I'm not saying men and women are not different. They absolutely are. All I mean is that I am not convinced that in this case they are as different as you are saying.
I think the mentor who created the bad experiment was trying to illustrate a sound principle based on slight behavioral differences. I think the rate of 20 pickup is probably pretty close, but definitely something that can be statistically measured, like "hand raising" in a classroom by gender.
I was reading the Joakim CG thread, and someone brought up an experiment a teacher in the 50s or 60s did. His students had a hard time believing that fascism rose in Germany so organically, so the teacher created a "fascism-light" club and students unwittingly joined. The problem is that that's a cute experiment, and helps people get an idea of how Nazi Germany started by living through a little class exercise -but it's not Nazi Germany.
It's super hard to scale these big, complicated social issues down to a few dozen people, that's why they're abstracted.
It's like when physicists say they can measure the size of the universe through "red-shift," and explain it by how an engine sounds as it's racing towards you, then away from you.
That analogy is about as useful as plonking down 20s on a desk in order to explain why women are lagging in business. It's a fun little "lookitthis" but a gross over-simplification. It's just a metaphor. It does not invalidate her central point about how men and women handle money.
