Let's start with some facts. FACT: Men and women have significant, measurable neurological differences[1]. FACT: These differences are measurable before birth

Let's start with some facts. FACT: Men and women have significant, measurable neurological differences[1]. FACT: These differences are measurable before birth[2]. FACT: Men and women show large, reproducible differences on average in tests of visuospatial ability, differences that can be mapped back to the brain[3] Men consistently outperform women on spatial tasks, including mental rotation, which is the ability to identify how a 3-D object would appear if rotated in space. Now, a University of Iowa study shows a connection between this sex-linked ability and the structure of the parietal lobe, the brain region that controls this type of skill. The parietal lobe was already known to differ between men and women, with women's parietal lobes having proportionally thicker cortexes or "grey matter." But this difference was never linked back to actual performance differences on the mental rotation test. ... "Differences in parietal lobe activation have been seen in other studies. This study represents the first time we have related specific structural differences in the parietal lobe to sex-linked performances on a mental rotation test," said Tim Koscik, the study's lead author and a graduate student in the University of Iowa Neuroscience Graduate Program. "It's important to note that it isn't that women cannot do the mental rotation tasks, but they appear to do them slower, and neither men nor women perform the tasks perfectly." There are literally thousands more studies of the deep rooted genetic, neurological, and endocrinological differences between the genders on pubmed.org. These differences manifest before birth. And this research is what your tax dollars pay for. It is just young earth creationism to postulate that evolution did not happen, or that biological gender differences do not exist or are somehow disconnected from their real world consequences. One of the consequences is that in any niche which requires cognitive or physical activity, we should not expect an exactly 50/50 distribution of males and females. Interests differ. Abilities differ. The religious outcry against stating these basic evolutionary facts got Larry Summers ousted as the President of Harvard in 2005. You simply cannot state these facts and retain your job. And the irony of all ironies is that those who drove the President of Harvard from power will insist that they are actually the oppressed, rather than the powerful. That's the root of the matter here. The ostensible evil of the term "brogrammer" rests upon the tacit desirability of having a 50/50 distribution of women in programming, which in turn rests upon the presumption that it is even possible to achieve this equality given biological constraints, constraints that are obvious upon a cursory skim of the relevant literature. We are just not blank slates to be blasted clean and remade by ideology. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine-M-D/dp/0767920090 http://www.amazon.com/Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine-M-D/dp/... [2] http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/uu-spb102309.php http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/uu-spb102309.... [3] http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-12/uoi-sdo121708.php http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-12/uoi-sdo121708...