And for that matter, is this even true? I was always told that females were done maturing before males when I was younger and I was wondering if there’s a scientific reason for this if it’s true.
In: Biology
The average ages at which girls go through the various stages of puberty are slightly lower than the average ages at which boys go through them, but it’s not a huge difference, and there is a lot of variation between individuals. I’m not sure anyone knows why this difference exists – puberty is a complicated process and much of it is not fully understood. There have been a number of studies which have found that the age of onset of puberty is actually decreasing over time in various countries – again, it’s not clear why this is, but most people think it probably has to do with changes in nutrition over time. I suppose it’s even possible that the difference between girls and boys is also a culture-specific thing that has to do with male-female differences in diet, exercise, obesity rates, etc.
As for emotional maturity, that’s a very subjective concept, so I don’t think you’re going to reach a clear answer there.
I see you’re already getting a variety of answers suggesting reasons why the difference might be an evolutionary adaptation – please take them with a huge pinch of salt. First of all, it’s very easy to come up with seemingly neat explanations for why some trait evolved the way it did. Often you can think of several equally plausible explanations for the same trait. Working out whether any of them are actually correct is often very difficult. But there’s a deeper problem, because it’s not even clear that this male-female difference *is* an evolutionary trait. It may be a result of environmental factors, or it may be a consequence of how puberty works at a fundamental level – i.e. maybe there is no change that could be made to our genes that would alter the male-female puberty age gap without also altering loads of other things. (if you want an analogy for that last idea: perhaps it would increase our evolutionary fitness if we could shoot lasers out of our eyes, but we’re not going to evolve like that because it would require massive fundamental changes to our biology, not just a few tweaked genes here and there)
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Mammals are female by default, Y chromosomes and testosterone cause males to exist and that comes with side effects.
Probably because a species survives better when the females can reproduce earlier than later. Men of age 12ish all the way until they die can bust nuts so that’s never gonna be a problem.
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