I've been teaching programming for a bit...For kids' learning there's a pretty clear top-of-the-list set Kodu -- XBox -- my 5 & 7 year old enjoy making these games a lot. -- Scratch -- My teen has used it. Logo -- I loved it as a kid, and it has fabulosu learning, but low video-game capabilities Lego Robotics -- Very good for learning programming, less so for video games. Android programming seems pretty easy for kids (My teen)...can use any dev environment you like. Eclipse, Android SDK, Java, you're ready to go. And you can put the results on your phone immediately.

And my daughter enjoys the legos as well....and my boy likes the dolls sometimes. My claim comes down to the idea that interest isn't binary. Interest is an intensity as well. Boys tend (strongly) to like trucks MORE than girls like trucks, and MORE than boys like dolls. Ditto girls with the ideas reversed. To the extent that interest drives hours (as a teacher, I'd put this at well above 90%)...then you expect boys with higher interest to focus on boy-things (STUFF, roughly) more than girls do, and girls to spend more of their energy on girl-things (relationships, roughly) than boys do.

I find that somewhere near 6th grade is when MOST math stops being obvious. + - * / ... these are obvious things. 7th grade is when you get pre-algebra, or algebra for your advanced kids. Again, my line about risk...algebra, despite assertions to the contrary, involves trying stuff that might not work. And the primary gender psych difference relevant to math classes is attitude towards risk.

Background: 1. I'm a math wunderkind (college classes in elementary school). 2. I spent ~20 years teaching math and programming to all levels of students. I read most of the study, and as far as I've been able to tell... A. They don't seem to reject the null hypothesis (Male IQ stdev ~= 16.5, Female IQ stdev ~= 13)... B. They don't seem to address my major analysis, which is differing attitudes towards risk. The best female students in the class are always the ones who do EXACTLY what you tell them to, perfectly. The best male students in a class are the ones who don't do what you tell them to, but try other things, and succeed brilliantly. C. Option 3 for reasons for variance is interest. Anyone who's ever had a boy and a girl, tried to be gender neutral with them, and watched the boy chase trucks and guns, and the girl chase dolls...there are questions of focus. D. On average, 1 of 100 guys is willing to spend 100 hour weeks trying to win. Girls have higher sanity scores. 100 hour weeks attempting to do a single thing is nuts...40-50 hour weeks is more sane, especially if you care about other things (like kids, friends, etc). however, Hours spent on a topic is roughly equal to skill. And so the insane people are the best.

Assumptions behind the question are not quite right.

The health care problem in America is not what is being said in most discussions. There are actually 6 problems, 1 big, 2 little, 2 unsolveable, 1 crazy, and 1 hidden.

The big problem is that the government spends at least about 1 in 2 health care dollars, and the prices are going up..so the government is going to have a money problem around health care real soon here. If we don't cap the $ spent by the government on health care, we're all up a creek.

The first little problem is that in healthcare, there are no real incentives to cut costs. The consumer, the provider, the payer, and the decider are all different people, which makes things bad. In addition, costs are hidden further by the fact that most Americans with insurance have the insurance paid by their employer (not seeing the full cost of the insurance), insurance regulations which don't allow (real) competition on which services are covered, and huge tax advantages for employer-provided insurance.

The second little problem is that in America, 50% of healthcare spending occurs in the last 6 months of a person's life. A big portion of our cost vs. other countries costs is sitting right here.

Unsolveable problem #1 is that the supply of medical care is massively restricted in the US. In some other countries, there are Bachelors' of Medicine who can do simple stuff like give shots, draw blood for tests, etc. There are not huge scary FDA "effectiveness trials" which insanely increase the price of drugs (well, and they piggyback off the drugs developed by relying on US profits).

Unsolveable problem #2 is that new medical procedures, which sometimes work better, are often more expensive. Basically, all older care is dropping in price, just like all other products...but there's so much new stuff....

The crazy problem is that no one actually knows what works/is cost effective. It's well known in medicine that about 50% of all medical spending has no discernable impact at all.

The hidden problem is that it remains important to get new procedures and drugs, so as to continue (despite not knowing which ones work, some do) getting healthier.

Data comparison:

• The US spends about 17% of GDP on health care, and it's growing at ~8%
• The single payer systems (Commonwealth, Europe) have better health results, and spend between 9-13% of GDP on health care (from a much poorer base), and it's growing at about 8%.
• Singapore's system has even better health results, spends ~4% of GDP, and it's growing at ~4%. They use required, tax-financed HSAs, with catastrophic government-provided insurance.