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CHAPTER 5
Conclusions from the Study
of Gender Differences
in Cognition
John T. E. RichardsonThis volume has been concerned with the hypothesis that there are gender
differences in cognition. In principle, this might encompass differences of
any sort between men and women or between boys and girls with regard to
their intellectual functioning, experience, and behavior. Historically, how-
ever, this notion has usually been taken to refer to the possibility of gender
differences in intellectual abilities, including specific abilities (such as ver-
bal, spatial, and mathematical abilities) and "intelligence," construed as a
generic form of ability. The hypothesis that there are gender differences in
cognition has therefore been evaluated by comparing the performance of
men and women or boys and girls on objectively scorable tests. This inter-
pretation has been reflected in each of the substantive contributions to this
volume by Janet Shibley Hyde and Nita McKinley, by Paula Caplan and
Jeremy Caplan, and by Mary Crawford and Roger Chaffin.The overall findings were well summarized by Hyde and McKinley in
Chapter 2:
• There are essentially no consistent gender differences in measures of verbal
ability, with the sole exception that women tend to perform better than men do
on tests of speech production.
• Men tend to perform better than women do on some measures of spatial ability,
but the magnitude of the gender difference varies markedly with the demands
of each specific test.
• There are essentially no consistent gender differences in measures of mathemat-
ical ability, with the sole exception that beginning in high school men tend to
perform better than women do on tests of mathematical problem solving.

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Publication Information: Book Title: Gender Differences in Human Cognition. Contributors: Paula J. Caplan - author, Mary Crawford - author, Janet Shibley Hyde - author, John T. E. Richardson - author. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1997. Page Number: 131.
    
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