I struggled with such questions.

Eventually, as I was trying to figure this stuff out, one expert told me: "Of COURSE women are MUCH more emotional than men. That's the cause of all the problems [between men and women]."

It does appear that from, say, SAT test scores, that the girls and boys have somewhat different aptitudes. But, girls can be plenty bright, really, at darned near anything. E.g., my wife was Valedictorian, Phi Beta Kappa, Summa Cum Laude, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, NSF Fellow, and Ph.D. in mathematical sociology. Her memory, verbal, and social talents were astounding: E.g., early in our marriage, we played Scrabble. She beat me like a rented mule. But I kept trying. I improved! She improved faster than I did; the situation for me was hopeless; and she refused to play me anymore.

She did beautifully in analysis of variance and, really, all the material in statistical hypothesis testing and multi-variate statistics, material that is still in significant ways ahead of the usual in AI and ML.

Still, the expert was correct: She was MUCH more emotional than I was.

COULD she be rational? Yes, especially for something far from her core concerns. Otherwise, nope: On any of her core concerns, especially as a female, her emotionalism wildly overwhelmed her rationalism.

Often it's not that the females can't be rational; instead, it's that they are also emotional, strongly emotional, and their emotionalism can just overwhelm their rationalism. The expert told me that this commonly happens very strongly near age 22. He'd been there, seen that, for years.

Female emotionalism? A lot of it, especially the more visible cases, has a single cause -- anxiety disease, and there are other experts who claim that anxiety disease is four times more common in human females, including across cultures, than in human males. Consequences of anxiety disease can include hysteria (overreacting to things), paranoia (overestimating dangers and external intentional threats), obsessive/compulsive disorder (thinking/doing things without ability to stop), etc. These can lead to stress, especially as these symptoms cause practical problems in relationships and careers. The stress can lead to depression and more problems in relationships and careers, thus, more stress, clinical depression (a scary, ugly, desperate situation), and suicide. Yup.

The stereotype of a dangerous situation with the female trembling, closing her eyes, ready to scream and the male, cool, calm, calculating, planning, plotting, quiet, hunting, and about ready to strike at the danger, the wild pig, the deer, the snake, the bear, the enemy, maybe these days a bug in a computer program, etc. is not fully wrong and in too many cases close to correct.

Men who insist that human males and females are just interchangeable and equal in all respects except the most obvious anatomical differences can be in for some serious, life changing, reality checks.

My strong advice: Without strong evidence to the contrary, treat each human female one by one as unique and quite different from a human male. Maybe slowly begin to see the main cases of human females accurately enough to speed up how you regard them, that is, not just one by one unique.

Sure, some human females can be tough, mean, cold hearted, ruthless, calculating, combative, emasculating, etc. Yup, SOME can. Commonly, easily? No. Sometimes? Yes. So, have to be ready for all the major, more common cases.

This is not nearly new stuff: As many parents discover and as some recent careful research has shown, right from the crib human males and females are very different. In particular, the males are paying attention to things and the females, to people. No joke.

For a simple view, the boy is there in the crib plotting how to hack the latch, crawl to the floor, and install a Raspberry Pi in the toy firetruck on the floor so that he can drive it via his Android, maybe tease his sister, and the girl is smiling at her mother, father, older brother and sister, aunt and uncle, and grandparents, soon learns how with just a smile she can wrap her father around her little finger and get anything she wants by smiling and looking pretty and pretending to be cute, sweet, darling, adorable, precious, and to be cared for. Then if she wanted a computerized firetruck, which likely she wouldn't, with just a smile she'd be able to get her father, uncle, or grandfather to get one for her. In simple terms, the pattern is, if the boy wants something, then he works directly to get it. If the girl wants something, then she works indirectly, gets a human male to get it for her. You've noticed this by now, right? You thought that this difference was just happenstance, random, and likely visible just to you? Nope. What you were seeing is real, solid, and quite general. Applies in all cases? Nope. Maybe 90+% of the cases? Yup.

Soon she learns that she gets a lot of what she wants by being pretty. Then she enters a circle: She begs for pretty clothes, gets them, looks pretty, and, looking pretty, gets more pretty clothes, a new iPhone, white bedroom furniture, whatever she wants in dresses, hats, coats, shoes, and gloves for Sunday in the winter, doesn't have to mow the grass (her brothers do), gets to watch her brothers fix the car, her pink bicycle, the printer of her computer, etc. When Mom's vacuum cleaner doesn't work, one of the brothers unplugs it from the wall, takes the switch apart, sees the A/C line cord broken from being used as a handle, with his pocket knife cuts off the broken wire, rewires the A/C cord connection, reassembles the thing, and Mom's vacuum cleaner works again. That's just what I did when I was 14 for the mother of the girl of 12 I was seeing at the time -- made a big hit with both mother and daughter. At about that age, in a class at school, the electric fan wasn't running. I saw that the plug was about to fall out of the wall socket so calmly plugged it back in. Within a millisecond, there was a scream that could be heard across half the school building -- the teacher, a woman, screamed "Don't TOUCH that. It's a WIRE!!!!!".
Of COURSE it's a wire, you bimbo -- I didn't actually say that, but I continued, and the fan worked again. Poor woman -- afraid of wires. She probably still doesn't know the difference between gigawatts and millivolts if only because when I took high school physics she and the other girls took high school biology and giggled about boys.

E. Fromm, The Art of Loving has "Men and women deserve equal respect as persons but are not the same."

Can females learn to fix a vacuum cleaner? Of course. In WWII they learned to weld big ships, too. And they can learn to fly an F-22. But from the crib and for the rest of their lives, they will prefer pretty, pink dresses, people, and humanities subjects to things, Lego blocks, electronic breadboards, physics, calculus, and, right, writing computer software.

This is just my opinion; I could be wrong; but the last time I believed that human males and females were just alike my wife died; no way will anyone ever convince me that human males and females are not radically different; we can try better to understand the differences, but to assume and/or insist that there are no differences is a short walk to Hell -- been there, done that, not doing it again, suggest that other boys/men don't either. I wish I'd been warned; now you've been warned.

Right, with political correctness we are careful never to say anything that might offend anyone. So, the female feminist movement wants to insist that there are no important differences in interests, aptitudes, careers, etc. So, explaining that quite clearly there are differences is not politically correct. Sorry 'bout that.

Wealthy Hollywood actresses have the financial power to ignore a lot of reality and embrace a lot of fantasy. Nearly all the rest of us need to be closer to reality or suffer some serious reality checks. So, for this post, don't tell anyone in Hollywood! They might be offended!