I was always wondering why HIFI is a man's world. When I grew up, we were made to believe that differences between men and women - beside the obvious - are dominated by education.
But when I read the very popular book "Why Men Don't Listen And Women Can't Read Maps" by Allan and Barbara Pease, I found an explanation. Today we know much more about our brain than some decades before. It's a fact that there are fundamental differences in the construction of the brains of women and men. The difference comes from evolution - yes the old story of the man as the hunter and fighter and the woman to control the home to safely grew the children. The man's brain is optimized for hunting. One specialized qualification is the ability to make use of minor differences in sound to find out the exact position of the origin of the sound, it may be a wild animal or a human enemy. Men are able to analyze the sound to find out distance, position and even movement.
Women developed different strengths. They are able to listen to different people talking at the same time. The view of women controls a wide angle, we even have the impression they see what happens behind them. This helps a lot when you are responsible for several children at home.
As we like what we are good in we have different views of music reproduction. We - men - love to be able to identify the position of the all the musicians, the singer in the middle may be 6 ft. tall, the big drum comes way far from the back, and so on. This is HIFI, our hobby. Is it important for the beauty of the music? Not really.
Women enjoy music as much as we do and their ears are very good. They can judge very competent about tonal differences and the Quality of the sound as a whole. But they are simply not interested in our HIFI disciplines.
By the way - the above mentioned best seller explains several phenomena in the never ending battle between men and women, very interesting reading. It does not address our HIFI phenomena, but it gave me the background information to find my personal explanation given above.
