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The statement "men have higher quantitative reasoning ability than women" seems to only take into account one side of the bell curve.

Steven Pinker wrote about the distribution you mention in 2002 in the "Blank Slate". I'd highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in neuroscience and assumptions about human nature that underly political discourse in this country.

It's remarkably relevant even though it's over a decade old

In a real meritocracy you would expect gender imbalances anyway, because of statistical phenomena such as these. Funny enough there are few comments on the gender imbalance of more females in nursing than males. Regardless of whether it comes down to stigmatizing of the profession (possible given the higher end of wages in nursing meaning the incentive should be there) or if it has to do with some distribution of talent, it's not commented on, despite being consistent with a universal application of sexism logic vs a particular application for just one gender.