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In her book The Female Brain, neuroscientist Louann Brizendine suggests that one of the most significant factors about the kind of career a woman chooses is her hormones.

Women have much more of the hormone estrogen than do men. Estrogen results in making us feel more concerned about relationships, and heightens emotional sensitivity. Says Brizendine: “[A]s estrogen floods the female brain [in the teen years], females start to focus intensely on their emotions and on communication – talking on the phone and connecting with girlfriends and the mall …[their reality is] dictated by communication, connection, emotional sensitivity, and responsiveness.”

Conversely, men have much more of the hormone testosterone than do women. Testosterone results in making us feel more competitive and sexually hungry. Says Brizadine: “[A]s testosterone takes over the male brain [in the teen years], boys grow less communicative and become obsessed about scoring – in games, and in the backseat of the car.”

As a result of these two differences, “at the point when boys and girls begin deciding the trajectories of their careers [again, in their teen years], girls start to lose interest in pursuits that require more solitary work and fewer interactions with others, while boys can easily retreat alone to their rooms for hours of computer time.”

Because of this, says Brizendine, women tend towards jobs that involve greater interaction (women talk an average of 20,000 words a day*) while men do not require jobs that involve as much interaction (men talk an average of 7,000 words a day*). If this is true, I think this provides some insight as to why there are far more men than women in programming; as with many engineering and math–related jobs, programming can be pretty solitary work.

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A final note: Having read Brizendine’s book, one might be inclined to presume that the better part of everything we do in life is the direct result of hormones. And that the solution to many of life’s problems can be resolved by simply becoming more conscious of how we as males and females act, from a fundamental biochemical perspective.

Though our biological makeup has an effect on the way we engage with life – it conditions, for instance, how aggressive, sexual, emotional, and communicative we are – life’s problems certainly go deeper than mere gender. By the sole fact that I am male, this may indeed contribute to my ineptitude at picking up on important signals that my wife is sending my way, but perhaps not exclusively. Perhaps it is the case that I subscribe to norms or ideals (learned from society, my parents, or religion) that prevent me from picking up on her signals as well.