Absolutely, which is why schools should be race-blind and organized around ability grouping. It is government that whips out the pigment meters and demands that the elimination of racial gaps be the paramount purpose of public education, and never mind that we can't define race properly. Government is the font of racialism in America today.
With regard to gender, men and women score about the same on average on IQ tests. There is considerable evidence, which Murray discusses very carefully, with regard to the familiar argument about a male advantage in visual-spatial tasks and at the extreme level of mathematical ability, and a female advantage in verbal skills. But put that aside. The big differences on gender have to do with psychological traits and interests. There is a great deal of overlap between the sexes. There are outliers of both sexes. The differences have to do with average scores measured across large groups. On most dimensions, the differences between the sexes are relatively small -- though this leads to an important question, discussed in some detail by Murray, of whether these small differences are cumulative in effect when one moves from the measurement of isolated traits to broader patterns of social behavior and choice in complex social situations. That is a difficult thing to sort out, but it is not useful to begin with the current leftist fallacy that men and women are really just the same and that all differences are a matter of social conditioning. That is demonstrably not true, which is Murray's point.
One of Murray's illustrations comes to mind. Take aggressiveness. This is one of the biggest differences in male-female average scores. There is a great deal of overlap on this trait. There are outliers of both sexes. But on average, men are more aggressive. How much more? As a ballpark figure, if you were to pick one man and one woman at random from a large group, what are the odds that the man would test as more aggressive? About 60 percent. That's a big differences, but it also reflects a lot of overlap. There are many aggressive women.
When one moves from the measurement of a singular trait to social behaviors and outcomes, it gets much more complicated. For one thing, social and cultural patterns tend to be organized around modal behaviors. It is a good thing for a society to be complex enough to have multiple male, female, and ungendered roles, so that no one is forced into a straightjacket. But men and women, on average, will exhibit different tendencies and this will affect the cultural expectations and roles.
Another complication of Bell Curve math is that small differences at the mean can produce big differences at the extreme ends of the tails. This is a problem for the advocates of the sameness principle -- the idea that absent discrimination, men and women should have identical outcomes -- IF THE SELECTION IS BEING MADE AT THE EXTREMES. One cannot assume that one extreme is better than the other; this depends on what you are selecting for. The example that Murray uses is caregivers in an assisted living facility for the elderly vs. Navy SEALS. As he notes, in neither case is the most extreme position the best, but even so, you will find significant differences in average male and female aptitude for these roles.
I strongly recommend reading Murray's book. Murray deals at length and very fairly with all of these complications. His critics simply disregard most of what he says and set up a straw man. Most of the critics have never read his work and are simply parroting their talking points. But the originators of the criticism are often operating in conscious bad faith.
That certainly was the case in the appalling reviews of the Bell Curve.
But to be clear, my basic point remains. For the most part, spending time on large group differences such as men and women is unlikely to lead to produce better pedagogies or anything else of real operational significance - for the reasons I gave earlier. It is the wrong unit of analysis.
See Herbert Blumer’s Sociological analysis and the “variable” http://www.asanet.org/images/asa/docs/pdf/1956%20Presidential%20Address%20(Herbert%20Blumer).pdf
Talking of SEALS, one of my sons got involved in endurance racing - The World’s Toughest Mudder. It was a 10 mile obstacle course built along the lines used by British Special Forces. You have to complete as many circuits as possible in 24 hours. There were 800 competitors at the start of the race. My son managed 6! The first and second places did 9 and were separated by a matter of minutes at the end. The second place finisher was a corporate lawyer and a woman.
If I was selecting a team to run such a race, I would look at past performance in related endeavors not gender.