Girls vs Boys

The best starting point for discussing the difference between male and female skills is a book published in 1974 by two psychologists, Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Nagy Jacklin. They summarize and critically evaluate a large body of work on the psychology of sex differences, concluding that at least eight different claims for sex differences (see left-hand column in the table) were disproved by the results of then available scientific studies and that the findings about seven other alleged differences (see middle column) were either too skimpy or too ambiguous to warrant any conclusions at all, but that sex differences in four areas—verbal ability, visual-spatial ability, mathematical ability, and aggressive behavior—were "fairly well established".

However a meta-analytic Review of sex differences in aggressive behavior, using 63 studies reported in the social psychological literature found that although men were somewhat more aggressive than women on the average, sex differences were inconsistent across studies. The magnitude of the sex differences was significantly related to various attributes of the studies. In particular, the tendency for men to aggress more than women was more pronounced for aggression that produced pain or physical injury than for aggression that produced psychological or social harm. In addition, sex differences in aggressive behavior were larger to the extent that women, more than men, perceived that enacting a behavior would produce harm to the target, guilt and anxiety in oneself, as well as danger to oneself. It is suggested that aggression sex differences are a function of perceived consequences of aggression that are learned as aspects of gender roles and other social roles.