Via Geek Feminism and Restructure!, it turns out there might be something else going on besides "girls suck at math" that keeps more women out of, well, math.

Skeptics might wonder if some of the [gender] differences [in engagement] among students relate to how well the students know the material. The researchers checked for that and found that, across sections, women outperformed men on grades. So the data point to women losing confidence with male instructors — even if female students know the material as well as or better than their male counterparts.

Link: Inoculation Against Stereotype (Inside Higher Ed)

Source: Geek Feminism Blog

Yes, the plural of lots of anecdotes still isn't data, but my observation in engineering, tech, math, and hard sciences -- in academia and even more so in industry -- has been that the biggest obstacle for women trying to get and do their work hasn't been their ability to do the actual work.

Incidentally, Penelope Trunk, who hasn't gotten the memo, still thinks it's all about brain differences.

One fundamental difference between the male and female brain is gray matter. And University of California at Irvine released solid data to explain why men are good at math.

“Evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior,” said Richard Haier, professor of psychology who led the study.

“In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of—or connections between—these processing centers.”

Source: Brazen Careerist

Not to sound all "don't have enough white matter to do interprocessing" or anything but gray matter is what we do math with, and if there are such vast differences between men's and women's white and gray matter then how is it possible that the average woman is capable of math as the average man?

Since that doesn't make any sense it must mean either that most men totally waste 5.5x of their 6.5x advantage over women in math-a-licious gray matter or... maybe something else is going on.

Based on the graceless quality and tone of the "congratulations" a friend of mine just got from her department head after receiving the highest NSF score anyone in her hard-sciences department has gotten in years I think it might be "something else."

The something else, incidentally, might be the worthiness trap conviction men have (doesn't matter if it's socialized or "genetic") that if they don't do better than women (let alone other men) then they'll never get sex.

You can't discount the effectiveness of that conviction, incidentally, or the grown-man-panic drive it can generate when a man's afraid he's going to be shown up by a woman.  Thank Rule #2 of the bogus  Two Rules of Desire for this -- if we're convinced women can't find us handsome and we're afraid they won't find us handy we imagine we're screwed... or more precisely not screwed!

Meanwhile women's worries about never getting sex run along pretty different lines (again whether it's socialized or genetic is kind of irrelevant.)

No one's asked me so far, but if someone did I'd say the difference in "...or I'll never get sex" accounts for far more of the differences in outcomes Trunk and others see in science, in sales, and in startups than gray matter ratios or "girls suck at math."