A new study has discovered that the patterns of brain activity taking place in the average woman’s head is profoundly different to the type of activity taking place in a man’s brain. Photo / Getty Images
Women are more generous with money, but men are better at reading maps. Here’s the science behind the brain battle of the sexes.
The differences between the sexes is a topic of endless debate at the dinner party table, but the latest research reveals what many of us already suspected: that there are profound differences between the brains of men and women, and this governs everything from our decision-making and emotional responses, to our risk of certain diseases.
Last year a long-term study by Stanford Medicine used powerful “deep learning” computer algorithms to analyse brain-imaging data from more than 1000 men and women, aged 20-35. They discovered that the patterns of brain activity taking place in the average woman’s head is profoundly different to the type of activity taking place in a man’s brain. This has long been discussed in academic studies and is not just down to cultural differences or hormones.
Larry Cahill, a professor of neurobiology and behaviour at the University of California (Irvine), who has been studying this field for the past quarter of a century, also says that there are also key structural differences in how the brains of men and women are wired. As our ability to analyse the brain has advanced over the past two decades, studying these variations in brain structure gives us much more of an understanding as to why we behave in the different ways we do.
Here are six of the most profound ways in which the brain differs between the sexes, and how ultimately this impacts our behaviour and the life choices that we make.
The human memory is a complex system, but there’s some evidence to suggest that the female memory might function more adeptly.
This stems from an unusual reason. The male brain is actually 10% larger and approximately 100g heavier, according to numerous studies, even when accounting for differences in body size. Cahill says that while this certainly doesn’t correlate to any variations in intelligence between the sexes, he believes it drives differences in brain structure, which contribute to why men and women perceive the world quite differently.
“As brains get larger, they tend to wire themselves differently,” says Cahill.
As one example, while women’s brains are smaller, their hippocampus, the S-shaped brain region critical for learning and memorisation, is proportionately larger than a man’s and functions differently. Some studies have suggested that this could be why women can generally access their memories faster than men, date them more precisely, and be more adept at retrieving information from their long-term memory.
Over the past four years, a group of Spanish economists have used a popular psychology experiment as a simple way of gauging whether men or women are more likely to be altruistic.
Their study was based on a simple psychological test called The Dictator Game, devised by behavioural economists in the 1990s, which analyses how people respond after receiving an unexpected financial windfall. When handed €10 ($22), over 1000 men and women were then asked how much of this gift they would donate to an anonymous recipient.
According to Marina Pavan, an economist at Jaume I University, the most common choice among the male participants was to give precisely nothing, while women displayed significantly more generosity, handing over almost €5 ($11), half of the gift.
Other research has revealed similar findings and offered possible explanations.
In 2017, Swiss neuroscientists conducted their own experiment where men and women wore a brain imaging cap, and made choices on whether to share a small financial reward with others, ranging from their best friend to a stranger on the street. The results indicated that women are not only more generous than men, but their brains respond more positively to sharing behaviours. For men, the opposite is true – their brains reward them more for making selfish choices.
Of course, individually, there are plenty of altruistic men and more self-centred women, but when we zoom out to a population level, these trends are very real. Time and time again, surveys have indicated that on average, women are more likely to donate to charity and in larger amounts, and more likely to volunteer their time towards different causes.
Relatively speaking, women are born with more grey brain matter, according to a recently published study from the University of Cambridge. It analysed the brain structures of more than 500 newborn babies, using state-of-the-art imaging technology.
Grey matter encompasses the many nerve cell bodies and branching fibres which form the brain’s outermost layer. Because it is essential for memory processing, interpreting information and the processing and controlling of emotions, it is thought that this may explain why females, on average, perform better in memory recall, and often score higher on emotional intelligence or empathy tests.
As Yumnah Khan, a researcher at the University of Cambridge who led the study explains, there is also evidence that adolescent and adult women tend to have proportionally more grey matter in their brains.
“Multiple papers have reported relatively more grey matter in females on average across various stages of development,” she says.
According to psychology professor Diane Halpern, this may also explain certain differences which emerge early in life, with young girls responding more readily to faces and beginning to talk much sooner compared with infant boys.
On average, men tend to score higher than women on so-called spatial awareness tasks which require being aware of where objects are, how to navigate from one place to another, and how to move through space without bumping into things.
Parking requires spatial awareness, as does map reading, and sports such as football, gymnastics, basketball and hockey. Of course, many women have excellent spatial awareness, such as elite gymnasts, but when averaging across the population it appears that men tend to be slightly better at these tasks.
The newly published Cambridge study, above, hinted at why: the average male newborn has more of the brain’s white matter, the neural pathways which form a network between brain regions often dubbed the brain’s “superhighway”, and this is thought to be potentially important for spatial awareness and physical co-ordination.
Women tend to process emotional experiences more intensely than men, but particularly when they’re in the second half of their menstrual cycle.
This is related to differences in how each of the sexes activate the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure found in each hemisphere, which serves as the brain’s emotional hub.
One of Cahill’s most famous experiments, published in 2000, demonstrated that after viewing a distressing movie, men activate their right amygdala to recall intense scenes, while women do so with their left amygdala.
This turns out to be a particularly important difference, as the left amygdala is notably more sensitive to hormonal fluctuations during the menstrual cycle. “When women are in the high hormone phase of their cycle, the second half of their cycle, they’re more likely to remember the details when something emotionally arousing happens, compared to men,” he says.
It means that during this half of the month, women can recall emotional memories particularly quickly and intensely. Researchers like Cahill now wonder whether this contributes to women being twice as likely as men to experience clinical depression or post-traumatic stress disorder in their lifetimes.
Clearly, men do get dementia, but women’s risk is far greater. Two-thirds of all clinically diagnosed cases of Alzheimer’s are women, reveals a study from 2019. While some of this may be related to women living longer on average, there are also suggestions that the male structure is more resilient to the Alzheimer’s disease process and the formation of toxic plaques and tangles.
For example, Cahill says that research has shown that for every additional plaque or tangle which gathers in the brain, cognitive functions deteriorate more than six times faster in women compared with men.
Other studies have found that middle-aged women have already accumulated 30% more plaques in the brain on average than men of the same age. Cahill also points out that while treatments like lecanemab and donanemab, the novel antibody drugs for Alzheimer’s which are designed to eliminate plaques, have received a lot of attention, a closer examination of the data shows that they tend to have more success slowing the disease in men compared with women.
But despite the differences, there’s still plenty to learn
Even in 2025, we still have vast amounts to learn about the differences between the brain structures of men and women, particularly when it comes to predisposition for various diseases.
Men are at a significantly greater risk of Parkinson’s disease, while some statistics have suggested that boys are far more likely to develop development disorders ranging from ADHD to dyslexia, intellectual disability and schizophrenia.
“Even in some of the most basic aspects of brain function, such as how different parts of the brain talk to one another, we see differences emerging in male and female brains before they’re born,” says Cahill. “It’s something we need to take into account when studying these disorders and possible treatments.”
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