While equal, there are fundamental differences in men and women. There are many studies showing the benefit of mindfulness meditation and its benefit in anxiety, depression, and pain coping.  Very few studies have looked for potential gender differences in the benefit from mindfulness meditation.  This study showed women benefit more from mindfulness meditation than men.  The reasons are thought to be because women in general tend to internalize emotions more than men and women tend to ruminate more than men.

The Research

Women Benefit More Than Men in Response to College-based Meditation Training

Rahil Rojiani^1*†, Juan F. Santoyo^2,3†, Hadley Rahrig⁴, Harold D. Roth^2,5 and Willoughby B. Britton^2,4

• ¹Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA
• ²Contemplative Studies Initiative, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
• ³Department of Neuroscience, Brown University, Providence RI, USA
• ⁴Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Providence, RI, USA
• ⁵Department of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI, USAMethods: Seventy-seven university students (36 women, age = 20.7 ± 3.0 years) participated in 12-week courses with meditation training components. They completed self-report questionnaires of affect, mindfulness, and self-compassion before and after the course.Conclusion: These findings suggest that women may have more favorable responses than men to school-based mindfulness training, and that the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions may be maximized by gender-specific modifications.
• Results: Compared to men, women showed greater decreases in negative affect and greater increases on scales measuring mindfulness and self-compassion. Women’s improvements in negative affect were correlated to improvements in measures of both mindfulness skills and self-compassion. In contrast, men showed non-significant increases in negative affect, and changes in affect were only correlated with ability to describe emotions, not any measures of experiential or self-acceptance.
• Objectives: While recent literature has shown that mindfulness training has positive effects on treating anxiety and depression, there has been virtually no research investigating whether effects differ across genders—despite the fact that men and women differ in clinically significant ways. The current study investigated whether college-based meditation training had different effects on negative affect for men and women.