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MEET Mr Mars. He’s descended from a race of tactically aware hunters, has a
good sense of direction, and pursues goals with a pathological
single-mindedness. He is also socially inept and inclined to retreat to his cave
when threatened.

And then there’s his long-suffering mate, Ms Venus. She’s great with people
and at making small talk, but lousy at reading maps and parking. She also
succumbs to bouts of retail therapy and is prone to emotional outbursts.

These are hugely simplistic caricatures of man and woman. But despite the
great range of personalities we all express, the stereotypes persist. Openly we
pour scorn on them, but secretly we can’t help admitting there might be
something in them.

Their persistence leads us to wonder about the origins and depth of the
gender divide. Are the differences in our behaviour universal, or peculiar to
specific cultures? Are they hard-wired or learned in the home and playground?
The result of genes or Barbie dolls and toy guns?

Scientific studies often seem to reinforce the old sexual stereotypes. But
dig a little deeper and you’ll find that some of these clichés are not
quite what they seem—as we found when we quizzed the experts on three
seemingly rock-solid facts about him and her.

STEREOTYPE 1:

Men hate shopping

She can’t have too many handbags, hats and shoes. He would rather visit the
dentist than the shopping mall. If that sounds familiar, then here’s a surprise.
Men were the original consumers, according to Geoffrey Miller from University
College London. Miller argues that our taste for shopping began when our
ancestors evolved the instinct to adorn themselves. “It started with body
painting, ornaments and furs,” he says. And that began with men.

Miller sees consumerism as a form of sexual signalling. Think of a Porsche as
the equivalent of a peacock’s tail—an expensive appendage that shows its
owner can afford to be wasteful. Because females invest far more time and energy
in reproduction than males, they are much pickier about who they mate with. So
nature’s showy status symbols are mostly confined to males, who must do their
best to impress. It’s not all empty showmanship, however. An expensive sexual
signal is the best way to prove you’re a good bet because it cannot be
faked.

But what about all those women addicted to shopping? “Consumption by females
is more puzzling,” admits Miller. “It seems concerned mainly with competing
against other females for social status.” Humans are monogamous and, compared
with most other animals, spend huge amounts of time and resources on their
offspring. Miller notes that as a result, there are incentives for women to keep
their partners around. One way to do this is to send out the same sexual signals
that men use.

If conspicuous consumption is a way of attracting a mate in the first place,
then it makes sense that men would soon lose interest in shopping. Miller
suggests this is why men tend to outspend women during the early stages of
courtship, trying to impress with flowers, candle-lit dinners and other
expensive tokens of love. “Once the sexual relationship begins, the balance of
power changes,” he says. Showing off by spending is no longer important for the
man, whereas a woman who wants to hold on to her partner must keep on sending
out those signals. That could explain why women keep spending, often shopping
more and more.

Miller also points out that many women still go for the same kind of vain
adornments that would have appealed to our ancestors—make-up, jewellery
and clothes—whereas men’s consumerist instincts have grown to include
cars, houses and overpriced stereo headphones.

Explaining these differences is tricky. There’s no doubt that financial and
social status play a big part in how much we spend and on what. But expectations
are also important—and sometimes these can be altered remarkably easily.
In Japan, for example, there was no custom of giving diamond engagement rings
until the 1970s, when DeBeers ran an intensive advertising campaign to convince
Japanese women that they deserved the same as their Western counterparts.
Japanese men are now expected to fork out two months’ salary on a ring as a sign
of their romantic commitment.

So whether you like to spend hours pawing over hi-fi catalogues or days at
the sales hunting down the perfect pair of shoes, you can blame it on your
evolutionary urge to be wasteful. And although consumerism may not be pretty,
extravagant sexual signals do have a positive side: Miller points out that they
are at the root of almost everything that we humans find beautiful or impressive
in nature.

STEREOTYPE 2:

Women are useless navigators

Wrong. Women are stylish navigators. Most psychologists will tell you that
men are better at finding their way around mazes—real or virtual. And that
men outperform women in tests of spatial reasoning such as map reading and
judging distances. Lab tests prove it. Well, that may be true for some men, but
women with the best spatial abilities are just as good, if not better, than men
with the worst. And women have a particular skill that doesn’t show up in some
of the lab tests.

