Sex Differences in Personality

How men and women differ across the lifespan

The graph below shows sex differences in the Big 5 personality traits across the adult lifespan. The first five panels show the differences in each of the Big 5 traits in turn; the final panel shows the trajectory of all five traits across adulthood, averaging across the sexes.

The graph comes from a fascinating paper by Petri Kajonius and John Johnson, based on data from a U.S. sample of more than 320,000 participants. Kajonius and Johnson look not only at sex differences in the Big 5 personality traits, but also at differences in the lower-order personality facets that make up those traits. It turns out that although sex differences in several Big 5 traits are modest, hidden within them are much larger sex differences in the personality facets.