportunities. (Rathus, 2010, p. 448) However, there are still some differences, though one gender isn’t necessarily ‘superior’ to the other. Research has shown that women generally pick on verbal communication quicker than males and males generally do better in the math, sciences and other visual spatial related fields. (Rathus, 2010, p. 448) There is still controversy over why these differences exist. Are they biological or environmental in nature? (Sommers, 2008) In one experiment when subjects were given idle thinking time, men showed more activity in the temporal-limbic system. (Bergley, 1995) This system is usually involved with less subtle ways of expressing emotion such as fighting. The women’s activity, however, showed in the posterior cingulate gyrus, which is involved with the process of emotion and recalling one’s own memory. (Bergley, 1995) (Maddock, 2001) When completing spatial visual tasks, research has shown that women use both right and left hemispheres of their brains while men use primarily their right brain to solve the problem. (Steele, 2014) Also, it’s been shown that when men and women are asked to recognize emotions, women will correctly identify the emotion 90% of the time for both men and women while men are able to identify men’s emotions 90% of the time and women’s only 70% of the time. While doing this, the women’s brain processed more efficiently on average; using less energy and producing better results than the men, who’s limbic system worked overtime and still did not produce as good of results. (Bergley, 1995) Though these differences emerge, there is still overlap in the sex’s abilities. A randomly picked woman may do better in math than many men who’ve taken the
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