[Paracelsus]

Depends what you mean by "prove". You can probably find any number of studies that support the proposition in both ways, but unless you're very good at statistics - and I'm not - it's difficult to tell where the bullshit lies, especially when the studies are of small samples, i.e. the law of small numbers applies and more extreme variations are found the smaller the sample you get for the most part. On top of that, there's a lot of opacity in assessing the causes of different learning capacities since the boy being raised by a single mother can be Albert Einstein and he would still struggle educationally compared with an IQ-100 girl coming out of a stable two-parent household.

So far as my own experience is concerned, I do think boys and girls develop different things at different points as they grow (and it is the case that there's greater standard deviation in IQ among boys than girls, i.e. we have more Forrest Gumps than girls do, but we also have more Albert Einsteins than girls do.)

Boys seem to develop spatial awareness and physical manipulation skills, if there is such a thing, at an earlier age than girls. They don't develop verbal and written skills at the same time as girls, but they're just as damn good if not better than girls at mathematics, especially early. It's just the different brains growing a bit differently thanks to the different soups of hormones their brains are sloshing in. Think of it as the different "packets" in the kid's brain coming online at slightly different points.

I'd also note that physical age has a massive role to play in this arena - in the sports area, you don't even have to look at the differences between a U/7 and U/8 team of kids, just look at the kids born in January versus December within the same age year and you'll get a sense for why smart coaches keep an eye out for the talented kid in his group but also the talented but late-born kid in the group - because odds are on the second one just has 12 months or so to get as good as if not better than the older one.

It's commonly minced around that more girls graduate from school or university than boys. I believe part of that is because, like it or not, schooling is female-dominated, with female teachers massively overrepresented. And women will not admit it, but they have a sex bias against boys, it is a cunt thing, you can't get around it any more than a male teacher can get over his own sex bias in favour of the guys who run hard and against the girl who moans that she's on her period this week. You'll think better, work better, and teach better those kids who are better able to engage with you verbally and seem a bit more mature ... i.e. the average girl student.

On top of that, it looks as though boys are better off waiting a year or so to start school just to get those verbal and emotional intelligence subroutines switched on, though I tend to think this is like the Bed of Procrustes ... it's an edict given more for the convenience of the teachers than it is the students.