A basic premise of a great many relationship books is that men and women are fundamentally very different creatures. With over 70 million copies of John Gray’s famous book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus in circulation over the last decade, it’s no wonder this particular assumption has stamped itself so indelibly upon the public consciousness in Western culture. Gray says that a lot of what goes wrong in relationships between men and women stems from our failure to appreciate just how different they are, and claims that only when men and women are able to respect and accept their differences does ‘love [have] a chance to blossom’.

Now I am not attempting to deny that men and women are different in many important respects, but I would suggest that the differences have been overplayed. In my opinion this has encouraged a kind of psychological apartheid between the sexes that is just downright unhelpful. Despite what Allan and Barbara Pease may wish to tell us about (insulting both genders in a single swipe) Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps or Why Men Don’t Have a Clue and Women Always Need More Shoes, whatever the differences, we should always remember that the basic similarities between us remain much stronger. People are people, irrespective of whether or not they carry a Y chromosome about their genotype, and we are all likely to get on a whole lot better if we remember that our distinctive combinations of needs and emotions are created using pigments from a common palate.

One reason why popular-psychology books based on gender differences have proved influential is undoubtedly because their rise has coincided with a number of research studies apparently supporting the theory that men and women really are distinct, right down to the level of how their brains are built. There are a number of studies that claim to show contrasts in the processing of emotion, memories, spatial perception, faces, and the levels of aggression demonstrated by men and women. However, in her excellent and carefully researched analysis of such studies, Cordelia Fine argues that the scientific evidence is ultimately far from convincing, and that the attributed differences are more to do with social constructions of gender and the prevalence of ‘neuro-sexism’ amongst some of the researchers concerned.

For example, we all know that women are more emotional than men, don’t we? Well not according to researchers Ann Kring and Albert Gordon who conducted a fascinating experiment in which they subjected a cohort of men and women to a series of short films selected to elicit an emotional response from the viewer and watched the results.

By and large it was possible to read the impact of the content on the women’s faces. Positive and negative emotions of greater intensity and duration were writ large for all to see. The men showed much less emotional response, so no surprises there. But before you conclude that this just goes to prove what we all know, in other words that women are much more ‘in touch’ with their feelings than men, consider some of Kring and Gordon’s other findings. When they asked their subjects to rate their emotional responses to what they had seen there was no difference between the men and the women. The men claimed they had been just as moved as their female counterparts. And even more telling (for the sceptics amongst you are thinking that the clumsy oafs were just mislabelling or misjudging their own feelings), measures of the skin’s electrical conductivity showed that the men’s nervous systems were, if anything, on average more responsive than the women’s, suggesting greater activation in response to what they were seeing.

One reading of this is that while the women were comfortably emoting and discharging their feelings, the men’s struggle to remain impassive in the face of equally profound emotional shifts was leaking out in other ways. Women may be better at expressing emotions (and there are many studies suggesting they are better at reading them), but men feel an equal range of emotions and studies like these suggest they feel them just as deeply.

Some additional evidence is provided by another study in which boys were much quicker than girls to turn off the sound of a baby crying. At first the researchers assumed this was because the males were just insensitive and thus indifferent to the child’s distress. However, when they analysed their subjects’ levels of stress hormones they found that, if anything, the boys had been more stressed by the crying than their female counterparts. This is why it is completely unreasonable for women to expect men to get up to their children in the night. I’m joking, I’m joking ...

But what about the other way round? What evidence is there that women experience supposedly ‘male’ emotions like aggression to similar levels? Intriguingly, in one of the most comprehensive reviews of the gender research in 2005, Janet Hyde found that aggression, along with other so-called gendered behaviours, tended to occur differently depending upon the context. It seems both men and women step out of role when they think no one is looking! So when experimental subjects were told that all markers of their gender would be eliminated or disguised, not only did women show as much aggressive behaviour as men, they actually demonstrated more.

Incidentally, Hyde’s conclusion after carefully reviewing 46 meta-analyses was that throughout the lifespan males and females were far more similar than they were different. Such differences as there were, she believes, are largely down to cultural influences. She cites examples like the fact that the first Teen Talk Barbie included amongst its repertoire of sound bites, the immortal utterance: ‘Gee, maths class is tough!’ Admittedly the offending remark was later deleted following an entirely understandable public outcry.

The way in which your culture constructs gender is really powerful. Messages like ‘Big boys don’t cry’ are unconsciously absorbed. Your culture gives you a script for what it means to be male or female, and by and large most of us find ourselves striving to obey its directives. As the anthropologist Victor Turner pointed out, culture is a big theatrical production, and any play only works if the actors stick to the script. Too much improvisation, too much deviation from the part allotted to you, creates problems for other actors since all the roles are mutually interdependent. This is why, if you happen to be conducting a study looking at what grabs an infant’s attention, it’s probably a good idea to conceal the gender of the subjects from your scorers – unless of course you fully intend to ‘discover’ that the boys spend more time looking at mechanisms like mobiles and the girls show a statistically significant preference for faces ...

Yet, even if we accept that culture shapes behaviour and the interpretation of behaviour, surely the neuro-imaging studies don’t lie? Well, perhaps. But then again, when MRI scans from a dead Atlantic salmon showed brain activity you have to wonder what to believe!¹ Even the finding that women have a thicker corpus callosum, the neural telephone exchange between the two hemispheres of the brain, has been called into question in the last few years.

