# What are the differences between men and women?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-differences-between-men-and-women/1015688>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [March 16, 2025, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-differences-between-men-and-women/1015688 "2025-03-16T22:42:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 147

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\
**Post date:** [March 22, 2025, 3:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-differences-between-men-and-women/1015688/147 "2025-03-22T03:38:39Z")

</div>

> [@Der\_Trihs](#):
>
> If men and women had an order of magnitude difference in how much bone, skin or muscle they proportionally had in a limb, that would be a more accurate analogy. At that point you’d basically be talking about “men are built like the Hulk, women have an exoskeleton” levels of difference.

Nah. For example, even male bodybuilders with tremendously swole biceps, where the muscle tissue proportion is ten times greater than it is on a small slender woman, still use basically the same arm motions for, say, opening a door that that small slender woman uses. That’s nowhere near “Hulk vs. exoskeleton” level of fundamental physiological function difference.

Furthermore, your claim about men and women having an order of magnitude difference in any type of brain tissue proportion still seems quite disputed, to say the least. [Here,](https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/700086) for example, is a description of a 2021 meta-study of brain studies that found much smaller sex-based brain differences, most of them attributable to overall brain size difference.

> [@](#):
>
> “Men and women’s brains do differ slightly, but the key finding is that these distinctions are due to brain size, not sex or gender,” Dr. Eliot said. “Sex differences in the brain are tiny and inconsistent, once individuals’ head size is accounted for.” […]
> 
> Women’s brains are about 11% smaller than men’s, in proportion to their body size. Smaller brains allow certain features, such as a slightly higher ratio of gray matter to white matter, and a higher ratio of connections between, versus within, cerebral hemispheres.
> 
> “This means that the brain differences between large- and small-headed men are as great as the brain differences between the average man and woman,” Dr. Eliot said. “And importantly, none of these size-related differences can account for familiar behavioral differences between men and women, such as empathy or spatial skills.” […]
> 
> Dr. Eliot and her collaborators […] conducted a meta-synthesis of three decades of research, assimilating hundreds of the largest and most highly-cited brain imaging studies addressing 13 distinct measures of alleged sex difference. For nearly every measure, they found almost no differences that were widely reproduced across studies, even those involving thousands of participants. For example, the volume or thickness of specific regions in the cerebral cortex is often reported to differ between men and women. However, the meta-synthesis shows that the regions identified differ enormously between studies.
> 
> Male-female brain differences are also poorly replicated between diverse populations, such as Chinese versus American, meaning there is no universal marker that distinguishes men and women’s brains across the human species.
> 
> “The handful of features that do differ most reliably are quite small in magnitude,” Dr. Eliot said. “The volume of the amygdala, an olive-sized part of the temporal lobe that is important for social-emotional behaviors, is a mere 1% larger in men across studies.”

And [here’s the cite for the published meta-study itself.](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421000804?via%3Dihub)

Yeah, I think we’re going to have to ditch that “order of magnitude difference” claim unless you can find some better support for it than an apparently freestanding assertion by a “CBS medical correspondent”.

---

_[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-differences-between-men-and-women/1015688)._