The Science on Women and Science [pdf]

These days, reading this fragment:

We have reviewed overwhelming evidence that genetic and hormonal differences between males and females are major causes of sex differences in behavior. These include differences in social behaviors in infants, play behaviors, interests, activities, educational and vocational goals, choices of occupations, patterns of cognitive abilities, and the frequency of extreme giftedness in spatial, mechanical, and mathematical ability. The dominance of female doctoral students in the life and human sciences and of male doctoral students in the inorganic sciences and engineering is consistent with and predictable by sex differences in interests and ability patterns. The greater social interest and ability of females than males is evident in infancy. The differing play activities and interests of boys and girls share similarities with sex differences in the play behaviors of nonhuman primates. Interests, activities, values, and vocational goals that differentiate girls from boys and women from men are strongly affected by the level of fetal androgen exposure or tissue sensitivity to androgen.

...feels like reading forbidden material.

In the context of the recent Google affair, this paragraph struck me in particular:

Unconscious Bias against Women? There are serious ethical issues in accusing people of unconscious bias, which, on the one hand, assumes guilt unless innocence is proved, and, on the other hand, denies the possibility of such proof.195 A frequently cited paper that purportedly establishes biases against women in the awarding of graduate fellowships by the Swedish Research Council employs illegitimate statistical procedures and fails to establish what it claims (see appendix).196 Moreover, a study of fellowship awards in 1998 by the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) found no evidence of systematic bias against women.197