I thought this was really amusing. A long piece on the way in which men and women seem to listen to music in different ways.

Earlier this week, the co-ordinator of the BBC’s popular music coverage across TV and radio, Lesley Douglas, ventured an opinion on this very subject. Appearing on Radio 4’s Feedback programme to defend recent changes to BBC 6 Music, she explained that many of the changes, such as the addition of more “personality” DJs, were instigated to entice female listeners. There was, she argued, “no reason why women shouldn’t love music as much as men” and further explained: “What was true is that for its first five years the audience [for 6 Music] was very, very male biased. For a station that has music at its heart, it is only right to make it more open to female listeners. It’s partly how you talk about music. For women, there tends to be a more emotional reaction to music. Men tend to be more interested in the intellectual side: the tracks, where albums have been made, that sort of thing.”

That’s really rather a sexist way of looking at things: all men do this, all women do that? Fortunately, the author of the piece takes matters a step futher:

Broadly speaking, I suspect that women and men do respond to music a little differently. Naturally there are millions of exceptions: I know plenty of women who are obsessive collectors of vinyl, and I once dated a man who owned only three albums, two of which were by Jewel. But, by and large, men more often adhere to the High Fidelity model of music appreciation: completist and competitive, as if you score more league table points for knowing the greatest amount of trivia about a band and owning all of its releases - even the Japan-only 7in singles and the flexidiscs. Women, on the other hand, are perfectly at ease with the idea of falling madly in love with one song, and never feeling the need to vacuum up the artist’s entire back catalogue.

It’s that millions of exceptions part that needs explaining really. Yes, men do tend to one side, women tend to the other, but there are enough who don’t conform to the haplotype stereotype to make us very unsure about whether it is actually true. But think of those two descriptions of reactions to music. “Completist” is very similar to the idea we call here systemizing. That womens’ reaction is not far away from empathizing. And this gives us the conceptual tool to understand th different reactions and the variations from it. Just as with the results of our EQSQ personality tests, based as they are on Simon Baron Cohen’s ideas.

There’s a continuum of brain types, from that completist of systemizing type to the empathizing. Men tend to be at the first end and women at the second, but there are some 17% of women at the more usual male end and vice versa.

If we are to cautiously agree that women are more at ease with discussing emotions, and therefore more comfortable with the idea of embracing their emotional response to music, then it is logical to assume that the songs which aim for the emotional jugular might appeal more to women than to men. How else to explain James Blunt? This is not to say that men do not have an emotional response to music, rather that the emotion is expressed differently. In Nick Coleman’s excellent article about how his partial hearing loss has affected his relationship with music, published in G2 yesterday, he wrote that he had always heard music three-dimensionally, architecturally: “I think music was the structure in which I learned to contain and then examine emotion.” I would further suggest that the framework of music appreciation, the lists and the cataloguing, the trivia and the multiple copies of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, gives men another kind of structure through which to examine their emotions.

It does all rather fall into place when you put it into the context of the EQSQ theories, doesn’t it? Even to the point of a man thinking about music three-dimensionally, a known characteristic of the male type (or systemizing) brain being better spatial awareness and manipulation.