Gender Differences

By applying self sanctions on gender linked behavior and selecting gender appropriate models, children contribute towards creating gender role socialization for themselves.

Gender role behavior is believed to be affected greatly by gender segregation, the fact that children spend most of their time with same-sex groups in all cultures, which is a powerful socialization force.

Different attitudes, abilities and skills are developed as a result of differential treatment in every culture.

Expectations, experiences, opportunities, guided participation and instructional treatment differs greatly among males and females in all societies.

Media outlets, TV characters, and family members are all potential models for children to learn behaviors from.

By observing the conduct of those around them, children learn gender appropriate behaviors.

Differential treatment and modeling, society, peers, the family and oneself all contribute to gender role socialization.

 Boys tend to be more dominant, while girls lean towards equal participation in their interaction styles.

Generally, boys prefer numerous friends and belonging to large groups, while girls prefer belonging to small groups and having fewer but closer friends.

The opportunities to pursue different roles and cultural attitudes influence differences in male and female academic interests.

Girls tend to enjoy playing with more domestic themes while boys lean towards violent themes, active play, and physical aggression.

Girls are more compliant and have better impulse control than boys.

Parents have different kinds of conversations with their kids, which encourages and causes males to show anger more readily and girls to be more verbally expressive about their emotions.

Female infants are better able to regulate their arousal, which seems to better equip them for social interaction than male infants, who tend to be fussier at first.

Parents and teachers treat boys and girls differently in a number of ways.

They have different expectations of them, and teach them differently.

In General, parents expect boys to be better at science and math, and girls to be better at reading.

They expect boys to be naturally better at sports, to have better crawling abilities as infants, and even to be stronger newborns than girls.

They encourage girls to take dance and music lessons and to read, and encourage their sons in the sports realm, thereby providing different experiences to their sons and daughters.

Fathers tend to gear play differently with boys and girls.

Activities that are done with their sons tend to enhance endurance and physical strength, such as construction and physical play, while with their daughters they encourage nurture and domestic themes.

Their interaction is different.

Parents express approval for gender appropriate play with toys, developing the child's preferences accordingly.

Parents also talk about emotions differently with boys and girls.

Parents tend to foster different attitudes, provide different opportunities and instruction to different genders.

Brain lateralization is the specialization of functions in the right and left hemispheres of the brain, which causes sex differences in verbal and language abilities.

Male fetuses are prenatal l y exposed to high testosterone levels, which enhances right hemisphere development and slows left hemisphere development.

Therefore, males have an advantage in quantitative and spatial tasks, which are specialized in the right hemisphere.

While males primarily use the left hemisphere for processing language, females language processing occurs in both hemispheres, which contributes to the female advantage in language and verbal tasks, since their brains are less lateralized.

Females perform much better in reading, writing, phonological tasks, language and verbal abilities.

Boys and girls use different strategies to solve math problems.

This creates differences in performance on texts and exams.

This may be due to their differences in spatial abilities.

Male hormones promote the development of the right hemisphere, which is specialized for quantitative and spatial tasks.

These differences in male and female brains are consistent with their sex differences in cognitive tasks, such as language acquisition, spatial task performance, math reasoning, computation and overall verbal abilities.