And if anyone came here expecting to see a summary of a thread about innate gender differences in math aptitude, they are just plain wrong-- instead what they get above is a summary about an issue that the thread is not about, to wit: that some performance differences persist, quite likely due to residual environmental factors. The differences have lessened to a degree that the average is not shifted, but environmental influences may well persist at the upper and lower ends of the distributions. What these environmental effects might possible be require about one ounce of common sense to imagine. But due to some mystery agenda, that obvious explanation will be rejected by tofu, for basically no good reason other than it would agree with political correctness and disagree with a completely invented evolutionary story.

Which is precisely what the data does show, in regard to the average performance. But this does not deter the "innate difference" camp, they simply retreat to making great hay out of the variance, their second line of defense-- having had their claims about the average refuted.
What it also did not show is a culture where there are no differences, where boys and girls are treated equally in regard to mathematical aptitude and performance. As I said above, even an "equal" culture can discourage in a hundred subtle but effective ways a "brainy" girl or an "athletically gifted" boy from pursuing mathematics. That would explain the variance differences. But does our present "equal" society really include those subtle discouragements? Are you kidding me? The role models alone make it perfectly clear that it does. It must take considerable effort to ignore such a pervasively obvious fact of our culture.

Yes, I'm quite certain that is exactly what you will find. Apparently, it does not occur to you that the influences we are talking about might also hit a peak in the 8th grade, when children are most susceptible to societal cues about their intellectual growth patterns. At later ages, those patterns might already be established, such that further divergence does not occur and experiences random variations. This is all perfectly plain, nothing you are saying in any way casts doubt on an environmental interpretation of these variances.
Which is precisely what happens in the cultures that uniformly encourage boys and discourage girls! You admitted that yourself, it is one of the most clearly apparent signals in the data. No, it's not difficult at all-- I did so several posts ago, and repeated again here. When it is considered improper for girls to be "too brainy", and when it is considered acceptable for athletically gifted boys to be not brainy at all, we have a very obvious environmental influence lending to precisely the variance effect that is reported (and even that is a pretty small effect, so we are not looking for blatant environmental factors here, but rather quite subtle ones).

Obviously. You seem to fail to recognize how readily that makes my point-- when considering large populations, environment is vastly more important in producing performance differences than innate aptitude differences between the groups, for the simple reason that environment affects them all, while innate differences are statistically mixed. I pointed that out long ago in the thread. I showed how the hypothesis explains the data just fine.
I found this pretty lacking when it was first raised in the thread, for these reasons:
1) It requires that a different environment can influence people to stress the importance of different skills. Well, once you assert that pretty obvious fact, you then have to ignore that very same truth in regard to modern culture!
2) When you find environments that equalize to a large degree, the average performance differences go away. Poof! That's a pretty telling fact, but the innate camp is nothing if not persistent-- they turn to the issue of variance. Let's look at that more closely:

The basic problem with evolutionary arguments, as is by now quite well known, is that you can use them to argue absolutely anything. Anything at all, it's no problem. But for someone to make a legitimate case that evolution "rolls the dice" more liberally with males, they really should actually look at the process governing evolution: genes. Let's say, for the purposes of argument, that there is indeed something about the y chromosome that turns on greater variation in the action of all the other genes, since evolution can take more risks with males and thereby let males carry the greater share of testing genetic variations for survival benefits. What happens when a male does find a survival benefit? Well, for evolution to work, he must pass that benefit on-- to both male and female offspring. The offspring then exhibit the variance in the male population (and female, but we are considering the hypothetical situation being described) of the previous generation.

So the claim that the variance is carried by the males in no way establishes that the likelihood of advanced intelligence is not passed equally to both genders. This is the whole point-- evolution does not bestow survival advantages associated with analytic reasoning skills onto only one gender, for that would obviously lack benefit for the other gender. That is why fully developed men and women are so amazingly equal in their innate mental aptitudes, regardless of where they send the blood in their brains-- until environmental factors come into play.

Let's look at the whole point here. The claim by the "genetic variance" camp is that the next Einstein is more likely to be male, because the y chromosome is more likely to take "risks" with the mental patterns, and thereby generate the next Einstein along with a few dunces. This somehow should explain why most of the math professors in our country are male (don't ask me how this camp tries to explain why in some countries math professors are equally distributed in gender, and in others they are essentially entirely male-- I guess there's greater genetic variance in some countries than others!). But that is clearly a specious argument, because why would the daughters of yesterday's math professors not be among the math professors of today? It's just obviously the wrong explanation. Let's contrast that with a far more reasonable explanation-- the daughters of yesterday's math professors were not encouraged by their environment, in most of today's cultures, to become the math professors of today.
Replacing my arguments with your own imagined cartoons certainly does nothing to make your case. I am perfectly happy to stand by the arguments I actually gave, then and now. One of which holds just as plainly now as ever-- none of the data you researched is capable of disentangling environmental factors from genetic ones-- none of it. All one needs to assert that fact is simple logic. What I have done is supply that logic, accompanied by a basic and unrequited demand to see actual evidence of claims that are made-- instead I am given nothing but environmentally uncontrolled data and a make believe speculation of how evolution might have happened with no effort to conform to the realities of biological procreation.