Instead, it's saying that gender inequality has been associated with effects on the brain. We are fairly confident that the environment you grow up can affect how your brain develops. It's not unreasonable that growing up in a society with gender inequality will have an effect on how the brain develops.
You should :)
> however what I am more interested in is how does the paper determine that mental inequality is influenced by exterior factors, instead of inherent gender differences causing exterior inequalities?
It's not looking at causality, just association, so it doesn't do what you're asking. What it does do is show that countries with more inequality have more brain differences between genders. You can make your own hypotheses about the causality, for instance, if it was inherit then why would the differences be less prevalent in countries with more equality? There is some discussion in the discussion part of the paper.
Maybe that's the causality? Chicken and the egg.
Alternatively, we get really good human models and simulate everything, sci-fi style.
One explanation for the gap in SAT scores I've seen is that women and minorities (except asians) perform worse because they expect to perform worse. Plausible to an extent sure but today it seems the science is jumping through all kinds of hoops to prove that genetics have an effect on every part of our body except the brain.
I'm not trying to deny that culture and nurture plays a big role, but we choose dog breeds based on personal traits, so why do we expect ourselves to be any different? It applies to all animals but us, nonsense if you ask me.
Where I live the second generation immigrants are more prone to crime than their parents were. What's the explanation for that?
Teachers give higher grades to girls than to boys with the same academic ability, according to a study published today in the British Journal of Sociology of Education.
That's an interesting result, and worth discussing.