They say it is nurture rather than nature that has the largest affect on the skills, attributes and personalities of an individual.

Experts say children are not born with intellectual differences but learn them in our gender-divided society.

So boys aren't born with better map-reading and parking skills, mathematical prowess and a liking for the colour blue.

Similarly girls do not inherit the ability to express for emotions and multi-tasking, better communication skills and a love of the colour pink.

Instead they develop them as they grow and are steered towards gender-defined skills by parents and teachers.

According to a new book, Delusions Of Gender by Cordelia Fine, there are no major neurological differences between the sexes.

She told the Observer, there may be slight variations in the brains of women and men but the wiring is soft, not hard.

New angle: Delusions Of Gender claims Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus is outdated

'It is flexible, malleable and changeable,' she said. 'Many of the studies that claim to highlight differences between the brains of males and females are spurious.

'They are based on tests carried out on only a small number of individuals and their results are often not repeated by other scientists.

'However, their results are published and are accepted by teachers and others as proof of basic differences between boys and girls.'

Dr Fine, a psychologist of Melbourne University, said: 'All sorts of ridiculous conclusions about very important issues are then made. Already sexism disguised in neuroscientific finery is changing the way children are taught.'

Her claims are backed by leading psychologists who say the theory we are hard-wired differently from birth leads to gender stereotypes.

Dr Lise Eliot, of the Chicago Medical School, said: 'All the mounting evidence indicates these ideas about hard-wired differences between male and female brains are wrong.

'Children don't inherit intellectual differences. They learn them. They are a result of what we expect a boy or a girl to be.'

She said: 'We are being told there is nothing we can do to improve our potential because it is innate. That is wrong. Boys can develop powerful linguistic skills and girls can acquire deep spatial skills.'

Professor Robert Plomin of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, found that in verbal development - where girls often learn to speak first - there was just a three per cent variation between the sexes.

He said: 'If you map the distribution of scores for verbal skills of boys and of girls you get two graphs that overlap so much you would need a very fine pencil indeed to show the difference between them.
 

'Yet people ignore this huge similarity between boys and girls and instead exaggerate wildly the tiny difference between them. It drives me wild.'

The publication of John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, in 1992 stressed the differences between the minds of men and women.

He said: 'A man's sense of self is defined through his ability to achieve results. A woman's sense of self is defined through her feelings and the quality of her relationships.'

But researchers say this trend was a response to psychologists' emphasis of the environment's importance in the development of skills and personality in the 1970s and early 1980s and was now outdated.

Lise Eliot said this 'pseudo-science' - which told parents that boys had poor chances of acquiring good verbal skills and girls have little prospect of developing mathematical prowess -  was 'neurosexism' which placed unnecessary obstacles in the paths of a child's education.

'Yes, boys and girls, men and women, are different,' she told the New Scientist.
 

'But most of those differences are far smaller than the Men Are From Mars, Women Are from Venus stereotypes suggest.'

She said: 'There is almost nothing we do with our brains that is hard-wired. Every skill, attribute and personality trait is moulded by experience.'