Textbooks and popular science books claim with certainty that women are better at verbal fluency (sometimes also called word fluency) and verbal memory, but is this really a fact?
Analyzing data from 168 studies, 496 effect sizes, and 355,173 participants, Hirnstein et al. suggest that a small but robust female advantage in verbal fluency and verbal-episodic memory exists; with respect to verbal fluency, the female advantage emerged only in phonemic fluency, whereas sex/gender differences in semantic fluency appeared strongly category-dependent. Image credit: Pexels.
After more than 100 years of psychological research, sex/gender differences in cognitive abilities are still heavily debated.
Mathematical and spatial abilities, in which men are commonly believed to excel, are very well researched.
By comparison, much less is known about verbal abilities, in which women/girls are commonly believed to excel.
There is no unitary concept of verbal abilities, but it relates to all aspects of open or inner language production and comprehension.
Previous meta-analyses reported female advantages with medium effect sizes for writing ability and reading comprehension.
Verbal intelligence/reasoning and vocabulary, on the other hand, did not reveal a female advantage.
The two verbal abilities, however, that textbooks and review articles typically refer to when claiming the existence of a female advantage are verbal fluency and verbal memory.
Verbal-fluency and verbal-memory tests correlate with general cognitive abilities and are frequently used in psychological assessments of developmental impairments in children, impairments and rehabilitation after stroke, and cognitive decline in dementia.
“So far, the focus has mostly been on abilities, in which men excel. However, in recent years the focus has shifted more towards women,” said University of Bergen’s Professor Marco Hirnstein, lead author on the study.
Professor Hirnstein and his colleagues conducted a so-called meta-analysis, where they analyzed the combined data of all Ph.D. theses, master theses, and studies published in scientific journals they could find.
The meta-analysis encompassed 168 studies and 496 effect sizes from 355,173 participants.
The authors found that women are indeed better. The advantage is small but consistent across the last 50 years and across an individual’s lifespan.
Moreover, they found that the female advantage depends on the sex/gender of the leading scientist: female scientists report a larger female advantage, male scientists report a smaller female advantage.
“Most intellectual skills show no or negligible differences in average performance between men and women,” Professor Hirnstein said.
“However, women excel in some tasks, while men excel in others on average.”
The results were published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.
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Marco Hirnstein et al. Sex/Gender Differences in Verbal Fluency and Verbal-Episodic Memory: A Meta-Analysis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, published online July 22, 2022; doi: 10.1177/174569162210821
