So which gender is better: men or women ?
This question raises several other questions that mostly relate to understanding a complex interplay in the relationship between men and women. Are men better leaders than women? Who makes the decisions at home? Who is happier in life? etc. These are just some of the never ending questions.
But let’s try to stick to statistics to understand the real world situations.
- Woman makes more decisions at home
According to the pewresearch, it seems that woman make more decisions at home. Interestingly, the findings suggest that 43% of responses are attributed to woman making more decisions at home while man does it in 26% of cases.
Although this research is already a bit outdated, a more recent one from Gallup, 2020 confirms this finding.
source: link
And when it comes to detailing the situations in which decisions are going into one or the other direction, it turns out that for many activities women are the ones that are more likely to to make decisions.
Funny enough, when it comes to keeping the car in good condition, men largely win this battle :).
Source: Gallup – link.
2. Who is better at decision-making: men or women?
Recent study from 2021, found that “Men make more extreme choices and decisions” (source: link). Researchers highlighted that “…men were much more likely than women to be at the extreme ends of the behavioural spectrum, either acting very selfishly or very altruistically, very trusting or very distrusting, very fair or very unfair, very risky or very risk averse and were either very short-term or very long-term focused.”.
However, the scientific literature is largely contesting this conclusion (source: link) concluding that “at lower levels of cortisol both men and women tend to make riskier decisions in both economic and social spheres.”.
When looking at physical differences (i.e. human brain), the nero-researchers found that “…women, in many different tasks, process information about five times faster than men, and use much less of their brain to do identical cognitive performance.” (source: link).
It seems that the answer to the question who is better at decision making is not that simple and should definitely be contextualized. In some cicumstances, women may react better and faster while, in some other situations men are the ones taking over.