I’ve been sitting on this topic for a while. 

*clears throat* Men don’t listen… or perhaps they don’t listen well.

 I’ve had communication struggles with the male-bodied since I made my Earth debut. From my father to male-bodied sexual partners, to advisors and friends, to people taking my order via a drive-through intercom. The variety in the nature of these relationships makes me think, ok it’s not specific to romance, to authority, to familiarity… It’s specific to organs. Organs that are sex-specific and the hormones said organs affect. Throughout my academic training, I have observed sex-differences in multiple systems; the hypothalamic-pituatary-adrenal axis is an excellent example if your looking for one. (Shame-free plug for one of my pubbies: Relevance of Sex-Specific Metabolic Phenotypes in Diagnosis and Treatment of Mood Disorders and PTSD | Psychiatric Annals (healio.com) Henry et al., 2022. Yea it’s giving that, first author big purr.)

Hennyways, based on my anecdotal evidence, I expected to observe the same in auditory processing because communication with cis- het- males is truly a tempestuous affair. (An aside, being attracted to men is embarrassing for me but I can’t fight it.)

So why is it like this? I don’t have all the answers but let me define two terms for the readership before I offer some peer-reviewed science. 

Harmonic encoding: the neural encoding of sound to translate auditory sensation and perception. 

Robustness: the capacity of an organism to withstand (tolerate) mutations and show no phenotype or compromised viability. 

There are differences in timing and harmonic encoding between males and females across multiple species.The female encoding of acoustic components speech are earlier and more robust than that of males. This helps explain why there is a higher incidence of language impairment in males than females because males have a higher incidence of subcortical deficits associated with language impairments and other disorders i.e. dyslexia (Krizman et al., 2012). 

When and how does this happen? Well, the majority of physiological differences appear after puberty which centers hormones as a source for these differences (Krizman et al., 2019). A notable experiment done by the Moyer group at USC back in the 90s in rats helps demonstrate this. Female rats that were ovariectomized (SNIP-SNIP) have a later (slower) response time to sound compared to that of intact females. The response time differences are rescued (disappear) with estrogen administration! This supports the roles of hormones, specifically estrogen, in sex differences of auditory processing (Coleman et al., 1994). 

What does all this mean? Females are physiologically favored with infrastructure for response to sound and neural perceptions of sound.  What is the resolve? Do we start administering estrogen to males? Lol- probably not, it would cause broad dysregulation. The reality is some people listen better than others and you just have to find someone who makes you feel heard. 

Cheers, 

Stef