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I just read an article ("Talk in the Intimate Relationship: His and Hers" by Deborah Tannen) for my cultural anthropology class that reminded me of this conversation. It was about differences in communication styles between men and women, claiming that typically, men tend to pay value conversation for its content, while women look for what the author called "meta-content", or the messages that are carried in the tones and implications made during content. What seemed particularly pertinent to our class though was the observation made by the article's author that women and men would remember different aspects of a conversation. For instance, while men were more prone to remember the facts and figures explained in a conversation, women were more apt to remember the relationships between the individuals mentioned in the conversation.
I'm not trying to imply that there is some "natural", "innate" or genetic difference which accounts for this discrepancy in memory abilities between men and women, but it seems probable that in the process of socialization, the emphasis placed on what is "important" for a little girl or a little boy to remember would influence the development of certain neural pathways over others. I wonder what this process might entail, and what the results of a study exploring the difference between the brains of men and women during conversation recollection might look like.