Do men have more 'sensitive' hearing than women? - Page 2

I only wished they had included asians as well.

Also, with some reading elsewhere I found females hear better because their inner ear can vibrate easier. However, it was said it is also a bad thing, since it makes them more prone to environmental hearing damage than men.

Let's petition for black middle aged women as hi-fi reviewers!!!!!!!

Most likely men and women are generally born with equal hearing capabilities (with intra-group variation of course). It's likely environmental factors (loud noises at work, listening to sources too loudly, etc.) degrade men's hearing on average more than women's. It's way too easy (and fallacious) to ascribe evolutionary reasons for perceived differences among the sexes, "races" (in quotes because there's really no such thing, but that's a separate argument for another day), etc., but if the conjecture isn't falsifiable/testable (and usually it's purely just anecdotal) then it's not science. but mere guesswork. As a former evolutionary biologist, I want to believe everything is based on biology (that's my world view), but even I recognize that most purported differences simply aren't.

If you do some more reading on the subject, you will see this is not the case.

Women are born with more sensitive hearing than men, there could be many evolutionary reasons for this, but I do not have evidence that they are the cause.

But still, women have more sensitive hearing because their inner ear that actual vibrates, vibrates more than in men. But also because of this, their hearing is more vulnerable to environmental damage. But since older women still have better hearing than older men, you could assume that women either are subjected to less environmental noise damage, or their hearing exceeds that of men enough that even though they receive more damage from environment noise, they still hear better than men.

There is many many differences between the sexes and races.

I really do not understand how people can recognize easy differences between the races like skin colour, facial features, general body size, but then deny that there is any other differences in our brains and how we perceive things.

I read somewhere that women have better hearing than men.

i learned that lesson at work a several times with two different females workers. i have to make sure to keep my mouth shut now.

it depends on what context for what kind of sound you are more aware of. if you have a baby then you will be very sensitive to it. if you live in the jungle you can hear a cricket in the middle of the city. i heard black women have very good hearing though.

I think that a lot of the hearing differences between men and women relate to what types of work each gender is expected to perform. For example, men are more likely to work in factories, mow the lawn, and join crappy rock bands.

Maybe women appear to lose low frequencies first because their ears are naturally smaller, thus not calibrated to hear as much low frequency information in the first place. Just a guess.

i'm fairly certain they can hear our thoughts as well.

i'm currently testing various hats made out of tinfoil to prevent this.

Ugh, why haven't people read the link and do some research on their own.

These theories of yours are incorrect.

The article you posted doesn't say anything about the possible cause for the hearing loss discrepancy between men and women.

I have what I sometimes think is an over-sensitivity to highs, and what I perceive as shrill, or piercing, sometimes to the point of physical pain, my male friends don't even notice. It shows up in headphone choices: I can't handle the DT880s (they hurt!), the Proline 2500s, certain Grados, or the Zu cable on HD650s; the CD3000s were difficult for me though I liked them, and even my beloved K1000s and ER4Ps seem harsh with certain music. I also don't find treble roll-off nearly as troublesome (SE 530s) as many do. A DIY friend was even going to build me a little filter gadget, but we never got around it it. I never wondered if this trait has anything to do with being a woman, but as this thread brought it up, it now has me curious.

I stand corrected. After doing some research, it does appear that many studies have shown, as early as infancy, that females generally have better hearing and that there are some tiny but measurable anatomical differences in the inner ear. It's still unclear, however, what the cause might be, and there's no evidence that the difference is even adaptive. It could simply be a byproduct of some other process. Men and women are obviously different, but from a human biological view these differences tend to be pretty small (i.e., there's a lot more variation within the genders than between genders) -- the environment and social pressures tend to greatly exaggerate these differences so that we perceive them as being much bigger than as they really started out.

First of all, "race" is a meaningless, invalid term that no reputable scientist uses any more. It's not a PC thing, it's just that decades of study have demonstrated that no such monolithic groups exist (at least in biology -- society is another matter). Second, you may want to be careful, as you're veering dangerously close to the scientific world's most overrated* "embarassing pervy uncle who makes everybody uncomfortable at parties": http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h...iqNogD8SC14GO0 ,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle2677098.ece

* "Overrated" because his Nobel-winning "discovery" was one of those scientific milestones that was inevitable (based on the collective work that everybody was engaging in at the time, as well as the development of new technologies) and he happened to get there first (by standing on the shoulder of both giants and contemporaries he exploited like Rosalind Franklin). If he and Crick hadn't made the double helix discovery when they did it would have been done soon thereafter anyway, likely in a matter of weeks. Watson simply happened to be in the right place at the right time, and has milked one overly-dramaticized discovery for a lifetime of reward.

Women have "trigger" words that subconsciously trigger a defensive reaction such as the word "fat".

Nonsense. There's still significant controversy on the subject, and even physical anthropologists can't agree on the validity of a biological origin for race.

Either way though, many scientists have just abandoned the term race and it's association with racial discrimination based on junk science and the absurd monolithic group model for "population clusters" and "clines". Oddly enough, those tend to geographically correlate rather well with the old definition of race...

Not many but the vast majority have abandoned the term. And anthropologists have generally agreed for many years now that race has no biologicial validity. For example, see this statement from the American Anthropological Association, the world's largest organization of anthropology professionals: http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm
Of course, there are still some anthropologists who nevertheless insist on using the term, but there are also some who insist on searching for Sasquatch.

As for "population clusters" and "clines", it's not just semantics (i.e., scientists didn't just replace a tainted word with more inocuous ones). Sure some correlate with old racial stereotypes, but only for that particular trait being examined (such as skin color, or eye shape, or hair type). It's not just the word "race" that died in the eyes of science several years ago (and its odious social misuses), but the concept of forced over-simplification of a vast set of highly variable traits and adaptations that the term defined.