Because I’ve had to answer posts about this twice in two days, I’m going to turn this comment into a full post because men stop making excuses for chauvinism challenge.

Performance and attainment in education and career paths have very little to do with gender differences. Studies attempting to link learning ability to biology get mired in extraneous social variables. Wheras studies that isolate the socialization of gender as a factor have much more consistent results:

In an attempt to explain the link between gender and cognitive performance, research has examined the potential contributions of biology and environment. Although studies have examined whether biological factors such as testosterone exposure and greater brain lateralization are linked to superior mathematical reasoning and reduced verbal ability among males, findings have been inconclusive (Miller and Halpern 2014; Valla and Ceci 2011). Contrasting this are the more consistent findings of the sociocultural impact on gender differences in quantitative and verbal reasoning. Enriched STEM-related learning experiences predict notable STEM accomplishments even among mathematically gifted individuals (Wai et al. 2010). Additionally, parents may shape children’s math expectancies and performance by communicating their own gender-biased beliefs about how girls and boys should perform in math. For example, research has found that parents with stronger gender-math stereotype beliefs (e.g., beliefs that boys are better at math than girls and find math more useful and more important than girls) had higher perceptions of math ability for their sons and lower perceptions of math ability for their daughters. These parental beliefs, in turn, were positively associated with children’s own math ability beliefs (Jacobs and Eccles 1992; Tiedemann 2000a; b).

In addition, several cross-national studies indicate that greater cultural inequities between males and females are associated with larger gaps in mathematical performance favoring males (Else-Quest et al. 2010). Specifically, nations with higher proportions of women enrolled in postsecondary science courses and employed in science careers are less likely to explicitly endorse the stereotype that science is a masculine profession (Miller et al. 2015). These cultural values and beliefs about male/female abilities and roles are communicated to children through prominent adult figures. For example, a meta-analysis found that parental gender stereotypes reflecting male/female roles, interests, and abilities were linked to children’s gender schemas about others and their attitudes about gender occupational roles (Tenenbaum and Leaper 2002). Similar to the sex differences in math performance favoring boys, sex differences in verbal performance favoring girls may be partially derived from parental socialization at young ages. For example, research found that mothers talked more and used more supportive speech with their daughters than their sons (Leaper et al. 1998). In another study using nationally representative data, parents spent more time teaching girls verbal activities, such as reading and storytelling (Baker and Milligan 2013): some of these differences emerged in early childhood and persisted into elementary school. Although these studies did not link these socialization differences directly to cognitive performance, these differential experiences for boys and girls may partially explain why girls are more likely to outperform boys on standardized tests of verbal ability. Therefore, while biological factors cannot be definitively dismissed, sociocultural influences appear more likely to impact gender differences in cognitive ability.

Article about Lyndsey Scott, the girl in the pic.