Adrian,
I don't recall any gender differences in speaker ratings from listening tests at the National Research Council on the few occasions that women were on the listening panel. Also, when Debbie does the blind tests at Axiom, her ratings of good and bad speakers are similar to mine, Andrew's, Ian's, JC's, Brent's and other Axiom employees who participate in the tests.
I think a better way to phrase it is that women retain their high-frequency hearing well into old age, but that may be based on an earlier generation of women who were housewives and didn't work in industrial settings or noisy cities. It might be interesting to see data compiled from tests on younger women in the work force.
It might be a question to pose to Dr. Sean Olive, now chief of psycho-acoustics at Harman. They use lots of male and female listeners in their blind testing at the Harman lab. If any divergence in ranking had been noted there, I'm certain he would have written about it. Sean used to be on the listening panel at the NRC while he was working on his graduate degree.
Purely on an anecdotal basis, which doesn't count for much, I have encountered more than a few women who don't seem to like deep subwoofer bass. I'm not sure why, or whether any researcher has done solid scientific work on that. Perhaps it's an inherited protective thing through evolution, such as protecting children from the threat of earthquakes, eruptions, tsunamis, etc. I'm just speculating, but it's theorized that the fact our hearing is so ultra-sensitive in the midrange is not just because of speech but also in eons past, we needed that as a protective measure to detect intruders (snapping of twigs in the bush and so on) and possible danger.
Alan
