Lefties and Righties

As a left handed women, I found the following interesting.

Q. Is left-handedness less common in women?

A. Studies of Western populations usually find that left-handedness is somewhat less common in women, but perhaps because left-handedness is hard to define, the difference varies by several percentage points.

One large study in 1971 used a standard called the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory, which asks which hand is used for different tasks, and found that 90 percent of women were right-handed, as against 86 percent of men. But a smaller 1988 study using the same inventory found no significant difference by sex, and a large Internet study done for the BBC for another purpose found sex differences that varied by ethnic group.

Anthropologists’ studies of traditional cultures in Africa and elsewhere found a wide range of differences, from no left-handed women at all to levels approximating those in Western studies.

Some researchers have suggested that the trend for more men to be left-handed is not universal or may be affected by social norms, with left-handed men stubbornly clinging to left-handedness while left-handed women are more easily persuaded to join the majority.

Reasons suggested for rates of left-handedness that differ by sex include an innate difference in the structure of the hemispheres of the brain; effects of a gene or genes; prenatal hormonal influences, especially that of testosterone; or some other process in the womb. Link