The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter

The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter

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The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter
The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter
Sex Differences in Personality Across Cultures
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Sex Differences in Personality Across Cultures

What a global study reveals about the psychological differences between men and women

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Steve Stewart-Williams
May 21, 2025
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Sex Differences in Personality Across Cultures
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Are sex differences in personality a cultural artifact or a human universal? A new 27-nation study offers fresh answers to this enduring question. With more than 143,000 participants from nationally representative samples, Beatrice Rammstedt and her team examined male-female differences in the Big Five personality traits: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. In this post, I’d like to share three graphs from the preprint of the study - graphs that shed fascinating light on how men and women differ across the globe.


1. The Big Picture: Sex Differences in the Big Five

The first graph shows the overall sex difference for each of the Big Five traits. Women scored higher than men on all five, though the difference wasn’t statistically significant for Extraversion. As with earlier research, the largest sex differences were in Neuroticism and Agreeableness, with effect sizes of d = 0.40 and d = 0.35, respectively.

When all five domains were considered together, the resulting multivariate effect size was a robust MD = 0.67. Although that’s far from trivial, it’s notably smaller than earlier estimates.

Gender differences in scores on the Big Five domains aggregated across the 27 countries investigated. Note. Positive values indicate higher scores on average for women compared with men. Source: Rammstedt et al. (2025).

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