I think people generally miss the obvious explanation for this. American teenagers have more freedom than kids in other cultures. Here, kids have enormous latit

I think people generally miss the obvious explanation for this. American teenagers have more freedom than kids in other cultures. Here, kids have enormous latitude with regards to how and where they spend their time. They acquire agency at a young age. We don't have strict tracks to various careers or specialized tests to weed people out of opportunities at a young age. We don't have Tiger Moms[1]. We hear lots of stories of uneducated people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps or making it in sports and entertainment. Some other cultures share some of these properties, but not to the degree of the US. Which gets us to sex and and the fact that sex is an ancient, ancient behavior whose irresistable force will shape the patterns of behavior in any culture. If you want to know why things look a certain way, start with sex. Teen-agers want the attention of the opposite sex. In America, pretty teen-age girls uniquely have the opportunity to acquire as much attention as they desire and they spend a lot of their time and agency acquiring it. And it is by no means a symmetrical arrangement. The girls seeking attention only want it from a much smaller fraction of the boys. So, a bunch of girls are gathering attention instead of studying. For most ordinary people--not necessarily Hacker News readers--studying hard enough to be able to program computers or deeply understand maths is a lot of work. And a bunch of girls don't need to bother. On the other hand, a bunch of boys have nothing better to do and can only hope that studying hard will pay off in the attention of girls down the road. [1] I'm generalizing because pretty much all cognition is for the purpose of generalizing and this discussion is definitely about generalizations.