[garbanzo]

I shift from “innate” to “intractable” to acknowledge how complex is the interaction of genes, their expression in behavior, and the environment. “Intractable” means that, whatever the precise partitioning of causation may be (we seldom know), policy interventions can only tweak the difference at the margins.

While I tend to think of IQ as respectable pseudoscience, I think this point is essentially correct. For example, why have women reached parity in fields like medicine and law, but not science?

[Shawndell Green]

"why have women reached parity in fields like medicine and law, but not science?"

Women's general superiority in verbal ability is mentioned in the article and verbal ability and manipulating emotions is important in law.

High grades are a very important factor in getting into medical school. As noted in the article, women get better grades than their test scores would predict. I think that is because women are more willing to do required busywork than are men of similar ability. To graduate from medical school and become a doctor takes lots of grinding work and women are, in general, more willing to work hard and steady, while men tend to work more in fits and starts.
Also, medical schools have practiced affirmative action in order to increase the number of women in medical school. Graduate schools of science are also using affirmative action to get more women advanced science degrees, but not enough women are interested in applying to science schools to attain parity.

Medicine has a nurturing and interpersonal element that appeals to women. Science deals with abstractions that do not have an emotional appeal to women. Men look at working in a field in which they do not have to have much interaction with other people, (read idiots) as being a good thing.

[megatherium]

For example, why have women reached parity in fields like medicine and law, but not science?

I think they have reached parity in some fields of science, such as biology. But certainly not in computer science, engineering and mathematics.

However, in mathematics, in the last two years, more than 30% of new PhDs in math have gone to women.

Murray says there have only been two woman mathematicians who are "great" mathematicians in history. But I think there are some modern women mathematicians who are at least near-great: one example is the Princeton professor Ingrid Daubechies, whose work in harmonic analysis (wavelet analysis) was spectacular and unexpected.