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.

Incidentally the oestrogen theory and the pruning theory are not mutually exclusive. The “other theories” aren’t different theories, they’re just answering the question further. Suppose oestrogen does protect against schizophrenia: why and how does it do that?

I’m intrigued as to why so many scientists on this site feel able to declare themselves “not convinced” by a scientific study. Is it that you think the other scientists made the data up?

Pruning seems to occur more in adolescent boys than in girls. Here’s an article.

It’s fairly well established that excessive pruning is probably related to schizophrenia. Here’s an article.

Combining these two possibilities sheds some possible light on the fact that onset of schizophrenia is earlier and more severe in men than in women. There’s a theory that Oestrogen has something to do with it. Here’s an article.

There’s also been evidence to suggest that faster pruning is related to higher IQ. But this, together with the above evidence, is not very easy for scientists to publicise because of political correctness issues. See here, for example.

And finally - the punchline - some research showing a connection between schizophrenia and mathematical ability. Here.

These articles are just things I’ve quickly found on the internet so might not be the best references. Like I say, I’m not a neurologist.

Actually the last thing (mathematics and psychosis) was just some personal speculation of mine based on some dinner conversations with schizophrenia experts together with my personal experience of the behaviour of mathematicians. Richard’s question prompted me to look it up on the internet and I’m very interested to discover that someone has since published some research about it.

Just what do you mean by “synaptic pruning” and what do you speculate that would have to do with mathematical ability?

If this very quantifiable difference exists, then other differences may of course exist as well. Individual experience is not a good basis for scientific theory, as we scientists should all know. Of course I was better than all my peers at mathematics, but that is not precluded by men in general being better at mathematics than women. Think tails of bell curves etc.

In particular, what if mathematical ability were also related to this sort of pruning? It would explain why men and women start off evenly, and then men accelerate rapidly at some point. Being a mathematician certainly feels like a mental disorder sometimes, and I say this entirely without irony or flippancy.

If this were the case, women’s mathematical ability would in theory accerelate in their thirties, but of course this is too late for an academic career. The crucial age is around 18 when academically inclined people are moving towards their specialties.

By the way, I’m at the age where I’m keenly awaiting this accererlation myself…