The society in general can be unaware of a trait while few people who are aware of it (perhaps those who have just discovered it through a psychological experiment) can discuss its origin. I don't see any contradiction in this. Of course it doesn't apply to sex-based differences in math proficiency which are widely discussed. It can, on the other hand, in principle apply to the refrigerator staring problem discussed in the OP (although, as it has been pointed out, this exact difference can be caused by differences in gender roles with respect to preparing food). To expand the unparseable section: Imagine you make a study to compare handwriting of men and women in which you, possibly among other things, measure the size of the lettres. You realise that female handwriting is smaller on average by 20% than male handwriting. You repeat the study to exclude confounding factors (compose your experimental groups of men and women of the same education, social and ethnic background, age, handwriting practice, physical dimensions, whatever else) and see that the effect persists. The main remaining explanations are 1. Men have inherent psychological inclination to write bigger lettres than women. 2. Men are socially conditioned to write bigger lettres. Now imagine that the society is unaware of the fact. That means: if you ask random people whether men or women write bigger lettres, most people would answer "I don't know" and the rest would split equally between the other possibilities; nobody would refer to small compact handwriting as feminine and to big, crude letters as manly. This leaves 2 with a problem: social conditioning is supposed to work by making gender stereotypes apparent and people then accomodate to the roles they are expected to play and traits they are expected to have. But when the traits are not apparent, this couldn't work. Which pretty leaves us with 1 as the only explanation. (Note that I have chosen a fictitious example because I am not an experi