> 4 or 5 or 6 standard deviations away from the norm Assuming normal distribution: Single tail 4s.d. is like 1 in 30k. There are about 300M people in the US.

> 4 or 5 or 6 standard deviations away from the norm Assuming normal distribution: Single tail 4s.d. is like 1 in 30k. There are about 300M people in the US. Doing the division, that's 10k people. Google employs way more software engineers than that. --- Google does hire at the tail (just not as extreme as you claim). And when you select for the tail, slight difference in average translates to a huge gender imbalance. Take height for example, we have quite some overlap between men and women. But when we select for people over 6', it's gonna be overwhelmingly men.