When separating men and women based on gender, most people do so based on physical appearance. Did you ever think you could tell if someone is a man or a woman based on their psyche? Psychological gender differences have a long history dating back more than a century. The use of psychological research on women began in 1879 which also marks the beginning of formal psychology. Any research conducted in these years was mostly based on the idea that the white male was supreme over all others. This belief is a gender stereotype and children develop their own gender-based beliefs about these things. I believe children should develop their gender-based beliefs through studies that are unbiased and do not favor one gender over another. During the early years of psychological research, many believed that the brains of a male and a female were different as well as their physical appearance in selected areas. . The most popular argument was that women had smaller heads and brains than males, that brain size was a direct indicator of intelligence, and that therefore women must be less intelligent than men. (Hyde, 1990, p.56) The argument overlooked the fact that brain size is related to body size. Helen Thompson Woolley rejected the brain size argument by stating, “It is now a generally accepted belief that the smaller gross weight of the female brain has no other significance than that of the smaller average size of the female.” (Hyde, 1990, p.57) During these years, only a meager amount of research could be found that used actual psychological methods to determine gender differences. The new phrase in research on gender differences was the use of mental tests and the creation of standardized methods. skill tests. French p...... half of the document ...... more competent and women tend to be more helpful in situations that present little danger and feel more competent in an educational role. The way we conduct research and our findings over the past century have come a long way from naive beliefs about the mental abilities of women compared to men. Before the meta-analysis was conducted, studies always concluded that there were no gender differences in general intelligence, but they favored genders in certain abilities. With the use of meta-analysis, there have been various findings that have shown a small gender difference in cognitive abilities. The meta-analysis also helped Linn and Petersen discover that there were three distinctive spatial abilities: mental rotation, spatial perception, and spatial rooting. Meta-analysis is a great tool for making an unbiased assessment of existing research on cognitive gender differences