The following “links” of the sex differences found in Helen Fisher’s book, The First Sex is the completion
of a project that I started with the essay/chart found below the references.  That essay/chart is called Gender Differences in the
DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, 4th Edition) An Observation From an Evolutionary Perspective.
http://www.evoyage.com/BillsEssays/genderdifferences.htm 
If you click on the chart you will see that I have five columns; two for each sex and one for both. 
If you compare this DSM chart with the First Sex chart you will notice that the sexes/genders are switched. 
My brain is telling me to reverse the DSM chart and have the males on the left and the females on the right side. 
I know that you’re smart enough to do the switch, but it would make a neater package.

MALE

FEMALE

BORN TO TALK

BORN TO TALK

As talking, women have the edge.  Infant girls in the United States often babble more than infant boys.  They begin to speak earlier in childhood. [Hampson and Kimura 1993, pp. 357-400; Halpern 1992] As they grow up, girls use longer utterances, as well as more complex grammatical constructions, such as the passive voice. [Horgan 1975; Shucard, Shucard, and Thomas 1987].  Their speech is smoother.  They make fewer slips of the tongue, omissions, and repetitions, and utter fewer incomplete sentences.  Girls are three to four times less likely to stutter, and more than three times less likely to be dyslexic.  Ibid.; Halpern 1992; Hall 1984].  Far fewer girls require remedial reading. P. 58

Girls like words.  They enjoy word games, riddles, puzzles, making up stories, and talking to grown-ups.  By age twelve, they excel at grammar, punctuation, and spelling and at understanding and remembering what they read. [Maccoby and Jacklin 1974; McGuiness 1976; McGuiness 1985; Martin and Hoover 1987, pp. 65-83]. P. 58.

Boys never catch up.  Girls and women excel at what psychologist call verbal fluency – rapidly finding appropriate works, phrases, or sentences. [Hampson and Kimura 1993]  On average, mature women can list almost twice as many synonyms for common words like sharp or wild.  They can repeat tongue twisters more accurately.  And they can rattle off more works starting with a specific letter.  Although men and women have vocabularies of the same size, men are less able to reach quickly into their memories to find the appropriate words. [Halpern 1992]. P. 58.

Men speak more when they are in a formal group, particularly in a mixed group of men and women.  You have probably noticed this during the question-and-answer part of a public lecture.  Men invariably ask more questions, as well as longer ones.  Psychologists believe that men use more works in public settings, such as conferences and business meetings, to establish, display, or bolster their rank. [Hall 1984; Tannen 1994] p. 59.

Women on the other hand, do more talking at home and when they are with other women – undoubtedly to strengthen connections with family or friends. P. 59.

Men chat more about business, sports, and politics, while women…

…converse more about people. [Mitchell 1981]. But leaving substance aside, in test after test and in culture after culture, women excel on how they construct their sentences, choose their words, and pronounce the little sounds of spoken language.  Women are, on average, more articulate at saying what they say. P. 59. 

The Female Brain for Talking

The Female Brain for Talking

[Distinguishing sounds]  We size up a person’s verbal message by listening to the cadence, the lilt, the inflection, the pitch, the music of his or her worlds….Baby girls listen more intently to music.  They also pay greater attention to people’s voices. McGuinness and Pribram 1979]. P. 60.

Larger Brain Areas Are Better for Language Skills

Larger Brain Areas Are Better for Language Skills

Women use both sides of the cerebral cortex for talking because they can.  As discussed in chapter 1, neuroscientists now think that the corpus callosum, the tissue bridge that connects the two brain hemispheres, bulges in one or more sections toward the rear in women while it is more evenly cylindrical in men. [Lacoste-Utamsing and Holloway 1982, pp. 1431-32;
Witelson 1989, pp. 799-835; Allen et al. 1991, pp. 933-42; Holloway et al. 1993, pp. 481-98. p. 60

Estrogen: The Mother Lode for Language

Estrogen: The Mother Lode for Language

Estrogen builds more dendritic projections or spines on each nerve, thereby increasing the number of connecting links between nerve cells.[Gould, Wooley, and McEwan 1991, pp. 67-84; Wooley et al. 19990, pp. 4035-39; Frankfurt 1994; Toran-Allerand 1986, pp. 175-211; See McEwans 1994, pp. 1-18; see Nyborg 1994.]  Hence estrogen facilitates the flow of information among neurons. P. 62.

+

A woman’s capacity to pronounce words increases during her monthly menstrual cycle when estrogen levels peak. [Halpern 1992]. P. 62.

Due to patterns of inheritance and complex bodily interactions, however, this gene or cluster of genes is silence in all men but active in about 50 percent of women.  This explains, Skuse writes, why “males are substantially more vulnerable to a variety of developmental disorders of speech, language impairment and reading disability.” [Skuse et al. 1997, p. 707]. P. 62

Baby Talk

Baby Talk

Fathers use some of the same vocal techniques. So psychologist Anne Fernald of Stanford University argues that this suite of stereotypic vocal patterns is universal to human parenting, and that it evolved from the musical signals of lower primates.[Fernald 1992]. 63.

