The distances between the matrices for males and females are shown in Figure 9, they are about the same size as the differences between the initial and final matrices in the each of the sexes individually. This, taken with the MDS results shown above is by far the most important result of the analysis: the precise parallelism of male and female MDS trajectories with the consistent difference in distance between the corresponding male and female covariance ages. The fact that male covariance values are larger than the female covariance values after age 18 (see Figure 5) cannot be a complete explanation for this.
