Why Women Have a Better Sense of Touch

Men apparently can sense less than women, when it comes to touch acuity. One of the main reasons for this, scientists believe, could be the fact that women have, on average, smaller fingertips than men do. In a series of experiments conducted on college students, it was revealed that those with smaller fingers tended to be more responsive to touch sensations than those with larger fingers. The new findings explain why women have a much more keen sense of touch than men do, the experts say.

Details of the new work appear in the December 16 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, ScienceDaily reports. “Neuroscientists have long known that some people have a better sense of touch than others, but the reasons for this difference have been mysterious. Our discovery reveals that one important factor in the sense of touch is finger size,” McMaster University expert Daniel Goldreich, PhD, who has also been one of the authors for the journal entry, says. He explains that more than 100 test participants had their fingertip sizes measured, and were then subjected to the tactile equivalent of the optometrist's eye chart.

The investigation revealed that people with smaller fingertips tended to sense finer details. The test consisted of pressing a material embedded with progressively finer grooves on the stationary finger. Each of the participants had to let the researchers know when they could no longer feel the spaces between the grooves. Those with larger fingertips exited the tests faster than those with smaller ones, who were also most likely to be females, the researchers say.

“The difference between the [genders] appears to be entirely due to the relative size of the person's fingertips. So, a man with fingertips that are smaller than a woman's will be more sensitive to touch than the woman,” Massachusetts General Hospital scientist Ethan Lerner, MD, PhD, adds. He has not been involved in the research. Funding for the new work came from the National Eye Institute and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), in Canada.