Why stereotypes usually true...

[stormlord]

There's a stereotype that woman aren't good at math. Of course, woman are every bit as good at math as men are, but somehow far more men end up in engineering and mathematical disciplines. I think an explanation that's as good as any is girls growing up don't perceive math to be a female-reinforcing thing. It's kind of like how guys won't wear dresses or the color pink. So they lose interest and turn their focus on something else.

Here's a look that explores the topic of differences in the brain between genders:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/life/me...ent-brains.htm

I remember reading one study where grey/white matter was different in the genders....

Here:
http://www.livescience.com/3808-men-...fferently.html

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Psychology professor Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine led the research along with colleagues from the University of New Mexico. Their findings show that in general, men have nearly 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence compared with women, whereas women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence compared to men.

"These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior," said Haier, adding that, "by pinpointing these gender-based intelligence areas, the study has the potential to aid research on dementia and other cognitive-impairment diseases in the brain."

The results are detailed in the online version of the journal NeuroImage.

In human brains, gray matter represents information processing centers, whereas white matter works to network these processing centers.

The results from this study may help explain why men and women excel at different types of tasks, said co-author and neuropsychologist Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico. For example, men tend to do better with tasks requiring more localized processing, such as mathematics, Jung said, while women are better at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions of the brain, which aids language skills.
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