Others: Multiple Math Intelligences should be considered as well, when pondering the abilities to think mathematically.

People who say that the observed gender disparity in Science and Mathematics is exclusively due to discrimination and socialisation experiences (extreme nurture) are wrong. The fact that people with autism reliably gravitate to areas of Study and Careers where complaints of gender bias are loudest…is too much of a coincidence. I cannot accept what Ben A. Barres says, because the same argument must be applied to autistic people as well…that autistic peoples Subject/Career choice, which inversely mirrors the typical non-autistic pattern (fewer women are autistic) is also due to discrimination and extreme nurture. However, autism is mainly genetic.

I favour a mixture of bias/discrimination/mild nurture and genetics. That both extremes of opinion are not mutually exclusive but are both correct and should be combined…

…I read post 101. by JB, who wrote of young woman who left two other courses before earning a degree in computer science. Her reluctance to finish her other courses was due to the poor social skills of her (mostly male) classmates that upset her. I run a social group for adults with AS/autism. Women have attended the group on occasion, none returned. The members have few or no social skills, they talk about their hobbies ignorant of the listener’s disinterest and they are very in your face, when you say something wrong they say that your wrong. They, despite ther best efforts, have no idea that other people have emotions. It is not a surprise that women never returned to my Asperger group, or subjects/careers where AS is common.

However, Spelke does say:
“… Sex differences emerge on more complex quantitative tasks. In most studies, these differences begin during or after elementary school and grow larger with increasing age … cognitive tasks that show sex differences … typically can be solved in multiple ways, and men and women tend to favor different solution strategies … for example …

In navigation tasks presenting both landmark and geometric information … women tend to rely more on the former and men on the latter …

In visual comparison tasks presenting two objects at different orientations, men are more apt to form an image of one object and turn it around in their minds to align it with the other (i.e., mental rotation), whereas women are more apt to compare features of the objects. …

in solving mathematical word problems on speeded tests … When a problem can be solved either by verbal computation or by spatial imagery, males are more apt to use the latter …

The gender gap on tests of mathematical reasoning is narrowed when all students are encouraged to use the spatial strategy …”.

The question that comes to mind is:

Why would males tend to use spatial strategies and females landmark feature strategies,
even though both sexes have equivalent core ability to do spatial and landmark feature tasks,
with the difference becoming more pronounced after elementary school?

When I read Spelke’s paper, I did not see an answer to that question, so here is my naive guess:

For the bulk of the population relevant to the studies (USA in the past few decades) as children grow from elementary school to high school and college, there have been sex-related cultural differences:
females (on the average) pay more attention to details of appearance and so become more likely, given a choice, to see things in landmark feature terms;
while
males (on the average) play more ball (and recently, spatial video games) and so become more likely, given a choice, to see things in spatial terms.

In short, my opinion is that the sex differences seen in strategy selection are due to cultural influences.

Since the strategy selection difference is the only significant sex difference observed related to math/physics ability, and since I think that the strategy selection is due to culture (nurture, not nature), my opinion remains that there are no innate gender differences relevant to math/physics ability.

Tony Smith
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/

I think that there is a mental phenomena that is probably common to many people who do creative work, and that is the ability of the mind to develop sophisticated subsystems which operate autonomously or on “automatic pilot”. Trivial mechanisms of this are at work all the time in most people: the catchy music that plays over and over in your mind, or Mel Gibson’s mental anti-semitic tape loop that played continuously in his mind and which finally got dumped in public by alcohol. Mathematics requires a vast workspace in the mind with fast short term memory function. (I know this, because after a long period of ill health I was having problems with short term memory and had great difficulty, before recovery, even reading my own old notes because I just couldn’t load the big picture into my short term memory.) Who hasn’t, while struggling with a difficult proof, not been able to turn off that workspace at bed time? It seems to keep operating on its own with little or no conscious intervention (If this is a problem, a little red wine before bed time may help shut it down.) I’ll bet that similar, but not necessarily identical, mechanisms are at work in many musicians, composers, and some visual artists and physicists. (comments please!). It seems to me that creativity, especially of the type that involves a lot of intricate structure, requires this kind of well oiled machinery that can work almost on its own. Clearly, schizophrenia involves some sort of autonomous mental systems: the fictional people who appeared in John Nash’s hallucinations were being invented by some subsystem of his brain that was operating almost entirely autonomously. Should all of these phenomena be seen as identical? No. Obviously some of it is destructive and some of it has a lot of value. I’m guessing that what we are looking at here is another evolutionary compromise, or risk, in which the brain is endowed with the ability to let loose these autonomous systems which in some cases can become destructive, but without which spectacular advances in thought, music, etc., would never have come about.

Experiments in rats have shown that castrated rats are less agressive than non castrated rats. If you administer testosterone to the castrated rats they become as aggresive as their non castrated colleagues.