Gender Differences Quotes

“Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey−fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean−mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”
― George Orwell

“Men most often know what they want, yet they are not always sure how they feel. Women most often know how they feel, yet they may not always know what they want.”
― Ken Poirot, Mentor Me: GA=T+E—A Formula to Fulfill Your Greatest Achievement

“The healthiest relationships have room for both male and female strengths.”
― Shawn T. Smith, The Woman's Guide to How Men Think: Love, Commitment, and the Male Mind

“Maybe this was a male-female translation problem. I read an article once that said that when women have a conversation, they're communicating on five levels. They follow the conversation that they're actually having, the conversation that is specifically being avoided, the tone being applied to the overt conversation, the buried conversation that is being covered only in subtext, and finally the other person's body language.
That is, on many levels, astounding to me. I mean, that's like having a freaking superpower. When I, and most other people with a Y chromosome, have a conversation, we're having a conversation. Singular. We're paying attention to what is being said, considering that, and replying to it. All these other conversations that have apparently been going on for the last several thousand years? I didn't even know that they ~existed~ until I read that stupid article, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.”
― Jim Butcher, Cold Days

“For every woman you know who has been given substandard treatment by her parents, used by her friend or boyfriend, abused by her husband, discriminated by her employers and ridiculed by society, I know a man who has been burdened with family responsibility since childhood, humiliated by his girlfriend, bullied by his employers, pushed by society and harassed by his wife. Everybody is fighting their own battle.”
― Sanjeev Himachali

“We may add that it is not an act of justice but of foolish injustice to pretend the sexes are the same. Justice is exercised in respectfully providing for the due needs of each.”
― J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

“Instead of ignoring our differences, we need to accept and transcend them.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead

“In my experience, women underestimate the effect that their happiness has on the men in their lives.”
― Shawn T. Smith, The Woman's Guide to How Men Think: Love, Commitment, and the Male Mind

“Women tend to communicate early and often about a problem. Men are more likely to view communication as a tool, and when they see it as the wrong tool for the job, they believe it should be stored neatly in the toolbox.”
― Shawn T. Smith, The Woman's Guide to How Men Think: Love, Commitment, and the Male Mind

“Whether they regard themselves as pro- or antifeminist, most women want men to do more of the emotional work in relationships. And most men, even those who wholeheartedly support gender equality in the workforce, still believe that emotional work is female labor. Most men continue to uphold the sexist decree that emotions have no place in the work world and that emotional labor at home should be done by females.”
― bell hooks

“Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puerisque

“The propositions that accompany most of the chapters . . . are not as snappy as I would prefer—but there’s a reason for their caution and caveats. On certain important points, the clamor of genuine scientific dispute has abated and we don’t have to argue about them anymore. But to meet that claim requires me to state the propositions precisely. I am prepared to defend all of them as “things we don’t have to argue about anymore”—but exactly as I worded them, not as others may paraphrase them.

Here they are:

1. Sex differences in personality are consistent worldwide and tend to widen in more gender-egalitarian cultures.

2. On average, females worldwide have advantages in verbal ability and social cognition while males have advantages in visuospatial abilities and the extremes of mathematical ability.

3. On average, women worldwide are more attracted to vocations centered on people and men to vocations centered on things.

4. Many sex differences in the brain are coordinate with sex differences in personality, abilities, and social behavior.

5. Human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity.

6. Evolutionary selection pressure since humans left Africa has been extensive and mostly local.

7. Continental population differences in variants associated with personality, abilities, and social behavior are common.

8. The shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personality, abilities, and social behavior.

9. Class structure is importantly based on differences in abilities that have a substantial genetic component.

10. Outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on personality, abilities, and social behavior.”
― Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class

“A man will never receive an invitation to participate in the secret relationships the woman in his life has with other females.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Men loathe the feeling of failing at the relationship.”
― Shawn T. Smith, The Woman's Guide to How Men Think: Love, Commitment, and the Male Mind

“the hope is that laying out what we understand about essential differences in the minds of men and women may lead to grater acceptance and respect of difference.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism

“God simply revealed the self-centered core that began to motivate each of them: The woman would continue to try to draw life and nurturing from a man who was not capable of filling these deep needs—never was and never will be. And the man would be forever trying to rule over the woman, either aggressively or passively trying to keep her quiet about his inadequacy to fill her needs.”
― Jeff VanVonderen, Families Where Grace Is in Place

“There is more difference within the sexes than between them.”
― Ivy Compton-Burnett, Mother and Son

“Men need a purpose?' She sighed, exasperated.

