Last year, 5,000 boys in the UK completed Level 3 engineering apprenticeships, but only 40 girls, Prof Rippon pointed out.
Boys taking physics A level also vastly outnumbered girls.
But Prof Rippon insisted this was nothing to do with innate differences in the way the brains of girls and boys worked.
Rather, it was likely to be the result of their brains being altered by experience.
One of the most often quoted examples of gender difference is spatial ability - the ability to understand the relationships between different objects in space.
Boys are said to be naturally more spatially gifted.
But if girls aged six to eight are given the tile-matching puzzle game Tetris, their brain wiring changes and their spatial ability improves, Prof Rippon said.
She added: “It's quite clear that spatial cognition is very much involved with experience, whether or not you have experience of manipulating objects as opposed to just observing them.
"This goes back to 'toys for boys'.
"From a very early age, boys have a lot more experience with manipulating objects."
Research had shown that as women attained greater access to education and power, gender differences began to disappear.
Prof Rippon was also dismissive of evolutionary psychologists who claimed the way men and women thought was largely the result of natural selection.
"The idea that women like the colour pink because it made them better able to pick berries - it's nonsense," she said.
【“男人来自火星,女人来自金星”的神话让科学受损】相关文章:
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