Girls’ comparative advantage in reading can largely explain the STEM gender gap
pnas.org
pnas.org
With the relative inefficiency might come relative unprofitability, and if the girls perceive and/or anticipate that doing reading-oriented tasks would be more profitable for them, they choose to participate in the market for reading-oriented labor (self-select into that market).
* biased towards girls
People choose to do things because they enjoy doing them, and people enjoy doing things more when they’re good at the task. If girls have better language skills, they will naturally gravitate to those kinds of tasks because they like them better, which will reinforce their skills, in a cycle. The same can be said for boys who like to do things and naturally gravitate to/reinforce those skills. Eventually you have people who are good at doing different things, because the initial advantage/preference gave them a tendency to move in a particular direction.
It can't explain why math-intensive fields like biochemistry are not male dominated (with roughly equal distribution between genders for degrees), but the less-math-intensive, more-human-interaction centered people management positions in those fields are disproportionately (given the total population of the fields) male.