You’re right about male and female distributions having different standard deviations as well as means. It appears that distributions for many female traits have less variance than those for males. So we see more male geniuses, more male retards, far more violent male criminals.

The high school / College Male/Female Maths & Physics break is something I observed in my youth.

At the time my understanding was somewhat naive, but I *did* make the observation that up until ca. Age 15, academic results were as much a function of neatness and conscientiously showing up and doing the work by rote as anything else. In other words, all those not clinically retarded or dyslexic had not yet encountered any of the many Bridges of Asses we all eventually stumble upon in our lives. Even at that age I realized that girls were far more neat and tidy and conscientious than we boys. Didn’t take much realizing really – we had it rammed down our throats all the time by irate teachers and parents.

But hitting the later years of High School, it got a bit different. Calculus knocked off a few of the less smart, but that wasn’t the Filter. I’m pretty sure it was spatial reasoning — an area where Males have been proven to out-perform Females. Loci in the Complex Plane, playing fast and loose with Basis Vectors. You can memorize a lot of it and decorate it with different colored highlighters and post-it notes, but eventually you do have to grok what’s going on in n-space or some exam questions are just going to stump you. It stopped them in their tracks. Not all of course, but the disparity was obvious.

High School Chemistry and Biology apart from some smells, explosions and investigating the innards of small critters, is largely rote bookworm and in case of Biology ingesting and regurgitating a lot of Political Correctness and quoting Sources of Authority. I think we know which sex gets off on this more than the other 😀

Today, the outer higher reaches of Biology seem to be largely computational. Be interested to know the gender distribution at the cutting edge. If I had to guess, I’d say the males wrote the foundational software tools and then the women moved in and out-socialized them… but I’m just Mister Dunning Kruger 😛

Note to Art Deco: The outfit I have the good fortune to work for hired a bunch of Harvard School of Public Health post-docs some years back. Started with one and then hovered up a few more via that first contact. What we do (far from anything health sciences related) is intensely right tail stuff in the machine learning domain. These guys were hired because this skill set was necessary to get them up into the Academic Bio Stratosphere. As for why did such smart *guys* quit and come to money grub with us? Politics. It’s all politics at the top. Same as everywhere else but more so.

I do think that when researching gender or race difference traits across any dimension it’s important to look at the absolute cutting edge where money is either made or lost in true marketplaces where you can bankrupt yourself as easily as enrich yourself. It’s only there that the politics stops and the reality kicks in. Every other department in an organization can afford to be PC as long as (e.g.) the quant algos work. So I look at who works there when I’m trying to cut through the fog and crap.

One good thing that might be resulting from the Chinese Corona virus lock downs could be a large increase in such parental enlightenment.

It was no wonder that unrepentant urban terrorist Bill Ayres switched from physical revolution to becoming an “educator,” and proceeded to churn out extremely influential teacher textbooks, model curricula, and reading lists, which have obviously generated a far greater revolutionary payoff than bombs ever did.

Unless and until Conservatives find some way to take back control of the Academy–the education of our children, and the formation and content of their characters and mind-sets–we will never have a chance in Hell of dethroning Leftism from it’s current dominant position in our culture, and society, or of winning against the Left and its subversive ideology, which today has a virtual monopoly on all of the positions of power, and an ever tightening stranglehold on just about every aspect of our dwindling traditional culture and society.

The people who really get physics don’t generally go in for teaching high school. Anyone with the kind of IQ that would let them understand physics well enough to teach it well might be drawn to a non-teaching occupation that pays better.*

*Brief aside to pooh-pooh the notion that teachers are “underpaid”. For nine months’ work, and the kind of benefits they get, they are amply compensated, and most teachers are above US median individual income ($60,300 K median for teachers vs $58,379 for all US).

It’s not that we underpay teachers. It’s that we pay the wrong ones more and in many states are practically unable to fire them.

Inneresting. I’ve been out of high school a long time. My recollection is that there were two levels of each of the natural sciences available and three levels of math at each grade level. The girls tended to prefer biology to chemistry and chemistry to physics. The advanced math classes were 70% male and the advanced physics and chemistry classes were 100% male.

Almost no one is at ‘the top of their field’

Women are amply represented in the fields in question (between 10% and 25% depending on which detailed occupation you look at). They’re just not equally represented. This is not a social problem, just how things play out when you have free choice in education and labor markets. It’s of professional interest to industrial psychologists and diverting fodder for magazine articles, but that’s about it. The problem arises when you have lawyers, scheming academics, hr pests, and higher ed apparatchiks pretending its a problem and making the world worse for hiring managers and their teams alike.