You didn't get it. When you take studies about differences in brain structure and claim it supports a the notion that a specific apparent behavioral different is inherently biological, that is vague handwaving.
Uh huh. I'm pretty sure it's you that doesn't get it. I made no such claims. What I did do is provide you with a list of links that conclusively show biological differences in the brains of men and women, which were trivially easy to find, and which disprove your position that there's no reliable evidence to the contrary.
Further, behavioral studies which crucially fail to control for culture don't actually say anything other than how people behave, as opposed to why.
Did you actually read any of the papers in my list of citations? If you did, you would have noticed that the studies are grounded in observed brain structure/biology, not behavior. Controlling for culture in these studies would be based on the assumption that culture somehow has a measurable effect on brain structure and biochemistry, and that different cultures would have different brain structures. Is that your position?
In any event, I would point out that the last two papers I linked to do in fact seem to claim a causal relationship between male/female brain differences and observed behavior. The paper's abstract hosted on the Oxford Journal site reads in part:
"The current study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine whether induced stress resulted in gender-specific patterns of brain activation during a decision task involving monetary reward....Gender differences in behavior were present in stressed participants but not controls, such that stress led to greater reward collection and faster decision speed in males but less reward collection and slower decision speed in females."
I'm not a neurologist, and I take no position on the conclusions of that study. But it sure looks to me like the paper's researchers are claiming a direct relationship between differences in male/female brains and gender differences in the ability to perform a decision making task under stress. Does this study meet your standard of reliable information? If not, why?
The interesting thing here, demonstrated in the OP's responses, is that the underlying motivation is the belief that women don't face obstacles in STEM.
Which OP is that? The only thing I see under discussion here is the question of 1) whether or not there are biological differences in the brains of men vs women, and 2) whether or not biology might play a role in women being underrepresented in some professions and overrepresented in others.
