I’m going with nature. Of course, individual gender runs along a spectrum from Extreme Male to Extreme Female, but in general, as a parent who tries to raise his kids in a gender-neutral way, it is my observation that if you give a young boy a doll he will turn it into a gun. Give a girl a toy gun and she’ll turn it into a doll. Both genders seem to move toward the center as they age (and have their own kids). There are lots of female soldiers and male child-care workers. But for me, that is where “nurture” and aging begins to manifest more strongly.

I’m not speculating that women are more System 2 than men. I haven’t given it enough thought.

“We had to convince the women they were better than they thought they were. We had to convince the boys they were nowhere near as good as they thought.”

The boys wanted to do most of the math in their heads instead of writing down each step. They kept making mistakes and wouldn’t believe they could make mistakes. The girls never believed they could do it, then, when they did solve the problem, thought they must have made a mistake. Most of my tutoring was convincing the boys to slow down and take their time, and convincing they girls that they had the brains to do it. I’ve actually seen this in the workplace. The male engineers tend to do things “off the top of their head” fast, quick, and wrong. Where the women are more couscous, though, and unwilling to speak up for fear of being wrong. Thankfully, as people age, the women tend to get more bold and the men more calm. Broad generalities, I know, and are all different. But such are my observations.