The scientific evidence is at best ambiguous, but of course once you accept the notion that the person in front of you thinks and feels completely differently to you, you are likely to start foundering badly when you try and relate to them. You can no longer rely upon empathy to guide you, because your opposite gendered mate is apparently nothing like you. You are now dependent upon the sketchy maps drawn by those who claim to be familiar with the territory of both your worlds: your own internal compass is pretty much useless. You are like someone with Asperger’s syndrome, left having to decode the emotional aspects of your partner’s behaviour purely by the book, without ever being able to fully identify with them or relate intuitively to their experience. We would do well to remember that a love letter and an instruction manual are very different kinds of undertaking.

We should also bear in mind that the typologies being offered to us (‘All men prefer this ... All women are like such and such ...’) are ultimately no more than crude, sexist stereotypes. They don’t allow for how different members of the same gender can be from each other. We all know men who are sensitive and expressive as well as those who conform to the stereotype of the emotional dullard. In fact you can probably think of examples of masculinity all the way along the spectrum. Similarly, not every sister is eager to pour her heart out at every opportunity. Some women are ‘strong, silent types’, while others demonstrate other supposedly ‘masculine’ qualities like ambition or aggression in abundance. However, because the prospect of a more fulfilled, rewarding relationship is so alluring for us, or perhaps because the claims are apparently backed by hard science, no one ever really challenges these stereotypes. And, if we are honest, much of the popularity of such books has to do not so much with what they tell us about our Significant Other, but instead what they appear to tell us about ourselves.

These books offer readers of both genders a convenient script upon which to hang aspects of their own identity. We recognise ourselves in their pages in the same way that we like to match up aspects of our lives with the predictions of horoscopes, or the categories offered by pop-psychology quizzes in magazines. With the help of these books we can perform our masculinity and femininity in ways that other people will acknowledge and recognise – not least because they have read the same books as we have. They also let us off the hook with a convenient excuse when it comes to demands we can’t be bothered to meet. It’s a case of: ‘Sorry, love, I just can’t be expected to remember your birthday/pick towels off the floor/talk about my feelings etc. It’s a man thing. Just read this book – it’ll explain everything ...’

Male or female, with the help of these books everyone knows what they are doing (or at least what they are supposed to be doing) and there is a great comfort in this. Having worked extensively with transgendered and gay clients, take it from me that when people are ambiguous about the script, or fall foul of society’s expectations concerning gender or sexuality, a great deal of anxiety is stirred up – usually not only in them but also in the people around them.

Yet in many cultural traditions those who walk closest to the gods, such as the Greek prophet Tiresias or the shamen of the Navajo and other Native American tribes, are often characterised by their blending of both male and female characteristics and roles. In Tiresias’s case, legend has it that he was compelled to spend several years as a woman after the goddess Hera objected to his rough treatment of a pair of copulating snakes. It sounds entirely reasonable to me. However, the association between heightened levels of insight and the blending of male and female identities is a strong and recurrent one across many cultures.

Of course the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung believed that legends like that of Tiresias reflect a deeper and more fundamental truth, namely that within the psyche of every human being there is a masculine and feminine dimension. He called these the animus and anima and claimed that they represent gendered archetypes latent in us all. The guiding principle of the animus, the male aspect, is logical and active, being oriented towards getting things done in the outside world. The anima, on the other hand, is all about establishing relationships in the inner world and is typically manifested in processes like intuition, sensitivity to feelings and capacity for meaningful connection.

Furthermore, Jung suggests that it is the very existence of this contra-sexual self (the unconscious masculine principle in every woman or the feminine buried in every man) that allows people of the opposite gender to relate to one another in a meaningful way. To some extent we intuitively ‘get’ how the other sex works because there is a part of us that recognises ourselves in them. As the feminist journalist and author Margaret Fuller observes in her epic treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century:

‘Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.’

Psychological maturity, for Jung, was partly about being able to accept and harmonise these complementary aspects of one’s nature. This is not about suddenly coming over all metrosexual or rushing out to get a short haircut and a pair of Doc Martens (unless you want to, of course). It is about learning to integrate the whole spectrum of who you are and connecting with the different facets of the collective unconscious in all of us. Readers of John Gray should note that Jung warned that when people of either sex repress their other-gendered self, the rejected animus or anima can take on a darker, more malevolent guise in the ‘Shadow Self’. If Jung is right, then the psychological segregation of the sexes is both misguided and potentially destructive.

When the hapless Professor Higgins puts his head in his hands in the musical My Fair Lady and laments tunelessly, ‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’ the lyricist Alan Jay Lerner is providing us with a cautionary tale. Higgins’ chauvinism, his underlying belief that men and women are destined to stare uncomprehendingly at each other across an impassable gulf, actually creates the very division he is complaining about. Cut off and adrift from his own feminine side, Higgins has not the least idea how to respond to the love that Eliza offers him. Ultimately he is handicapped not by his inability to understand women but by his failure to understand himself. Fans of Mars and Venus should pause and reflect before following too eagerly in his footsteps.

Perhaps fans of Mars and Venus can find some common ground after all?

¹ For more details of the dead salmon that produced a false positive result on an MRI scan see: http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/09/the-story-behind-the-atlantic-salmon