Beyond domestic abuse and physical violence, females have been found to emit greater levels of verbal, and indirect, aggression than males7,17. Girls and adolescent females use verbal and indirect aggression (social manipulation to harm a target) more than boys.
Men are, on average, more outwardly aggressive than women and so it might be assumed that they are also angrier. But this doesn't appear to be the case. Research has consistently found that women experience anger as frequently and as intensely as men.
While boys became angry more often than girls, girls were significantly more likely to use indirect aggression when angry, such as persuading the peer group not to be friends with a child, or telling lies about another child (Lagerspetz et al.).
The answer seems to be, “no,” especially among adolescent girls. We have all heard that girls are meaner than boys, but some studies report that girls are simply more “aggressive” indirectly. Psychiatrists call it “indirect aggression.”
Other studies have similarly shown that women prefer men who are sensitive, confident and easy-going, and that very few (if any) women want to date a man who is aggressive or demanding. The picture that emerges is clear: when women rate hypothetical partners, they clearly prefer “nice” men.
This means that although men usually have larger muscles than women, the force exerted by equal-sized muscles is the same in both genders. This isn't surprising since muscle tissue is essentially the same regardless of gender.
Baby boys have higher levels of testosterone than girls and lower levels of serotonin, which causes them to be more easily stressed and harder to calm down.
Which is the weaker sex when it comes to pain? It may be hard to say since women and men have different experiences with pain. New research has found that women report more pain throughout their lifetime. Compared to men, women feel pain in more areas of their body and for longer durations.
Women's experiences of trauma have been linked to a variety of negative mental health consequences, including especially PTSD (4). Estimates from community studies suggest that women experience PTSD at two to three times the rate that men do (4).
However, when it comes to health, men are biologically weaker. Men are more likely to experience chronic health conditions earlier than women and have shorter lives. In almost all countries around the world, women outlive men.
Everybody who works in the field of injuries knows that after infancy, and before old age, males engage in more behavior that exposes them to the risk of injury, experience more injuries, and die more frequently from injuries.
It is now recognized that there are no significant sex differences in general intelligence, though particular subtypes of intelligence vary somewhat between sexes. While some test batteries show slightly greater intelligence in males, others show slightly greater intelligence in females.
Several factors play a role in an individual's propensity to cry. Gender differences in crying, for example, have been explored for decades and across the world, and all of the studies reached the same conclusion: Women cry more than men.
Girls physically mature faster than boys on a physical level as well due to the quicker process of puberty. Girls undergo puberty earlier than boys by about 1-2 years, and generally finish the stages of puberty quicker than males due to their differences in biology.
“As we've evolved and developed shared values and morals as a society, that tends to mute the process that biology was trying to encourage,” Hay said. She added that boys catch up to girls in development by late high school. Males and females don't finish brain development until about age 25.
Gender surprisingly plays a role in flexibility as well. In general, women are typically more naturally flexible than men, part of this is because of the makeup of their connective tissue.
In most mammals, including humans, males are larger than females and thus often considered dominant over females.
But once they're born, boys seem at least statistically to be more fragile than baby girls in the earlier years. The comparison of births based on gender is called the sex ratio — and it's been largely stable for a very long time.
“In the early weeks, through to beyond six months, they smile less and cry more, are more irritable and demanding and show less emotional stability.” Dr Chilton adds that baby boys need more emotional support from their mother, and for a longer period than baby girls.
There is a common myth among parents that boys tend to develop slower than girls. But is it true? Generally speaking, the answer is no. While girls and boys might develop certain skills on different timelines, the differences likely are not because of gender alone.
IQ scores between 90 and 109 indicate a normal range or average intelligence. Individual adults usually score somewhere in between the 70-130 range, with 100 being the theoretical average.
William James Sidis has the World's Highest IQ. Anywhere from 250 to 300 is his IQ score, almost twice the score of Albert Einstein. At the age of eleven, William famously entered Harvard University, becoming the youngest person to enter. He also claimed to be conversant in 25 languages.
As mentioned before in Perett's book, In Your Face: The New Science of Human Attraction, women show a stronger attraction toward men with a figure consistent with the ideal hunting physique: strong shoulders, narrow waists, and broad chests and shoulders.
Differences were especially strong in pain tolerance—even though male participants had higher tolerance, female participants were less variable across visits. According to the researchers, this was the first study to measure gender differences in the test-retest reliability of pain sensitivity in humans.