All these threads turn into the same thing. They start off innocently until a gang of men come along saying, ‘we are smarter bec we are men and you are dumber because you are women’ and then a woman comes along speaking for the rest of us saying, ‘it’s true. We are dumber because we are women’.
“I have noticed a tendency to try to create a nice picture of a piece of mussar they wish to impart by fabricating a conclusion based mostly on their own creative imagination of p’sukim, and less on solid sources. Men will argue a point based more on recorded precedent in a search for Emmes, not for a happy ending and justification of their own theorems.”
—This has a lot more to do with conditioning than with intelligence. I argued before that I believe that Bais Yaakovs should not have grades for Jewish subjects, and this is part of the reason. For 12+ years we are graded on, not on how well we learned the Torah but rather on how well we understand our teacher’s interpretation of the Torah. We are conditioned to learn Torah in the way that you explained with fluffy mussar lessons, while the boys are taught more to focus on what the Torah said, rather than on what they wished the Torah said. So it’s no wonder that our learning patterns later on in life reflect how we were taught to learn.