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Men are better at maths. Women are more emotional. Men are more competitive. Women talk more. Right? Apparently not. Popular culture tends to view men and women as being so different they may as well come from opposing planets – like Mars and Venus. But recent research by psychologists has shown that men and women are far more alike than we think and that much of what we’re taught about gender differences is nothing more than myth.

Myth one: men are better at maths

Boys do in fact do better at maths than girls do and are more likely to choose career paths like engineering which require maths skills. The problem girls have with maths has nothing to do with biology, though. It has to do with something called ‘stereotype anxiety’. Research at New York University and the University of Texas found that when groups of people were primed to think about bias against women before taking a test, women scored badly. When groups of people were primed to think about gender-neutral topics, the gap in scores disappeared. Psychologists say that it’s anxiety caused by social expectations that leads to girls having lower maths scores than boys.

Myth two: women are more emotional

A study by psychologist Ann Kring from Vanderbilt University found that male and female students watching movies felt the same level of emotion. But women felt more comfortable expressing their feelings. Many studies confirm that there is no difference between men and women when it comes to experiencing emotions. It comes down to the widely held belief that ‘boys don’t cry’ – and if they do, they have to do so in private.

Myth three: men are more competitive

Many societies share the stereotype that men are more competitive than women, and many of these societies have patriarchal structures. A study by professors at the University of Chicago and Columbia University tested this myth by looking at two cultures that don’t share this bias. It was found that men in Tanzania’s patriarchal Masia tribe were more competitive, while women from the matrilineal Khasi group in India were the more competitive gender. This suggests that competitive behaviour is linked to social norms rather than being intrinsic. A brand new study by a Harvard psychological scientist confirms this finding, and argues that while women seem less competitive in patriarchal societies they are simply using different strategies to men.

Myth four: women talk more

It’s commonly thought that while women speak thousands of words a day men only utter a few hundred. But a 2007 study from the University of Arizona found that 396 male and female students they monitored all spoke around 16,000 words a day. In fact, the three chattiest students observed were all men, who spoke about 40,000 words a day.

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