[laughinghan]

You are correct that narrowly speaking, it is false to say that "all evidence" points in any one direction.

However, your claim that there is a "overwhelming", "clear scientific consensus" is lacking in citations, your one broken link to what I assume was supposed a scientific study and one link to a pop science blogpost (which links only to other posts on the same blog and not any actual scientific papers) notwithstanding.

In fact the overwhelming scientific consensus is that the opposite is true. Check out this blogpost with working links to 22 different peer-reviewed scientific papers on how social priming can differentially affect how men and women, or white students and black students, etc perform at various academic and cognitive tasks (there are actually 27 links to such papers but 5 are broken; there are also links to 9 more scientific papers besides, just to flesh out the argument): http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/picture-yourself-as-a-s...

I challenge you to find working links to 22 different peer-reviewed scientific papers arguing that women's underrepresentation in STEM is not due to systemic discrimination but is explained wholly by other factors such as innate psychological differences.

In fact, I'll give you a head start. The blogpost I linked to already links to 6 such papers, so if you can find 16 more, I'll concede that maybe there isn't the scientific consensus I thought there was.

[_0ffh]

The scientific consensus is real, it's just not the one you seem to make it out to be. It's about the claim that there are "innate psychological differences" between boys and girls. I did not claim that these differences are solely responsible for 100% of observable statistical variations between genders. To try to ascribe all effects to a single set of causes, be it nature or nurture, is really a fool's errand. The blank slate is out of the window. Humans come into the world primed, and boys and girls are primed differently.

That notwithstanding, I wouldn't think of claiming that societal norms do not at all affect outcomes. Because it would be next to impossible to prove, and I'd give it a rather low a priori probability. Just what these effects really are and how big they are is a matter of ongoing debate. C.f. "The Norway Paradox".

[laughinghan]

As noted by the other reply to GP, even if your links worked and were to actual, peer-reviewed scientific papers, they do little to support the argument that women's underrepresentation in STEM is not due to systemic discrimination. I think it would be an uphill battle for you to argue that they count towards the 16 in my challenge.