Laura Beckwith thinks girls aren't using tools. An Associated Press story dated September 24th tells about the many experiments Beckwith, with her advisor Margaret Burnett, have designed to try to figure out why women do not seem to use advanced functions in the software they use. Beckwith suspects that this is down to a difference in the way ( Read more... )

A new survey conducted by Harris Interactive (2007) that men and women are equally likely to drink wine (63% and 61%), but that women were more likely than men to feel uncomfortable making wine choices. The survey, commissioned by Robert Mondavi Private Selection, found the biggest gaps in wine attitudes by age, not by sex. Most of those surveyed ( Read more... )

Many theories to explain gender differences hinge upon the assumption that women have lower self-esteem than men. But what is self-esteem and how is it different, if at all, from other constructs like ego, self-concept, and self-image? Where does it come from? Sadly, while many studies attempt to detect the antecedents of self-esteem, both high ( Read more... )

Abbey and Melby (1986) found that males perceived more sexual intent than females in both ambiguous and nonambiguous nonverbal situations. Levesque et al (2006) also found that men attributed more sexual interest after brief interaction than women, but that women tended to generalize attraction to positive personality characteristics more than men ( Read more... )

Noel-Levitz higher education consultants (2007) surveyed nearly 100,000 college freshmen in 2006, and found some interesting gender differences in their responses. Men tended to be more confident about their ability, but women tended to report better study habits. The Noel-Levitz report states that only 73 men graduate college for every 100 women ( Read more... )

In 1981, Hemmer and Kleiber set out to examine the labels of "tomboy" and "sissy" in a midwestern school. They found that the children labeled by their peers as tomboys and sissies weren't actually any more androgynous than other children, but that there were specific behaviors that could trigger the labels, such as creativity in boys. The ( Read more... )

What do men exaggerate and women downplay? Their computer skills.

Eszter Hargittai and Steven Shafer put 51 women and 49 men through internet-use skill test, and found that the women consistently rated their skill lower than comparably skilled men. The skills test gave participants a number of subjects to research, and allowed them to search ( Read more... )