Women are less likely to give up smoking permanently. Women are less successful than men in maintaining long-term cessation in spite of the fact that they are just as likely to try quitting. Women seem to be particularly responsive to nicotine's ability to reduce anxiety. Women believe more that men that it would be hard to go out with friends who smoke after quitting. Some research has even suggested that women are more sensitive to external stimuli, making them more apt to find the distraction-filtering effects of nicotine more useful than men do.
Female smokers seem to show greater psychological reactivity to smoking than do male smokers.
Women report the reduction of negative affect as a primary motive for smoking, whereas men are more often report sensorimotor stimulation and enhanced concentration. Despite reports of women using nicotine to decrease negative affect, studies looking into reports of negative affect after quitting do not show a gender difference. However, this inconsistency may be an artifact of the lack of adequate studies to clearly identify the effects of menstrual cycle phase and gender-specific biases toward certain personalities, occupations, and other sample selection issues. The data on the latter are less conclusive, however. Overall, these findings may be of particular importance to women because both depressive and anxiety disorders occur in women twice as often as in men.