Psychological similarities

What is most striking about so-called ‘sex-differences’ research within psychology is its failure to find any really significant differences between how women and men use their minds. Feminist sociologists in the past drew heavily on debates about the relationships between ‘sex and intellect’ within psychology (see Oakley, 1972: 79—98). Other disciplines have also drawn on psychological testing in considering to what extent there are gendered modes of thought; for example there are some interesting philosophical debates about whether or not women make moral decisions in different ways to men (see Benhabib, 1987). Connell (2002: 40—6) provides a well-considered, brief evaluation of the huge volume of psychological research intended to establish whether women and men think, talk and judge differently. All the careful testing and re-testing seems only to have confirmed that actually the genders are virtually identical in everything from mathematical ability to self-esteem to motivation to visual sensing. Therefore, after over a hundred years of research, involving thousands of studies, ‘the main finding is that women and men are psychologically very similar, as groups’ (Connell, 2002: 42, emphasis in the original). However, it is arguably the branch of psychology called psychoanalysis that has been most influential in approaches to ‘sex differences’ since the nineteenth century, although sociologists have only engaged with these ideas more recently.