Johannesburg - When it comes to a game of scrabble don’t take on a woman… that is if you are a man.
Even when it comes to Wordle, if you are a man, step aside.
For a long time the suspicion was that women were better at finding and remembering words than men.
Now science has finally settled the score.
“Women are better. The female advantage is consistent across time and life span, but it is also relatively small”, declared Marco Hirnstein, professor at The University of Bergen, Norway.
Hirnstein made this discovery after he and his colleagues conducted a so-called “meta-analysis” which analysed the combined data of all PhD theses, master theses, and studies published in scientific journals. These studies combined included 350 000 participants.
The research examined:
Verbal fluency and “verbal-episodic memory'”.
Verbal fluency measures a subject’s vocabulary, while verbal-episodic memory is the ability to recall words one has come across in the past.
“We thought women were better – and they are!
“The origin of these sex/gender differences; nature versus nurture – and the potential consequences of these differences have been the subject of big societal debates,” explained Hirnstein, who is interested in how biological, psychological, and social factors contribute to sex/gender differences in cognitive abilities.
He is also studying what the underlying brain mechanisms are that cause these differences.
Men and women, they found, excel at different tasks.
“Most intellectual skills show no or negligible differences in average performance between men and women. However, women excel in some tasks, while men excel in others on average,” he said.
Their research does more than settle an age old pub debate or prove once and for all who to pick as a scrabble partner. One day this study could help in the fight against dementia.
The researchers said that the results of the study were relevant and it finally clarified that the female advantage was real. Also that by knowing the sex/gender difference was real it would help in interpreting diagnostic assessments.
In the case of dementia, simply knowing women are generally better at finding words will prevent them from being under diagnosed.
But for the meantime it has been settled. Time to accept defeat, put away the Thesaurus and ask the better half for some help with the crossword.