Are Men from Mars and Women from Venus?

Updated June 12, 2006.

Oct 2000

Researchers from Brigham Young University and Stanford wanted to investigate whether men really are from Mars and women really are from Venus, and they found, at least among depressed individuals, that the answer is a resounding no -- both genders are from Earth.

The images of a depressed woman pining for a lost love or a hardy man weakened with self-doubt after a career nose dive are common ones, universalized by popular literature like John Gray's series Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand.

Similarly, many psychologists have proposed differences between men and women in communication style, values and vulnerability to depression. This approach includes the presumption that depressed women are more concerned about relationship problems and feelings, whereas depressed men are more self-critical about work or achievement related problems.

In a study published in the October 2000 issue of the Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy, BYU's Diane Spangler and Stanford's David Burns prove that notion false, showing that worries about being unloved or being a failure are standard human concerns, not gender concerns. The researchers are calling for more research to tear down the wall between genders they believe has been built by previous, unscientific psychological and popular literature.

"There has been a lot of this gender-differentiating stuff floating around in the professional literature for a while, and now you're seeing it spill over into the popular culture," said Spangler, assistant professor of clinical psychology at BYU.

"Of course our work is limited to depressed individuals, but hopefully it will be a part of a growing movement to debunk gender stereotypes. If different researchers explore it in their own areas of expertise it will be much more difficult to hold these assumptions. Then hopefully that will leak out into the lay literature and reach those who really need to hear it -- everyday people."

Spangler and Burns studied 427 individuals suffering from clinical depression, a condition which affects an estimated 16% percent of the U.S. population sometime during their lifetime. They measured the degree to which the study participants were "dependent" or "perfectionist." Using a state-of-the-art statistical tool called structural equation modeling, the researchers repeatedly found no correlation between the gender of patients and the level of dependency or perfectionism they suffered from.

"Depressed women and men do not differ in levels of dependency or perfectionism, and both ... depressed women and depressed men present to therapy with dependent and perfectionistic concerns to similar degrees," the researchers wrote.

"The results of the study reflect my own clinical practice treating many depressed men and women for 25 years," says Burns, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Stanford School of Medicine. "Men and women have voiced similar concerns and shown similar vulnerabilities for the most part. Men and women both get profoundly disturbed by rejection, disapproval, or feeling alone and abandoned. But these are stereotypically 'women's concerns.' This never made much sense to me, based on my clinical practice, and now the research has supported those clinical impressions. Women and men are also both vulnerable to beating up on themselves when they fail or make a mistake or when they are not as good as they think they should be."

The editor of the Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy called the study "the most sophisticated analysis of data" on the issue of dependency and perfectionism in depression.

"(Spangler and Burns) found that men and women get depressed over the same things -- that is, both achievement and relationship issues -- in the same proportions," said Robert Leahy, who is also director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy in New York City and a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College. "Moreover, they found that men and women get better for the same reasons. I guess we can say that men and women are both from the same planet -- Earth."

Spangler grows visibly miffed when discussing the fact that therapists have been fed the notion that patients' levels and types of depression may be gender-specific.