It's probably far more a nurture thing that nature, but it seems to me that the big difference between men and woman is that men tend to communicate more with the purpose of exchanging information and finding solutions. Women on the other hand, tend to communicate more in order to validate themselves emotionally. It's the difference between men asking, earnestly "am I right?", and women asking, implicitly "please make me feel good about what I already want to believe" obviously, if the latter is what you're working with, you're going to tend to want to reinforce only what you know intuitively, and since all of us, having been brain washed to accept the state without much critical thought, our ability to reprogram our minds depends heavily on our ability to use "out-of-the-box" thinking. It follows that the less willing we are to honestly discuss ideas and think freely, the more likely we are to never have our minds changed. Again, I need to point out that I'm not implying out a physiological impairment in women. Rather, I tend to think of women as victimized by a culture that pushes them toward meekness, histrionics and unbalanced priorities. I've met women as open-minded as practical as any man that I know, they just happen to be rarer. What I do notice though is that each of these enlightened women, unsurprisingly, have female role-models with roughly the same values.