6 ideas
When a negative stereotype about one's group is made salient, even subtly, as with ticking a gender box before a math test, performance on the relevant task drops. The mechanism is anxiety and self-monitoring, which consume working memory, so measured 'ability gaps' partly reflect the testing context rather than fixed capacity.
Self-concept shifts with whichever social identity the situation activates: reminding a woman of her gender makes her rate herself as more stereotypically feminine and less mathematical, and reminding her of an academic identity reverses this. The gendered mind is therefore not a stable trait. It is continually reassembled by environmental cues that prime one identity over another.
People who consciously reject gender stereotypes still carry automatic associations, such as male with science and female with family, picked up from the surrounding culture. These implicit links shape judgment and behavior below awareness, so egalitarian intentions alone do not neutralize stereotype effects.
Neurosexism is the practice of treating small, unreplicated, or ambiguous brain differences as proof of innate gendered abilities, then presenting the result with scientific authority. To detect it, check sample sizes, publication bias toward positive findings, reverse inference from brain activation to mental function, and leaps from structure to behavior that the data do not support.
The brain changes structurally and functionally in response to experience, practice, and social environment, so a sex difference observed in adult brains cannot be assumed to be innate or causal. A difference in the brain may be the product of a gendered life rather than its source.
Parents who try to raise children without gender stereotypes still transmit them through subtle cues: different speech to infant sons and daughters, estimates of crawling ability that track the child's sex, and toy choices. Children, who actively seek out gender rules from about age two, then amplify these signals and police gender norms themselves.