Women are indeed underrepresented in computer science and mathematics, and meta-analyses confirm moderate average sex differences in occupational interests (women tending slightly more toward people-oriented and men more things-oriented, with a Cohen’s d of roughly 0.7–1.0 and very large overlap). However, the assertion that “most women in computer science do not write programs because they enjoy solving puzzles” or that there are “almost no women in math” is demonstrably false.
Women earn 40–45 % of mathematics bachelor’s degrees in the United States and a majority in several other countries, and surveys of female programmers show that intellectual challenge and puzzle-solving remain strong motivators, only marginally less so than for men.
The companion claim that men universally find elaborate social relations boring and therefore lack social cognition is an equally exaggerated reversal of the empathizing–systemizing framework. Average differences exist, but individual variation is far larger than group averages, and many men excel at social cognition.
Portraying Chinese culture as defined by an “inordinate” obedience to authority rooted in fear of being killed ignores both historical nuance and contemporary reality, including high levels of entrepreneurship and private dissent.
Similarly, explaining Jewish innovative success primarily through “intellectual independence and anti-authoritarianism” while implying Asian cultures lack these traits recycles old antisemitic and Orientalist tropes.
When population size and opportunity are controlled, recent East Asian achievement in mathematics, physics, and patent production matches or exceeds historical Jewish overrepresentation in many domains.
The linguistic section rejects Chomsky’s strong nativist position (already heavily critiqued in modern linguistics) but replaces it with an equally unsupported alternative: that complex grammar arises purely from a motivational urge satisfied by general learning mechanisms, akin to those in gorillas.
Decades of research on child language acquisition, creolization, homesign systems, and failed ape-language projects continue to show that humans possess biological adaptations for recursive syntax that other species lack, even when motivation and training are maximal.