Gender gaps on the brain.
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Understanding Ourselves: Gender Differences in the Brain 

What a difference a brain makes - small changes in the brain can show up in big ways in life. This issue examines gender differences in brain structures and hormones that contribute to behaviors in the workplace. Our behavior is based of a number of factors, including evolution, biology, our developmental environment, and the choices we make.  We can change the wiring of our brains through practice, but first we need to understand how men and women use their brains differently.

Differences Begin Early 
Estrogen and testosterone influence brain development, although the process of the way in which hormones and the brain interact to influence behavior is very complex. Gender differences start before birth: female brains are flushed in utero with estrogen hormones, while male brains are washed with testosterone. Females begin studying faces as babies, which shapes their brain development. Research demonstrates that the skills of baby girls in making eye contact and facial gazing increases over 400% in the first three months of life, while facial gazing skills in boys doesn't. In one study, year-old girls looked at their mothers faces 10 to 20 times more than boys checking for signs of approval or disapproval. While the boys, driven by testosterone, moved around the room to investigate their environment and rarely glanced at their mothers.

During puberty, estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone continue influencing development. Teenage girls, flooded with estrogen, get stressed around relationships and ease their fear by banning together and being socially connected. Yes, they can be mean and use their language skills - passive aggressive rumor spreading - to undermine rivals in their competition for the boys (from an evolutionary perspective sexual competition is part of the survival mechanism). But they can apologize and re-bond when necessary. Testosterone flooding the brain of teenage teen boys has the opposite effect: the teenage boy wants to be left alone. He's not interested in conversation because testosterone decreases his desire to socialize except in pursuit of sex or sports. Teenage boys at this time get stressed around challenges to their independence and authority and seek to be respected and find their place in the male pecking order through competition and conflict. They don't look for connection in same way as girls do. These are brain-based behavioral patterns that continue to influence men and women throughout adulthood.

Evolution: The Historical Perspective 
It is believed that women's ability to read faces enabled them not only to interpret what a child who couldn't yet speak needed, but also enabled them to predict what a bigger more aggressive male was going to do so that they could protect themselves and their children. Protection was essential: if a woman could band together with other women she was in a better position to protect her children and fend off any attacks. Women's brains were programmed to keep social harmony.

Men on the other hand were programmed to compete in order to reproduce and pass on their genes. Males must compete hard in order to become fathers, and  females work hard to raise and support the young. That male reality demanded aggression and rules with which to contain it - hierarchy, competition, dominance. The testosterone drive is part of that. While females also had to compete, sometimes for mates and sometimes for food, their primary goals were social support, child care, and child protection."

Differences in Brain Structures 
The amygdala is an ancient part of the brain, influenced by hormones, that processes fear, triggers aggression and action, and stimulates competitiveness. It alerts us to danger and switches on the rest of the body. The amygdala in men's brains is larger than in women's. Men and women respond differently to fear signals coming from the amygdala. When the amygdala fires a fear signal, a "fight or flight" reaction is triggered. We have now learned, however, that women's response can be different from men's: women's hormones, based on the evolution of their brains, tell them the way to safety is to gather in a group. So their response can be "tend and befriend." Women can reduce stress and promote a feeling of safety by connecting.  Most female when they are stressed , need to get out of the office and talk to others, while  the men  who were stressed tended to withdraw into themselves. So if we are more conscious of the signals coming from our amygdala, we can change the way we respond to fear and adapt our behaviors to serve us better in today's world.

The prefrontal cortex is the decision-making executive center of the brain. It oversees emotional information and puts a check on the amygdala. It is larger in women and matures faster in women than in men. This difference enables women to look for solutions to conflict.  Women tend to look for ways to compromise and serve the needs of others, even at their own expense. Men tend to look for ways to come out on top, even with their own customers.

The anterior cingulate cortex, which is another part of the rational decision making center of the brain that weighs options, is also larger in women, and has been labeled as the "worrywart" center of a woman's brain. Research demonstrates that anxiety is four times more common in women than men. So while evolution prompted women to be extremely cautious and collaborative so that they could protect their young, this cautiousness in today's business world can be interpreted, particularly by men influenced by risk-taking testosterone, as not being confident enough to step-up and take risks.

The brain is divided into two hemispheres: the left hemisphere deals with language and verbal abilities as well as the ability to process information in an orderly, logical way. The right deals with visual and spatial information, as well as abstract thinking and emotional responses. The corpus callosum, which is the part of the brain that connects both hemispheres, is thicker in women enabling them to use both the right and left sides of the brain in a more connected way than men do. Women use both sides of their brains for visual and verbal processing, and use both sides to respond to emotional experiences, while men use the right side of their brain for spatial skills and the left for verbal skills. Even within the language-centered, left-hand side of the brain, there are differences between men and women's brains. The difference in the layout of the average male or female brain is found to have a direct effect on the way men and women differ in their ways of thinking -- differences in brain organization in men and women will lead to differences in the efficiency with which they perform certain tasks.

The hippocampus is the center for learning, memory and emotion and is larger and more active in the female brain. It is also estrogen sensitive and is a relay station for processing memories into words. Women have 11% more neurons than men in the brain centers for language and hearing. The connections between the two sides of women's brains enable them, on average, to be better at expressing emotions and remembering details of emotional events and communicating them. They use language to talk about feelings and develop consensus more efficiently than men do. Men's brains, more specifically organized and with fewer connections, enable men, on average, to focus more intensely and not be as distracted by superfluous information. Men using only the right side of their brains are able to zone in more quickly than women on certain kinds of tasks, for example, activities requiring spatial skills. Using both sides of their brains for processing spatial information takes women longer, while men take longer to process emotional information and to use certain language skills because of the location of these functions in the male brain.