RE: Men vs. women : the gender-difference myths
I can't agree more. There are definately sone neuroanatomical sexual dimorphism, but way people and media understand it is way too flawed. And, sure as hell focus on things that makes good clickbaits.
Take example of math performances and mental rotation skills. Many people will quote many studies, showing these correlation via sex. But does correlation always mean causation? I doubt.
The math performances gives us best example. Quoting from Robert spolsky lectures (not in exact words) - In 20th century many studies came up showing that gender differences in maths are real. However, this notion waa challenged in multicultural studies, that show that equality index of the society being study had an effect on it. Gender differences k
math test performances disapoeared in Scandanavian countries. The researches started looking at children and pointed that male kids still perform better in maths, and sex differences in test performances must be innate. Turns out, their assumption was wrong. It was later shown that sexism in math happened to seep in, in a very early age. The way teachers encouraged male children for solving math problems vs female children was different.
Mental rotation problem can also be reflection of such a bias creared by steretypes. For instance, here Hoffman et al., 2011, show thar mental rotation ability as function of society being studied. Then there are studies showing cultural differences in this ability as well as a role of education levels. This puts the entire premises into a blurry line which needs a better focus. Moreover, there are srudies implying that rotation ability by sex is also a function of stimuli (see Fisher et al., 2017. For instance females may perform better in the task, if they are more familiar with the stimulus.