Media reporting of the research may have put too much emphasis on the differences.

Apparently it’s because of the way our brains are wired that women can socially network with aplomb while men prefer to navigate the road networks instead.

At least that is the interpretation of a scientific study which scanned the brains of 1,000 people.

According to a report from the BBC, male brains appeared to be wired front to back with few connections bridging the two hemispheres, whereas in females the pathways criss-crossed left to right.

From this it is deduced that these findings uphold the gender stereotypes of women being better multi-taskers whereas men are single task driven.

In the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) recently,  men scored well on sensory motor speed and spatial processing, whereas women scored well on attention, face and word memory as well as social cognition.

Researcher Ragini Verma said: “These maps show us a stark difference – and complementarity – in the architecture of the human brain that helps provide a potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks, and women at others.”

The Daily Mail said : “The results are likely to be seen as  supporting the theory behind best-selling pop psychology book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus – that the sexes are as different as alien races.”

But media reporting of the research may have put too much emphasis on these differences.

Oscar Rickett in The Guardian argues that this study is about mental illness and not a piece of pop psychology to prop up any battle of the sexes.

Rickett said: “Often, people feel the need to back up their prejudices or assumptions with any old science they can find. Women, after all, were seen as too hysterical to be allowed the vote, and scientists would be wheeled out to attest to that.”

The Wired too said that the findings had been over simplified and were based on averages.

The article’s author Christian Jarrett said: “These are average differences with a lot of overlap. It’s possible that my male brain is wired more like an average female brain than yours, even if you’re a woman.”

Jarrett goes on the argue that it could be because of society’s tendency to assign different assumptions to the sexes that the wiring has developed this way.

“We know that cultural and societal factors affect how men and women perform on behavioral tasks. Remind people of gender stereotypes and they tend to perform in a way that reinforces them.”