Just curious. New moms often seem to hear low level baby and kid in distress noises that are all but imperceptible to the husband. Is this simply focus or is women’s hearing inherently more sensitive to soft, low level sounds?
After our daughter was born, my wife became very deeply depressed and couldn’t function very well as a mother. So I took paternity leave and took over most of the caretaking.
During this time I noticed that MY hearing certainly became much more acute when it came to the baby’s crying or cooing. Whether my wife’s hearing (already unbelievably sharp) improved any, I can’t say.
It’s been my experience, though, that women do seem to have better hearing than men. Can’t back it up with any evidence, but there it is.
Women certainly listen better than men, though.
I don’t know if there’s an inherent difference between men and women’s hearing (none was every mentioned in my anatomy or physiology classes), but I do know that men have historically had a higher incidence of hearing loss from noise than women. Of course, the last study that I saw that documented this difference was from the early seventies. Since then, the division between what were considered traditionally male and female work and leisure activities has certainly broken down, so whether or not this difference still exists in younger people is questionable. The advent of the walkman has probably wiped out any remaining differences.
What? WHAT???
My understanding is that there have been several studies showing women, on average have slightly better hearing and sense of smell than men from the very start.
Given that men are more likely to be employed in high-noise environments (steel mills, factories, etc.) the gap only widens with age.
Of course, a particular individual man may hear exceptionally well, and there are certainly deaf and hearing-damaged women walking about.
my wife can hear me sneaking a beer out of the fridge at 100 paces, so the answer is yes
About the baby listening… its more “brain” than “ear”. When I dont want to hear the baby crying nothing wakes me up. When I am worried I can hear pretty well.
Overall my experience is that women have better significantly NOSE/Smelling than we men do… as for hearing never noticed any difference.
Age is quite a factor in some senses thou… my younger brother as a small boy and his daughter now have incredible night vision… its scary. Now that he is older he doesnt have it anymore thou.
The normal hearing range of a (younger) human is 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz. This site says that “male hearing range decreases more quickly than the female, and so women can generally hear higher pitch notes than men of similar age”.
Once in physics class the professor had a device which played a certain frequency, and everyone that could hear it raised their hand. Most of the men in the class started dropping their hands at ~12,000 IIRC (I think it was Hz, but for some reason I think the numbers were 1200/1500, so I don’t know exactly), but even at 15,000 many women (and only women) had their arms still up.