ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Stinky Socks May Bother Women More Than Men. “In research published in 2002 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, Pamela Dalton of the Monell Chemical Senses Center and her colleagues exposed men and women to smells in the laboratory. Not just once, but over and over again. Dr. Dalton and her team found that with repeated exposure, the women’s ability to detect the odors improved 100,000-fold: the women were able to detect the odor at a concentration 1/100,000th of the concentration they needed at the beginning of the study. But the male subjects, on average, showed no improvement at all in their ability to detect the odor.”