Men and women are claimed to differ so fundamentally in communication and emotional needs as to constitute different cultures.
Hyde's meta-analytic review found the great majority of measured psychological gender differences small or close to zero, with far more variation within each group than between them. The book's framing survives because the categorical story is memorable and because readers can find confirming instances in any relationship. Its practical harm is that it supplies an explanation that forecloses inquiry into the specific couple.
In practice
- A couple told their difficulty is categorical stops looking for the specific cause, which was available.
- A framework that predicts every man and every woman predicts no particular one.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation for its appeal is that a categorical story is easier to act on than a distribution. Another is confirmation, since readers remember the couples who fit. A third is that small average differences are real and then read as categorical.
- In its favour
- It gave couples a shared vocabulary for differences in style, and some of the average differences it points at are measurable.
- Against it
- Meta-analytic work finds most psychological sex differences small, with heavily overlapping distributions, so treating men and women as different cultures misdescribes the data and can license stereotypes.
- Standing
- A hypothesis most psychologists reject on the evidence. Meta-analytic work finds most psychological sex differences small and distributions heavily overlapping, and the gender-similarities hypothesis is the better-supported position.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change