practicality

Hrm. But 'fluffiness' and 'hardcoreness', as it were, are often terms decided by our male-dominated society. As a perfect example, I find the courses of my 'fluffy' biochem/microbio major to be vastly more difficult than the physics and math courses I've taken so far. And the males in my major generally agree. Yet, because there are a large number of women in my faculty many view it as easy compared to the hard sciences.

Which couldn't be further from reality.

I have no doubt things look a little different coming from MIT, but in a regular university one sees that virtually all of the faculties, save the math/phys/eng disciplines, are relatively balanced with regard to the sexes. And those faculties carry a huge, undeniable, male-biased stigma. From a grades perspective the women who reject the stigma and enter those studies, at least in my college, do just as well as or better than the men, there are simply fewer of them.

While I have no doubt that there are some differences between the male and female mind, I think that we have since the beginning been approaching this issue from 'men are better' perspective, and there has been a disturbing trend of late to ignore the large, obvious social influences entirely.

(As a note that may be of interest, girls outperform boys in every subject area under Canadian standardized testing following an overhaul to eliminate anti-female biases. Yes, math too. Naturally, the right-wing now proclaims it 'biased against boys'.)