Why have historically most inventors been men? I noticed something strange when I looked at about.com's list of famous historical inventors. You can see that most of the inventors are men, and only a few are women.


Can this be explained by cognitive science in terms of men's brains having better abilities for inventing something? 
Or is this due to social factors or something else?
A large part is cultural, because, until recently, the people with the best education and most of the money have been men.

Sexism kept women out of schools for a long time. It also kept pushing women into what were perceived to be more appropriate studies (nothing technical) when they were allowed into schools.

Have a look at the sexism page at Wikipedia.

There is some evidence, as discussed in this Wikipedia article, there are differences between male and female human brains. Especially in spacial temporal reasoning regions and the language areas. As well as Wikipedia, in the book Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of The Mind[1], the authors state that human females are less good at the maths people are taught at school, which is linked to spacial reasoning.

However, this disparity is across the species as a whole. It is an average. Inventors, by their very nature, are not average. Thus the neurological differences are not the main contributing factor to why you see more men in your list than women.

Also, have a look at confirmation bias.

[1] Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of The Mind, 2nd ed. M. S. Gazzaniga, R. B. Ivry, G. R. Mangun. Page 602