The bell rings. People take their seats.

“Alright class, take some notes over this presentation, it’s going to be on the test,” says the teacher. 

I peer over at the girls gripping their pens and scribbling away flawlessly, but the boys are a different story. Most boys I’ve met seem to have terrible penmanship. Unfortunately, their papers (covered in a chaotic whirlwind of loops and squiggles) resemble hieroglyphics more than English letters. Seeing this huge disparity makes me curious. Why do men (usually) have worse penmanship? 

The answer to this intriguing question actually has a scientific answer. 

A 2020 study found that women often have better handwriting than men. This could be because handwriting involves both thinking of what to write and using your hand to write it down. Girls might just be better at both of these things.

But why? Well, different parts of the brain are involved in handwriting. Some help you develop the words, while others control your hand as you write. Women and men might use these parts of their brains differently, which could explain why their handwriting looks different.

To examine this better, researchers studied the brains of men and women of similar ages, education levels, and other skills like reading and thinking while they were writing. During this, they found that there were indeed differences in how their brains worked during this task. 

Researchers found that women’s brains showed less activity in a specific area called Exner’s area when writing, compared to men’s brains. This area is thought to help connect the words you want to write with the movements of your hand. This could mean that women’s brains are more efficient at coordinating their thoughts with their hand movements during writing.

Researchers also discovered that when men wrote, there was a stronger connection between Exner’s area and the cerebellum, a different region of the brain that controls movement and balance in muscles. This higher correlation raises the likelihood that men’s brains have a more direct motor control pathway when writing. This may suggest that when writing, men rely more on their motor control systems.

So keep in mind that scientific reasoning is real the next time you see a girl with flawless handwriting sitting next to a guy with sloppy handwriting. Women’s brains require less effort for motor control during writing because they are more skilled at synchronizing hand movements with thoughts. The way their brains are wired may facilitate more natural and effective penmanship.