A man trying to find his way around relies on his instinct for thinking
geometrically, whereas most women will clock specific landmarks—the water
fountain near the stairs, the tree near the road junction. What’s more, they are
better at spotting when objects have moved, which could give them an advantage
in the unpredictable world beyond the lab.

Lab tests are also limited because studies almost always examine the skills
of Western college students. But look to the Arctic and the picture changes.
Inuit women perform just as well as their menfolk in tests of spatial reasoning.
“This exception tells us that sex difference in spatial ability is not a
biological universal,” says Lesley Rogers from the University of New England in
Armidale, New South Wales.

The differences could come instead from our early life experiences. Exactly
what it is in Inuit culture that makes the women so spatially adept is a mystery
though. Rogers points out that although we know very little about how early
experiences affect our subsequent behaviour, we do know that they can influence
our gender and sexual orientation. “I believe the same may occur for other
behaviours, and that could include spatial ability,” she says.

There’s no doubt that cultural expectations can affect our behaviour. The
powerful influence of gender stereotypes has been revealed in recent research.
For example, researchers showed sexist adverts to maths undergraduates and found
that the images adversely affected the problem-solving abilities of women, but
not of men (91av, 30 September 2000, p 38).

But culture can not explain everything. Hormones also play a part, and their
daily, monthly or annual fluctuations mean that an individual’s performance in
tests of spatial ability depends on when the test is done.

A woman’s peak comes during menstruation when her oestrogen levels are at
their lowest. For men, testosterone is the key. Men in Europe and North America
have more testosterone in autumn than in spring, yet their spatial abilities are
better in spring than autumn. Too much testosterone is bad news for the male
navigator. A man’s spatial reasoning is poorest in the early morning when his
testosterone levels peak, according to a study by Scott Moffat and Elizabeth
Hampson from the University of Western Ontario. In general, men with middling
testosterone levels do best at spatial tests, while men with the highest levels
do badly. The gender stereotype that paints macho men as the great navigators is
all wrong.

STEREOTYPE 3:

Men are less emotional

Not so. Emotional outbursts might be considered female territory, and brain
imaging and psychological tests seem to confirm that women experience some
emotions more intensely than men, but men have strong feelings too.

In an environment of intense male-male competition it pays to be able to
suppress emotions—particularly negative ones such as fear and
stress—because men who express these are likely to lose status. But
although a man’s emotional repertoire is generally considered more limited than
a woman’s, there are certain situations where his best chances of survival and
reproduction lie in expressing strong emotions.

“It depends on context,” says David Geary from the University of Missouri in
Columbia. “In dominance-related situations and situations involving
confrontations with other men, men can react—with anger—more
intensely than women.”

But anger isn’t the only emotion that men display openly. Jealousy is just as
likely to be felt and expressed by males as females, at least when it comes to
feelings about a sexual partner. That’s because jealousy has evolved as an
adaptation to help keep couples together according to David Buss from the
University of Texas in Austin.

And because the perceived threats to a successful reproductive relationship
are different for men and women, so too are the situations that trigger feelings
of jealousy. Buss and his colleagues interviewed people from the US, Europe,
Asia and Africa and found that, given a stark choice, around 60 per cent of men
would feel more jealous if their partner was having a passionate sexual affair,
while close to 85 per cent of women said they would be more jealous of their
partner having a deep emotional relationship with someone else.

Buss points out that for men the biggest threat to reproductive success is
being cheated on. Men can never be certain of paternity because it’s not obvious
when a woman is ovulating or when fertilisation has occurred. Most male mammals
respond by providing no parental care. But for people, a protracted reproductive
relationship has advantages for both sexes, so male jealousy is particularly
sensitive to signs of sexual infidelity. Women, on the other hand, know they are
not caring for another person’s child. “Women historically have been more
concerned about the long-term commitment of a partner, which is signalled by his
love for her,” says Buss. That is why female sexual jealousy is fine-tuned to
acts of intellectual betrayal rather than physical infidelity.

“The differences in emotional reactions reflect the different ways that men
and women are motivated to organise their world,” says Geary. That’s why in
certain situations we appear to come from different planets. But, as Buss points
out, whatever our sex, we share many of the same goals in life, and many of the
methods of achieving them. So our partners aren’t as alien as they may sometimes
seem.