Do You Believe Girls Have Lower Self-Esteem?

Anyone looking for tips on improving their self-esteem must be driven absolutely crazy.  There are so many proposed influencers said to impact your self-esteem, yet so little quality research exists on the topic. 

Previously, factors having an influence on self-esteem have included:

• How you think – we mostly think negatively, change how we think minute-by-minute to improve self-esteem
• How well we know ourselves.  If you don’t know what you believe, value – then how do you live in harmony?
• Being connected to society.  We must come to terms with our relationship and role within society.  It could be that we come to terms with being an outsider or on the fringe – to build higher self-esteem, we must come to some decision on our connectedness with society

Recently, new and controversial research finds that girls are biologically tuned to have lower self-esteem mainly because they are programmed to remember bad things in life while males are programmed to forget past setbacks and negative events in life allowing them to move on without a significant hit on their self-esteem.

The theory is that this programming impacting self-esteem occurrred as a result of roles in the past where men had to continue to hunt and gather no matter how badly the previous day had gone while women were programmed to protect and nurture which by default means they do need to remember past negatives as they may hold information protecting them from future events.

I’m not sure I agree with this finding – to me I’ve seen a mix of boys and girls who have both low and high self-esteem and there are so many other factors that may impact their self-esteem and self-image that it’s too simplistic to say we are simply "programmed"

For instance, just in the people I know would argue that birth order has a great deal to do with self-esteem.  First born tend to have lower self-esteem, are more careful while second born have higher self-esteem often forced into a competitive mindset to get "their share" of attention and rewards.

What do you think?  Have you any experience with either low or high self-esteem you would like to share?  Hit the comment below and let us know.

Jeff