[MichaelGG]

It's no different than a guy in the NBA wondering out loud if the bias towards men might have a biological component, so that even if the systemic barriers are removed, we might expect far different than 50/50 female/male in the NBA. But no one thinks that - it's obviously silly because physical attributes are so obvious.

So we'll use Wikipedia as a perfect summary of all the research on this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_intelligenc...

"significantly higher variance in male scores, resulting in more than twice as many men as women scoring in the top 2%."

But certainly that study and all the others are just wrong, or they're measuring the wrong thing and it's not applicable to software.

I dunno, perhaps the ratio should be 45/55 once the systemic bias is removed. Or maybe it's 55/45 - maybe the systemic bias is beyond terrible and males are worse at software and we've got it all backwards. Doesn't seem like there's anything supporting 50/50 other than some weird notion that everyone's not physically equal at all, but somehow our brains are.

[nopatternhere]

I hate the high end examples, because people want to argue them. The case is also true the other way - there are more men at the bottom of the IQ scale. Can someone come up with a reason why an IQ test would make men appear more often in the bottom of IQ distributions?

[Malice]

Because of "significantly higher variance in male scores"

[stagbeetle]

I have no evidence, only speculation, but it could be because boys do not receive the same type of nurture and care growing up compared to girls. As well as, anecdotally, being more likely to engage in dangerous (for the brain) activities and take less care of themselves. The last point manifests itself in many ways, but the most important one I can think of is diet.

Again, this is all conjecture and I don't know how I would go about finding the studies to link it together.