> obvious

No it's not. It is however obvious that you're a fan of Simon Baron-Cohen. It's also obvious that you're trying to downplay the holes in his research.

"Why do so many scientific studies highlight gender differences?

When science journalist Angela Saini was on book tour, a man approached her from the audience. He stuck his face right up in hers and backed her body into a corner. All this to spit out: “Women just aren't as good at science as men are. They've been shown to be less intelligent.” Saini listed names of celebrated female scientists and cited a few studies, but he wouldn’t budge. "In the end," she admits, "I gave up. There was nothing I could say for him to think of me as his equal."

Earlier this year, Saini published the book that man should have been reading instead of denigrating women in STEM. It's called 'Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story'.

'Inferior' is "a set of scientific arguments...to reinforce that equality isn’t just a political ideal but every woman’s natural, biological right," Saini writes in her introduction. Through 100+ years of biology, anthropology, and neuroscience research, she illustrates that many studies on hard-wired gender differences have been debunked, exaggerated, or misinterpreted by the press. Few of these studies have been successfully replicated. Female scientists have even conducted research with different results, only to find their male counterparts were unwilling to acknowledge them. Scientific journals looking for cutting-edge research don't showcase the majority of gender difference experiments, which reveal that there aren't many differences at all -- at least not statistically significant ones.

Worst of all, these dubious "facts" are perpetuating myths on gender that still haunt women today. Over the next three Sundays, I’ll be sharing three scientific studies that Saini dissects in Inferior. I hope these give you counterarguments whenever somebody tries to tell you how your female brain works.

[...]

SIMON BARON-COHEN & "SYSTEMATIZING-EMPATHIZING" BRAINS

Remember Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard who insisted women's brains are worse at grappling with STEM subjects? The study used to defend his remarks was an experiment done on infants, testing the hypothesis that girls are born as empathizers and boys are born as systematizers. Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Cambridge University, led the charge. [...]

“Its basic message,” Saini writes, “is that the “female” brain is hardwired for empathy, while the “male” brain is built for analyzing and building systems, like cars and computers.” Baron-Cohen's reasoning is that male fetuses are exposed to more testosterone in the womb, which he links to systemizing behavior. Girl babies, with their lack of testosterone, are left behind.

Suffice it to say that there are problems with the Baron-Cohen experiment. Since its findings were published in 2000, other scientists have not only discovered multiple errors in the experiment design, but have failed to replicate the results. They’ve even conducted new experiments with results contradicting Baron-Cohen’s conclusions."

Source: https://www.writingonglass.com/content/gender-differences-sc...