Social scientists and gender theorists have long debated the causes of achievement disparities between males and females in certain competencies. For example, if we find (as we do) that most engineers are males and most nurses are female, would we attribute this disparity to innate sex differences in ability (males are better at math; women are better at relational empathy), interest (man are more interested in numbers; women are more interested in people), or to the social traditions and expectations, which serve to shape and channel males and females into different social niches (nursing is feminine; math is masculine)?

The answer to this question has concrete implications. If sex differences are mostly due to social pressures and expectations, then changing those social constructs should lead to the reduction of such disparities. Indeed, such was the hope of many gender theorists as 20th-century scholars began deconstructing the cultural gender narrative. Social constructivist theories have long predicted that sex differences will decline in more gender equal countries. A thrust of the feminist theory was thus aimed at opening the definitions of what constitutes male and female, relaxing old, rigid cultural constrictions, and providing equal access across the board to educational and professional opportunities. If nursing is no longer considered unmanly, and if engineering is no longer considered unfeminine, and if girls and boys are taught from an early age that both fields are equally open and acceptable to them and are given equal role models and social support to those ends, then we will see a de-gendering of the professions.

Alas, this is not what actually happened.

For example, around the Western world today, women tend to outnumber and outperform men in higher

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