'Can’t you understand women are the same? We crave our own goals and our own accomplishments, our own sisterhood as well. And there are precious few places we can find it, in a world ruled by the opposite sex. Everywhere else we are governed by men’s rules, live at the mercy of male whims. But here, in this one tiny corner of the world, we are free to be our best and truest selves. Spindle Cove is ours, Bram. I will fight to my last breath before I let you destroy it. Women’s needs are important, too.”
― Tessa Dare, A Night to Surrender

“It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire;”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“The moment you become aware of your automatic behaviours, judging and expecting another human being to live and behave within the stereotypical gender boxes, you cannot go back to being unconscious. This is when you know you are changing”
― Runa Magnusdottir, The Story of Boxes, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly: The Secret to Human Liberation, Peace and Happiness

“Girls spend slightly more time playing with the doll than with the truck. Boys on the other hand typically spend great deal more time playing with the truck rather than with the doll. We were taught that the social construction of gender is the appropriate framework in which to understand these results [..] We give girls a fairly consistent message that girls are supposed to play with dolls and not with trucks. So when offered a choice girls will be more likely to play with dolls rather than trucks. But if a girl picks up a truck it's not a catastrophe. WIth boys the stakes are higher, we send boys a much stronger message what a boy is and is not supposed to do. Boys are not supposed to play with dolls. Boys get that message loud and clear.”
― Leonard Sax, Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences

“Sexual differentiation begins approximately six weeks after conception, when in male children the gonads are formed and begin to manufacture male hormone, which has a profound effect on the future development of the embryo. In the female, on the other hand, the ovaries are not formed until the sixth month, by which time the greater size, weight, and muscular strength of the male is already established. This is the biological basis of the sexual dimorphism apparent in the great majority of societies known to anthropology, where child-rearing is almost invariably the responsibility of women, and hunting and warfare the responsibility of men. These differences have less to do with cultural `stereotypes' than some fashionable contemporary notions would have us believe. While it is true that at all ages males and females have far more in common than they have differences between them, there can be no doubt that some differences exist which have their roots in the biology of our species. Jung was quite clear about this. Again and again, he refers to the masculine and the feminine as two great archetypal principles, coexisting as equal and complementary parts of a balanced cosmic system, as expressed in the interplay of yin and yang in Taoist philosophy. These archetypal principles provide the foundations on which masculine and feminine stereotypes begin to do their work, providing an awareness of gender. Gender is the psychic recognition and social expression of the sex to which nature has assigned us, and a child's awareness of its gender is established by as early as eighteen months of age.”
― Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction

“Warum versuchen wir immer noch Fragen wie „was ist typisch männlich?“ bzw. „was ist typisch weiblich?“ zu beantworten, anstatt danach zu streben, diese beiden Seiten, die jeder von uns in sich trägt, gleichermaßen zu vereinen?”
― Nina Hrusa

“The Chrysler Building is masculine. Empire State’s feminine.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“But as for the rest of you, sisters, when anyone says to you, this, that or the other is natural, then fight. Nature does not know best; for the birds, for the bees, for the cows; for men, perhaps. But your interests and Nature’s do not coincide. Nature our Friend is an argument used, quite understandably, by men.”
― Fay Weldon, Praxis

“Another detrimental effect of undervaluing people skills was that in some cases, programmers were rewarded more for raw code production than for meeting the user's needs. Marge Devaney, a programmer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1950's, recalled sex differences in how programmers judged their performance. Asked if she had ever experienced gender bias on the job, sh replied that discrimination was difficult to prove, adding, "With things like computing, it's very hard to judge who's doing the best. Is it better to produce a program quickly and have it full of bugs that the users keep hitting, and so it doesn't work? Or is it better to produce it more slowly and have it so it works?...I do know some of the men believed in the first way: 'Throw it together and let the user debug it!'" This critique is echoed by women today who find their male peers rewarded for averting disasters through heroic last-minute efforts, while women's efforts at preventing such problems through careful work and communication with users go unrecognized. As a female software engineer complained in 2007, "Why don't we just build the system right in the first place? Women are much better at preventive medicine. A Superman mentality is not necessarily productive; it's just an easy fit for the men in the sector.”
― Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender: Women's Changing Participation in Computing

“There is a givenness to our bodies that makes present the realities of God, and the intricate nexus of these images, that sacred web, has become far more precious to me, far more beautiful than a flattened, bland gesture toward earthly equality. Sacrificing the embodiment of these metaphors to satisfy some modern egalitarian sensibility would be, to me, a tragic desecration, a calamitous loss.”
― Abigail Favale

“…females were possibly as complex and mysterious as the secrets of the universe.”
― H.C. Roberts, Harp and the Lyre: Exposed

“A woman’s honour is usually tied with curbing her sexuality; similarly a man’s masculinity is about flaunting it. While a woman must protect her honour by keeping her legs closed, quite literally, a man must demonstrate his manhood by putting on a show of his sexuality. How can the one physical act that bridges the gap between men and women be so disparate in its meaning for the two sexes?”
― Prachi Gangwani, Dear Men: Masculinity and Modern Love in #MeToo India