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When I looked into this a lot, looking into all sorts of data, reading tons of stuff, my conclusions were: 1. Women are generally more conscientious and studious. I've seen data they do more homework, get better grades, even in math, and are more likely to make the honor roll.
2. The more difficult the math test, and the higher the score bracket, the more men outscored women. Average SAT score for men was only a little higher. But among those scoring 800, men outnumbered women two-to-one (this has changed a bit, but they have also made the math test a lot easier, far more testers get an 800 math than get an 800 verbal). Then when looking at who gets a 100+ on the American Mathematics Competition tests, men dominated by about a 10 to 1 ratio.
3. I have observed throughout life that men seem a lot more likely to "geek out" on stuff -- whether that be coding all night for fun, editing Wikipedia articles, taking apart a mechanical device, trying to beat all the quests in an RPG, etc. This is inline with studies showing men to be much more system oriented. I have a hard time believing this is due to culture messaging because for a lot of these things men receive enormous cultural messaging that they are losers for being such geeks, yet they do it anyway because it is such fun.
4. Men tend to have higher variance in almost all things. More men at the top, more men at the bottom.
5. This Stanford article notes "Men, on average, can more easily juggle items in working memory. " http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b... I think that skill becomes more important the harder a math test becomes, or the harder a programming project is. I think the 1970's style computer punch card programming, which was very corporate, and did not involve as much keeping large complicated systems in working memory, was less prone to creating a gender imbalance. It more favored conscientiousness. Whe computers became available in every household, men were much more prone to geek out and become expert programmers on their own time. This means the pipeline of programmers ends up being much more male dominated. Furthermore, the skills required to be a computer programmer at a top company like Google, require someone from the top percentiles in being able to juggle items in their head, and there are a lot more men in those percentiles than women. I think programming at Google is much more akin to doing well on the AMC than it is to answering an average SAT-level math problem. When we not the disparity in math ability is small, it obscures that the disparity at the very high ends is much larger. |