[SamReidHughes]

I don't buy this because among my friends, all sorts of boys did technical stuff or had technical interests. In elementary school the only kids that checked out books on machines or science stuff from the library were boys. And this was starting in 2nd grade, the books were about construction equipment or feats of bridge building. It was in at least two cases, me and one friend, obviously self-generated interest. Also in 2nd grade, we had a teacher who was a bit crazy and decided to turn the classroom into a set of autodidactic learning paths that students could take on their own volition, with little oversight. I remember one kid being super-excited about getting through the math stuff and learning exponents. Of course it was a boy. Many of the girls spent the time writing acrostics about each other.

Though I had a similar theory at one point that math ability was affected by how much you thought about math before puberty. The relative abilities of my classmates went through a reshuffling in that period.