How your sex affects your behaviour and health – according to science

While most people are familiar with the term “man flu”, men really are more vulnerable to getting ill from a circulating infection. In general, women around the world seem to mount stronger immune responses to various pathogens, something which was made clear during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Statistics across England and Wales showed that 18 per cent more men died from the virus between March 2020 and January 2021.

At the time, Prof Philip Goulder, an immunologist at the University of Oxford, said that scientists were beginning to realise that there were major differences between the male and female immune systems.

“The immune response throughout life to vaccines and infections is typically more aggressive and more effective in females,” he said. “Several factors contribute to this including the fact that females have two X chromosomes compared to one in males, and a number of critical immune genes are located on the X chromosome.”

But while this is positive for women in many ways, it also means they are at a far greater risk of autoimmune diseases, caused by the immune system responding excessively and mistakenly attacking healthy tissue.

Thicker skin

Finally, if you find yourself regularly arguing with your spouse over the temperature of the house, it’s likely to be related to the different skin thickness levels between men and women.

Men’s skin is about 25 per cent thicker than women’s, and this combined with their higher resting metabolic rate – due to their greater muscle mass – means that they feel the cold less.

So next time, your girlfriend or wife asks for a hot water bottle or the heating to be turned on, it’s because her biology means she’s sensing the cold much more acutely.

---

The real life situations that prove gender-based science is right

Road rage

Although research indicates that both men and women feel anger with the same frequency, women may be better at holding back their frustration. One famous study from neuroscientists at the University of Pennsylvania found that a part of the brain called the orbital frontal cortex, involved in controlling aggression, is much larger in women than men. This may be why women are better at restraining themselves from explosive outbursts – such as bellowing when another motorist overtakes you on the M25.

Resolving arguments

One of the key findings from the Stanford research was that the female participants showed greater activity in the default mode network – a system of connected brain areas that is associated with internal thought and introspection. Daydreaming or simply contemplating another person’s perspective are linked to this region – allowing women to be more reflective in conflicts, whether in office politics or the right way to stack a dishwasher.

Cleaning the fridge

Women do most of the chores around the home because men do not see mess in the same way, University of Cambridge academics suggested in December last year, in a phenomenon they described as “affordance theory”. While men will look at a pile of dishes in the sink or a messy fridge as a mess, women view it as a job in need of doing and feel an urge to do so. “Men should be encouraged to resist gendered norms by improving their sensitivity to domestic task affordances,” the researchers concluded.

Map-reading

Many romantic mini-breaks and countryside walks have been tainted by male belief in their superior powers of navigation, and – unfortunately – they may have a point. The Stanford research and other studies have hinted that men seem to display greater visual and spatial awareness on average than women, along with a better working memory – allowing them to plot a route with more confidence. Whether they can keep their female partner on the walk alongside them is another question.

Sending thank you notes

Women are better at “remembering to remember”, multiple studies have found, a useful trait when sending a birthday card to Great-Aunt Susan or planning a child’s themed outfit for World Book Day. In a 2016 study carried out by the Experimental Psychology Society, women performed better in “event-based tasks” (prompted by an external event) which would take place in the future, and when the task “required a physical response modality”. 

Writing in the society’s Quarterly Journal, researcher Liana Palermo of Aston University reflected: “In daily life women might perform tasks involving prospective memory/planning skills more than men, thus enhancing their performance in remembering to remember.”