Psychologists long took it for granted that the male and female brains were fundamentally different. But in a landmark 1974 book, Stanford developmental psychologists Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin reviewed thousands of studies and found the opposite: By and large, there just wasn’t much data to support the conventional wisdom. Yes, men’s brains are bigger, but so are their bodies; aside from size, there’s no solid evidence of physical characteristics in the brain that are demonstrably male or female. A 2015 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that “human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain/female brain.” [...]
Yet over the years, research has documented differences in cognitive abilities between men and women, something Maccoby and Jacklin noted in 1974. And spatial skills, says Elizabeth Cashdan, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, “are the largest cognitive sex difference known.” [...]
Maccoby and Jacklin also found differences in math and verbal abilities. But data has since shown that spatial cognition might explain some of the gender gap psychologists measured in mathematical ability. High scores on mental rotation tests correspond to higher scores on math questions that involve geometry or story problems. And spatial cognition turns out to be a better predictor of success in engineering than SAT or GRE scores, for example. [...]
It’s still unclear whether a predilection to wander may help men develop better spatial cognition skills—or whether better spatial cognition skills make their peregrinations possible. “We don’t know what’s cause, and what’s effect,” Cashdan says. What is clear is that cultural biases have an effect. Consciously or unconsciously, girls are nudged away from activities that would help them develop spatial skills almost as soon as they’re born. As they grow, parents respond to their kids’ interests, quickly compounding what may start out as very slight biases. [...]
Moreover, while comparing the cognitive performances of men and women may produce a measurable difference, the averages don’t tell the whole story. “Many women have significantly stronger spatial ability than many men,” explains George M. Bodner, a professor of chemical education at Purdue University, who designed one of the tests commonly used to measure spatial cognition ability. Bodner stresses it’s important not to perpetuate the myth that a gender gap implies all men are better than all women at spatial cognition tasks. Stereotypes about spatial ability can have an insidious effect. “When women hear myths, such as the idea that they have ‘poor spatial ability when compared with men,’ they often believe this will be true for themselves, and it often is not true,” Bodner says.
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