We’ve all heard that during a recession, women buy more lipstick and their hemlines fall. Today, I learned that men react to a recession differently. They hang on to their old holey underwear. It’s easy to understand why cardboard box sales dwindle during a recession, but we generally don’t think of hemlines, lipstick, lingerie, and underwear as economic indicators.

More than economic indicators, they also indicate our gender-based differences. Men and women react differently – not just to recession, but to learning too.

Gender in Adult Learning Environments

I still recall standing in front of a class of PSU engineers-turned-trainers/SMEs working in the Indian steel and power sectors, discussing audience analysis. When I noted gender as a differentiating factor, the only woman in the audience shook her head vehemently. “Gender makes no difference,” she said. “Men and women don’t think differently. Gender difference is a patriarchal construct!”

I remember giving one example after another to illustrate how the experiences of men and women differed, so that when they reach adulthood, their schemas end up having at least some gender-based differences, and that as instructional designers, we need to be aware that such differences may exist and then use that knowledge to build more potent courses.

The point is that, among other things, our gender, too, determines our interactions with our environment, our responsibilities, and even our responses to situations. If only I had studied economics, I could’ve given the underwear vs. lipstick example in class that day (or not, because back then, saying the word “underwear” in class might not have gone well at all.)

As learning content creators, let us move beyond gender-differentiated recession indicators and talk about gender-based differences in learning.

Gender-based Differences in How Children Learn

The article “Debunking Myths that Girls and Boys Learn Differently” is an interview with Prof. Caryl River who says:

gender is really irrelevant. What really matters in the classroom is parent involvement, teacher quality, class size, and of course, social class.

So, if we agree with Prof. Caryl River, kids of both genders have similar brains and will learn similarly. I think she’s somewhat right, for kids a certain age…but the impact of the environment continuously molds our brains, making us different from others – and one of these factors is gender.

Gender-based Differences in How Adults Learn

And this article by Bruce Goldman in “Neurobiology | Spring 2017“, based on research done at Stanford, is about the cognitive differences between the brains of men and women. The article paraphrases Dr. Diane Halpern as follows.

Women excel in several measures of verbal ability — pretty much all of them, except for verbal analogies. Women’s reading comprehension and writing ability consistently exceed that of men, on average. They out­perform men in tests of fine-motor coordination and perceptual speed. They’re more adept at retrieving information from long-term memory.

Men, on average, can more easily juggle items in working memory. They have superior visuospatial skills: They’re better at visualizing what happens when a complicated two- or three-dimensional shape is rotated in space, at correctly determining angles from the horizontal, at tracking moving objects and at aiming projectiles.

Incidentally, in my class, I sometimes toss candies to the participant whose attention is on the verge of wandering. The participant obviously doesn’t expect a projectile to come hurtling toward them – but in every instance, men have caught the candy, and women have missed it. I’ve done this at least twenty times so far, and the results remain unchanged. So I vouch for men being good at tracking moving objects.

Per this study (and my own experiences with adult learners), the brains of men and women are somewhat different, so we must keep their differences in mind while creating content for them.

Why Does the Human Brain Evolve Differently for Men than for Women?

But then, assuming that both Dr. River and Dr. Halpern are correct, what happens between childhood and adulthood that makes the human brain evolve differently for men and women? The answer is simple, and you know it already. As infants, girls and boys may have no gender-based leanings but as they grow up, girls and boys do different things, play different games, get different toys, and are exposed to different societal constructs. Thus, the schemata of girls develop differently from boys – and by the time they become adults, certain gender-based differences have already settled in.

Let us now put a lid on this discussion, agree to keep gender as an important demographic factor while creating content, and return to the starting point.

During a recession, women turn conservative (lower hemlines) but spend more on lipstick and lingerie (possibly to help bring cheer to an otherwise gloomy situation). Men, on the other hand, stop spending on their underwear. (The Atlantic.)

Can you now tell why?

The Atlantic Article: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/09/recession-indicator-meme/684376/

Image Credits: Google Gemini