Human Diversity

Other scholars of sex differences have been finding differences in academic interests, careers, and life choices that break along the lines of systemizing and empathizing but that also lend themselves to the broader and simpler difference that Thorndike identified—in choice after choice, men are attracted to options that have more to do with things while women are attracted to options that have more to do with people.

Why the persistence of the tilt of men toward STEM and women toward the social sciences and the humanities?

1968: Sexual harassment was added to federal antidiscrimination law as a basis for bringing actions against employers.

Now look at the right-hand column, showing the difference between males and females on these subtests when the role of g has been extracted.

Females have an advantage on certain perceptual-motor tasks.

Why do many of these differences apparently become more pronounced in the most gender-egalitarian nations?

Two years after the Schmitt study made these points, another study led by Richard Lippa found that sexual dimorphism in visuospatial abilities also increased with gender equality.40

Or as the authors put it, “These findings imply that both economic development and gender equality exhibited an independent and significant association with gender differences in preferences.”

Kajonius published the results for a database with a more extensive (120-item) version of the FFM for 22 countries with uniformly larger sample sizes per country (at least 1,000) than the samples used by the other studies.

Among the 70 nations with data on personality and a GII score, the five nations with the best (meaning lowest) scores on the GII were Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Iceland.