Introduction. Very few studies have examined the neuropsychological performance of HIV-positive women, and even fewer have attempted a comparison of cognitive functioning by gender. The aim of this study was to describe the nature of the neuropsychological performance of HIV seropositive patients by gender. Methods. A clinical sample made up of 151 subjects was recruited to participate in this study. All of the subjects underwent the same assessment process, consisting of a neuropsychological evaluation and an interview to gather sociodemographic, toxicological, and clinical data. Results and Discussion. Despite the fact that men obtained higher scores in visual memory, attention/psychomotor speed, and abstract reasoning/verbal intelligence, these differences were not statistically significant. In contrast, significant differences were found depending on subjects’ serological status. Seropositive participants’ neuropsychological performance was significantly lower than that of the seronegative participants in all of the areas assessed as follows: (1) visual memory; (2) attention/psychomotor speed; (3) abstract reasoning/verbal intelligence; (4) verbal memory for texts; (5) verbal memory for digits and words. Conclusions. The results from this study reveal no significant gender differences in the cognitive performance of patients infected with HIV-1. 1. Introduction From a scientific standpoint, women have traditionally been underrepresented in biomedical and psychological research [1]. This has also been the case in studies done on the neurological consequences of HIV-1, in which the majority of research to date has been carried out with all-male samples [2, 3]. Although this tendency has begun to change in recent years, there is still only a limited number of studies which examine neuropsychological aspects of seropositive women, or which compare the cognitive functioning of seropositive patients by gender [4, 5]. As a consequence, we still know very little about the neuropsychological consequences of the HIV-1 virus for seropositive women. The scarce information which is available does not shed much light on the question; contradictory results have been found regarding the existence of differences in neuropsychological functioning between seropositive and seronegative women [6, 7]. For instance, Mason et al. [8] found differences between HIV-infected and noninfected women in the areas of psychomotor speed, verbal memory, and attention. In contrast, other researchers did not find such differences [9, 10]. Durvasula et al. [6] found differences between
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