My two pennies from the last thread:
There was a lot of discussion on the gender ratios in the academic world, especially in mathematics and science. As a mathematician in the UK, I can offer the statistics from my own college:
The male:female ratio is, overall, currently around 11:9, though individual years vary from 3:2 to 2:3.
I don't know the ratio for many subjects, but the worst I know of is in math, with a ratio of between 3:1 and 2:1.
The subject with the highest female ratio that I know of is Biology, with a ratio of between 1:3 and 1:2.
The majority of subjects have a gender ratio of around 1:1.
In maths at least, there is no gender difference in marks achieved that I know of.
When it comes to views that people are more/less competent at things based on gender, I'm going to make a distinction between direct gender influences and indirect gender influences. In a perfect world, where males and females receive the exact same opportunity in all affairs, then the only gender differences will be from direct influences. However, as was pointed out previously, females often receive lots of discouragement when it comes to fields such as mathematics, so that would result in indirect influences.
I believe that indirect gender influences should be minimized as much as possible, but should still be accounted for while they exist and are prevalent.
For example, the university I am at receives a lot of accusations of racism, because the number of ethnic minority students here is a lot lower than than the national average, and at other universities. However, this is because the ethnicity ratios in the applicants is so skewed. Given the ethnic distribution of the applicants, the university does not exhibit a racial bias. The large difference in ethnicities of applicants is due to indirect influences, not direct ones. As a result, I would be firmly against forcing the university to accept applicants so their ethnic distribution was in line with the national average.
Similarly, I do not consider the gender differences here to be symptomatic of sexism here (at least not directly). Instead, it is symptomatic of individuals experiencing sexism at some point at or before here. The course of action to minimize sexism would be to divide up the history of the individuals into different processes (in this case, stages of education) and to, for each process, compare the distributions before and after.
I am of the opinion that the are that needs the most attention by far is education, especially in the early years.
I am very wary of any attempts to try and compensate for or counteract gender differences (be they direct or indirect). It is adding indirect influence, which is something I do not support. It also implies that it is possible to 'trade off' sexism - that is, say that discrimination in favour of someone at point X is compensation for discrimination against them at point Y, which I do not believe is possible. It also poses a danger of being self-perpetuating: if action is taken to compensate for an indirect gender influence, some others may think that it is to compensate for a direct gender influence, therefore propagating sexism.