People's reactions to these facts vary. Some people conclude that it justifies women's lack of participation in traditionally-male fields. However, powerful arguments exist against taking such a stand:
[B]iological factors cannot be the complete answer. In other countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, large numbers of women study science successfully, despite any biological handicap. Nor are biological predispositions necessarily relevant when formulating education policy. Girls usually score better than boys on verbal tests, and boys have more difficulty than girls in learning to read. But schools do not take this as a reason for letting boys drop out of reading classes. Quite the reverse: most schools have remedial reading classes which are used predominantly by boys. Teachers put extra effort into teaching boys to read to make up for any deficiency, whether its origin is biological or social. The same could be done to boost the spatial ability of girls if the problems were considered equally serious [Kelly 1982, page 497,].
Additionally, the field of feminist technology argues that technology can legitimately be taught in a manner that plays more to women's strengths, be they biological or environmental, not relying so heavily on fields like mathematics in which men currently outperform women. For example, Sherry Turkle and Seymour Papert found:
When we looked closely at programmers in action we saw formal and abstract approaches; but we also saw highly successful programmers in relationships with their material that are more reminiscent of a painter than a logician. They use concrete and personal approaches to knowledge that are far from the cultural stereotypes of formal mathematics [Turkle et al 1990, page 128,].Student programmers with the less mathematical style, sometimes men but usually women, are discouraged when in classes that force a more mathematical approach [Turkle et al 1990, pages 131-132,]. Turkle and Papert advocate ``epistemological pluralism'', in which different approaches are allowed to flourish. Similarly, Sally L. Hacker argues convincingly that more mathematics than necessary is required by engineering programs, weeding out students who would be able to succeed as engineers if they did not have to pass timed calculus exams [Hacker 1983]. As one female computer science professor writes:
[T]here's a committee at the [X] engineering school trying to redesign the school-wide common core curriculum, for freshman and sophomore years. I asked our department's representative to the committee to bring up that the current common core tends to discourage females and minorities because it's too heavily math and engineering oriented (and most of these courses are not needed for CS), and does not provide options to take courses in more people-oriented fields (that are relevant to CS) such as psychology. Apparently the committee chairman said to our representative something to the effect that it is not the mission of this committee to address women and minorities, and thus he would not put this issue on the agenda.