I will give you one statistic to get your head going. I studied theoretical math (long time ago, not in the US). At the university I attended, there were 17 ap

I will give you one statistic to get your head going. I studied theoretical math (long time ago, not in the US). At the university I attended, there were 17 applicants for each admission. My class was 125 people of which about 30 were men and almost a hundred were women. During first 3 semesters, the class went from 125 to 70 at the end of the first semester, 35 at the end of the second and 20 at the end of third. Out of those 20, 15 graduated in the end, of which 11 were men and only 4 were women. Now, the rest is subjective view of what happened. I noticed that most of women that were admitted had really good grades all over (you had to have max points to be even considered) but were not super interested in math. My feeling was that most of girls either did not have a plan at all or their plan was they will be teaching math. When girls organised, this was either for extracurricular reasons or if it was about math at all, it was to share notes and work together to solve problems that were required by the prof. And finally when they were learning the material my subjective feeling at the time was that they depended more on rote memorisation. And as everybody knows, theoretical math is worst place possible to be relying on your memory alone. Most guys on the other hand almost immediately organised into one group of people who actually liked math for math's sake. This might be potentially explained by the fact there was relatively few of us but I don't think this was the only reason. Now, I cannot speak to how good some of those women were at math and whether they were treated fairly. I was young and I did not pay much attention to it at the time. But it is interesting to me how much girls were overrepresented in the initial population even if they did not seem to have a strong drive for mathematics -- purely because they had stellar grades and they just could choose any place they could go to. It is also a bit tragic they got penalised for this choice. I blame the education system which treated math as rote memorisation problem up to this point and never explained to us that this is not mathematics.