Sex/gender differences in verbal fluency and verbal episodic memory: A meta-analysis. Summary Women are thought to do better in verbal skills, especially in verbal fluency and verbal memory tasks . However, the last meta-analysis on sex/gender differences in verbal fluency dates back to 1988. Although verbal memory has been investigated meta-analytically recently, a comprehensive meta-analysis focusing on verbal memory as it is typically assessed is lacking, e.g. , in neuropsychological environments. Based on 496 effect sizes and 355,173 participants, in the current meta-analysis, we found that women /girls outperformed men /boys in phonemic fluency (ds = 0.12–0.13) but not in semantic fluency ( ds = 0.01–0.02), for which the sex/gender difference seemed to depend on the category. Women/girls also outperformed men/boys in recall (d = 0.28) and recognition (ds = 0.12–0.17). Although the effect sizes are small, the female advantage was relatively stable over the past 50 years and across the lifespan. Published articles reported greater female advantages than unpublished studies, and early authors reported better performance for members of their own sex/gender. We conclude that there is a small female advantage in fluency, recall, and phoneme recognition and that it is partially subject to publication bias. Considerable variation suggests other contributing factors, such as language and country/region of participants. |
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Textbooks and popular science books confidently claim that women are better at finding words and remembering them, but is this really a fact?
“Women are better. The female advantage is constant over time and across life, but it is also relatively small,” says Marco Hirnstein, a professor at the University of Bergen, Norway.
Hirnstein is interested in how biological, psychological and social factors contribute to sex/gender differences in cognitive abilities and what the underlying brain mechanisms are.
Will the results finally settle pub debates over who is better?
"Until now, the focus has been primarily on skills, which men excel at. However, in recent years the focus has shifted more toward women," says Hirnstein.
We thought women were better, and they are!
The origin of these sex/gender differences ; nature versus nurture, and the possible consequences of these differences have been the subject of great social debates. Do men and women have different talents for different professions?
Textbooks and popular science books assume that women are better at finding words. For example, when naming words that begin with the letter “F”, or words that belong to a certain category such as animals or fruits. It has also been considered a “fact” that women remember words better.
However, the actual findings are much more inconsistent than the textbooks imply: some studies find a female advantage, some find a male advantage, some find no advantage.
“Most intellectual abilities show negligible or no differences in average performance between men and women. However, women excel at some tasks, while men excel at others on average.”
This may seem obvious, but Hirnstein and his colleagues point out how their findings can be useful in diagnosis and medical care.
Critical relevance for the diagnosis of dementia
The results are relevant in at least two ways. First, they help clarify whether the female advantage is real. Second, knowing this sex/gender difference is important for interpreting the results of diagnostic assessments, in which these skills are often tested.
For example, to determine if someone has dementia . Knowing that women are generally better at those tasks is critical to preventing women from being underdiagnosed, due to their better average performance at baseline. And for men who are overdiagnosed, due to their lower average baseline performance.
Currently, many but not all assessments take sex/gender into account .
The method is goal
Hirnstein and his colleagues performed a so-called "meta-analysis ," in which they analyzed combined data from all the doctoral theses, master’s theses, and studies published in scientific journals that they could find. This meta-analysis covered more than 500 measures from more than 350,000 participants.
Researchers found that women are actually better. The advantage is small but consistent over the past 50 years and throughout an individual’s life.
Furthermore, they found that the female advantage depends on the sex/gender of the lead scientist: female scientists report a larger female advantage, male scientists report a smaller female advantage.