Because infants are more sensitive to higher-pitched sounds, mothers naturally compensate by speaking in a higher voice. [Hendricks 1998, pp. 12-19]. Mothers also speak slowly and smoothly and use a singsongy, wide tonal range. The point: to be conspicuous.  This exaggeration helps the baby to distinguish the mother’s voice from all the other surrounding sounds. P. 63.

Fathers spend far less time caring for infants, however.  In a survey of 186 societies done by the Population Council, fathers had “regular close relationships” with their infants in less than 2 percent of them [See Bruce et al. 1995, p. 51.] p. 63.

Women everywhere in the world spend much more time in direct infant care, holding their babies in front of their faces hour after hour, cajoling, soothing, reprimanding, and educating their young – with words. As they interact, mothers are more verbal than fathers are. [See Small 1998]. P. 64.

Throughout the centuries of our deep history, mothers who talked to and listened to their babies probably reared more healthy, well-adjusted offspring. These young survived to adulthood to breed themselves.  Thus the steadfast processes of natural selection gradually built into the female brain all of the biological equipment that gives women their linguistic edge. P. 64.

You Tarzan, Me Jane

You Tarzan, Me Jane

[male apes and monkeys] have a more restricted repertoire of growls and roars, aggressive strident sound. [Mitchell 1981; McGuinness 1979]. P. 64.

Women’s voices are more variable, more musical, and more expressive than men’s – traits shared with other female primates. [Hall 1984]. Female apes and monkeys produce a larger array of whimpers, coos, barks, and other middle-range “social” calls…So ancestral women probably acquired the brain circuitry for a somewhat more intricate tonal range even before our ancestors descended from the fast-disappearing trees of East Africa some four million years ago. P. 64.

Words are still humankind’s essential tool for explaining complex phenomena in simple ways.  As we move further into the Information Age, it seems likely that women will have an innate advantage in any career that depends on words – particularly in the communications industries and in all of our educational fields. P. 65.

Media Women

Media Women

Producer Power in Media Land

Producer Power in Media Land

Male producers and commentators generally orchestrate international news coverage on TV. [United Nations 1995; Karl 1995].p. 68.

Because women are so skilled with words, I think they will increasingly fill these middle-level jobs, as well as some of the upper-tier positions in TV land – and shape who million, even billons, of human beings think and act. P. 69.

What Women Want to Watch on Television

What Women Want to Watch on Television

Linda Seger…found that women want to see more diversity and balance on television and in films – including more believable female characters, more lifelike partnerships between women and men, and more complex dramas.[Seger 1996]  These tatest reflect women’s contextual view.  Women are also more likely than men to prefer musical and dance events. [Seger 1996] (This book was published in 1999 – one of the most popular shows in 2008 is “Dancing With the Stars” ). P. 69.

The Writing Trade

The Writing Trade

As women’s written words filter into the minds of billions of people around the world, women are exercising a new form of feminine leadership and power – and giving the educated public a more contextual, holistic, diversified view of every issue on their minds. P. 72

Gossip Columnists

Gossip Columnists

Men gossip, too, of course.  But boys and men speak more about sports stars, politicians, or themselves…while girls…p.72.

Women love to gossip, perhaps because this intimate word-filled pastime connects them to their confidantes, making and sustaining ties that women see as power. P. 72.  … while girls and women talk more about friends, enemies, and lovers.  Women also not and discuss many more of the nuances involved in social interactions. [Western 1996; Tannen 1990; Tierney 1998, p. 14.]. p.72.

Whatever you think of female gossip, it has distinguished history as well as vital social uses.  Long before television or radio, before the telephone, before the typewriter or fountain pen, even before written language, women politicked with words.  With their whisperings, women glued friendships, exposed philanderers, undermined cheaters, criticized laggards, galvanized followers, swayed leaders, convinced doubters, ridiculed pretenders, honored Good Samaritans, ostracized criminals, set moral standards, and spread the daily news.  Women used words to include, persuade, educate, and punish. P. 73.

Women were undoubtedly our gossip columnists and social commentators a million years ago, subtly broadcasting to all around them what was doing in the neighborhood.  Gossip was humanity’s social glue.  British anthropologist Robin Dunbar believes that gossip was so crucial to our earliest forebears that it spurred the evolution of human language. [Dunbar 1996]. P. 73.

Author and New York Times columnist John Tierney believes these women have an impact, too.  As he says, “As women gain status in society and the media, they are using their gossip expertise to enforce the rules that men preferred to ignore.” [Tierney 1998, p. 14]. P. 74.