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Human Performance

Published March 2010

Why Don’t Men Listen?

 

  Harold D. Stolovitch, Ph.D.

That title might sound like a somewhat facetious, so-called typical female complaint — obviously, from the male point of view — but in the workplace there is more to this question than meets the eye, or ear.

Different Brains for Different Genders

Neuroscientific research has advanced enormously in unlocking the mysteries of how humans process information. Current brain research strongly suggests that men and women listen differently. Indiana University School of Medicine researchers found, through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), fundamental biological differences in the way men and women treat auditory, verbal information: Men listen with one side of their brains; women employ both sides.

Yale researchers Sally and Bennett Shaywitz discovered that women use both hemispheres when they read or engage in verbal tasks, compared with males, who only draw on specific areas of the left hemisphere. Recent research not only confirms this, it adds other major male-female brain differences. These differences may explain why girls speak sooner, read more easily and have fewer learning disorders. Following a stroke, women often recover their speech more quickly than men, perhaps because they can draw more readily from both sides of the brain.

A 2001 British research report from Catriona Good, Ingrid Johnsrude and others documented several consistent gender brain differences. Women show more hemisphere symmetry, possess proportionally more gray matter and less white matter than men and have a higher concentration of gray matter in the neocortex — the newer part of the brain — whereas men have more in the entorhinal cortical, an older brain area.

Canadian researcher Deborah Saucier and her team demonstrated that men navigate differently from women: women more by landmarks, men by compass orientation. During navigation tasks, each activates different parts of the brain: women, mostly the cerebral-parietal cortical area; men, mostly the left hippocampus, not activated in women.

Even emotional information is handled differently, as reported in 2006 by Nancy Brisbon and Christopher Chambers. Children of both sexes process emotional events in the sub-cortical, nonverbal amygdala. By mid-teens, girls can connect emotional information to the neocortex and explain feelings. Boys remain in the nonverbal amygdala well into their 20s and often beyond, unable to verbalize emotional sensations.

While all this suggests men treat aural and perhaps other information differently from women, details are lacking as to why this is so. UCLA neurologist Roger Gorski said, "Sex differences do exist in the brain, but the full significance of this no one really knows." Social conditioning may provide some clues. Watch boys playing in a schoolyard. They are far more aggressive than girls and tend to make sounds and noises, whereas girls appear to engage in more socially cooperative activities involving a great deal of language.