Verbal Superiority of Women?

We all know that men and women are different. This does not mean that one of the sexes is better than the other, they are simply different. I wish to emphasise that these differences do not mean a superiority-inferiority relationship between males and females. When I claimed that usually women excel at certain language skills and men at spatial skills this was a simplification. Of course, we can always find exceptions to this generalisation, since there are some excellent female pilots and male interpreters as well. As for the explanation of sex-specific differences in cognition and behaviour there have been numerous theories. In the past nature was held to be the primary reason of these differences. Then in the 1960s, Locke's "tabula rasa" thesis, which proposes that the human mind is "blank" at birth and its content is built up step by step from the experiences of the world, was rediscovered and aspects of behaviour were attributed to nurture. In the 1990s, the evolutionary theory emerged by assigning almost every gender difference to the evolution of the brain and natural selection. At the end of the 20th century more and more works were published on the significance of hormones and the differences in brain structure. In this article I have attempted to give a more or less detailed account of these as well, pointing out the inconsistencies and lack of consensus.