The fight for equality between men and women comes up against an obstacle: the disparities cannot be reduced, because gaps in certain brain capacities persist.
“We’ll see when we have to carry something heavy,” OSS 117 replies to Dolorés Koulechov who claims, in the film OSS 117: Rio no longer responds, a work of equal. It is not only on the physical level that men and women will remain unequal. According to a study published on July 28 in PNAS, the journal of the American Academy of Sciences, cognitive equality can never be achieved.
“No reason to expect it”
A team from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis performed three sets of tests on 31,000 men and women from 13 different European countries. All over the age of 50, they answered questions assessing their episodic memory, math skills and verbal fluency. Thanks to the results, the researchers were able to assess the importance of living standards, education and gender disparities.
Contrary to what one might think, “there is no reason to expect cognitive gender differences to diminish,” concludes Daniela Weber, lead author of this study. “However, the results of this study suggest that if women and men have equivalent levels of education, then one can expect a female advantage over episodic memory, a male advantage over numbers, and no difference in verbal fluency (such as naming as many different animals as possible in one minute). “
Women benefit more from equality
Depending on the region and the state’s level of education, there are strong gender disparities. But if living conditions reduce inequalities a little, they will never be able to make them disappear. However, the data collected by the researchers suggests that women derive more benefits from gender equity than men. Concretely, the gaps would increase in episodic memory, would decrease in mathematical conditions, and would disappear for vocabulary and verbal fluency.
The differences in cognitive abilities have not yet found an explanation. Some researchers explore the biological path, but others always evoke societal factors. No society having succeeded in achieving perfect equality, it is difficult to determine which one dominates the other.
.
