Men dominate the physical sciences and mathematics, with the disparity growing as the subjects get more advanced. The notion that a 15-minute writing exercise c

Men dominate the physical sciences and mathematics, with the disparity growing as the subjects get more advanced. The notion that a 15-minute writing exercise can close this gap strains credulity. For a hard-headed introduction to this subject, I recommend The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Women and men have different cognitive strengths: on average, women are more verbally fluent and are better at inferring emotional states from facial expressions and body language, whereas men are better at spatial rotations and abstract reasoning. Women do better or worse on typically "male" tasks depending on the phase of their menstrual cycles and the corresponding levels of androgens ("male" hormones) in their bloodstreams. Patients undergoing male-to-female sex-change operations do progressively worse on "male" tasks and better on "female" ones as the estrogen therapy progresses, with the opposite effect in female-to-male patients. And so on. While the bell curves substantially overlap, the notion that men and women are cognitively identical is scientifically untenable. Perhaps the continuing disparity in the abstract sciences points to discrimination against women in those subjects. And yet, women make up approximately 56% of college graduates, with men at 44%—a 12-point gap. I find it telling that virtually no one decries this disparity, nor infers from it a systemic anti-male bias in higher education. The authors of these kinds of studies clearly want there to be no gender gap. (The results of this study could reasonably be described as "the 15-minute writing test that boosts female learning and suppresses male learning".) When the political biases of the researchers are so evident, it's difficult to trust the results.