Short version: Boys and girls are different. Or, vive la différence. Or, "Men and women deserve equal respect as persons but are not the same" (E. Fromm, The

Short version: Boys and girls are different. Or, vive la différence. Or, "Men and women deserve equal respect as persons but are not the same" (E. Fromm, The Art of Loving, love and its connections with emotions, psychology, and religion). The article is awash with phrases that constitute lying with statistics"; basically the article is a case of trying to get attention based on nothing very solid or new. So, (1) a lot of what the article is saying about so many women in college doing so well can be explained by: "But men and women tend to study different subjects, with many women choosing courses in education, health, arts and the humanities, whereas men take up computing, engineering and the exact sciences." and "A big reason is the choice of subject: education, the humanities and social work pay less than engineering or computer science." So, a lot of women are in college getting Bachelor's and Master's degrees as preparation for K-12 teaching. Add in the women there on the way to a nursing RN and have some more. Law? Get some more. Social science for work in HR? Got some more. The rest of the humanities? Women on the way to their Mrs. degree. Business? A CPA is a good career career path, especially for women. Women doing well in math in college? Sure: They want to be K-12 math teachers. But, from the OP, apparently still "whereas men take up computing, engineering and the exact sciences" so that the men are still there for technical training for hard work of applications, not just teaching, in a career. To be more clear, for the "academically" part of the title here, we're talking the real goal of academics, chaired profs at the top research universities, maybe? Nobel prize winners in the physical sciences? Fields Medal winners (math)? The girls/women are doing better there -- gee, why'd I not notice? Oh, I understand! In part we're talking K-6 where the girls have better manual dexterity, better hand writing, better verbal talent, better social skills (how to please instead of piss off the teachers, nearly all woman), better clerical talent (keep those columns in long division nicely lined up), much more interest in fictional reading, better social skills working in groups, much more eager to behave well* in class. Ah, now that's much of what is meant by "academically"!! Gee, what's that got to do with high end academic success? Well, let's see: Good starting attitude for such success is, "That old stuff is junk. Pitch it. Let's do some much better, new stuff. E.g., Maxwell did really well, but he was never clear on what would happen if the lab were moving rapidly, say, near the speed of light. So, looks like need to tweak Maxwell's equations. Or, the Riemann integral? Gotta be kidding! Looks like we can redo integration theory and integrate darned near anything and show that a function on a finite closed interval has a Riemann integral if and only it is continuous everywhere except on a set of length 0. Control theory? Sure. But what about in gusty winds? Now what? How 'bout some stochastic optimal control? Malaria caused by bad air? Gotta be kidding. Let's find out what the real cause is. How about something from all those mosquito bites? I can't do linear regression because some variable was listed twice or some variables are linear combinations of some of the others? Silly. Yes, I know, the normal equations matrix does not have full row rank and, thus, doesn't have an inverse, but why do we have to go through that matrix inverse stuff? We don't!" In the 10th grade I had such a case: My plane geometry teacher was a very ugly and angry woman. It was a good high school, and she actually could mostly work the exercises, but otherwise she was not much of a mathematician. So, no way did I want to have my knowledge of plane geometry, a subject I loved, owe anything to her. So, I slept in class and refused to claim to do any of the homework. But, I no doubt did by far the most homework of anyone in the class, solved every non-trivial problem in the book including the more difficult supplementary problems in the back. So, on the state test, I came in second in the class (the same guy beat me by a few points on the Math SAT also). But on that test the last problem was about inscribing a square in a semi-circle -- two corners were to be on the diameter and the other two, on the arc. How to do that? I said, go off on the side and construct a square, bisect one side, use that point as center and the distance to an opposite corner as radius, and draw a circle. Extend the bisected side to a diameter. Now have a figure similar to the desired one. So, for the given figure, just need, say, the length of half a side. So, that will be a forth proportional. So construct that and, ..., done. So, I wanted to check this and insisted over her objections that the teacher see me after school. She said I couldn't go off on the side and construct that other figure. Sounded like nonsense to me. As a college freshman, a girl asked me, given triangle ABC, construct D on AB and E on BC so that AD = DE = EC. Hmm .... Go off on the side and construct a figure similar to the desired one and for the crucial length AD, get that from a fourth proportional. The girl asked, "How'd you know to do that?" I told her it'd figured it out in the 10th grade. She said, "That's the advanced technique smilitude we are studying." "Well, I reinvented it in the 10th grade, and the teacher said I couldn't do that." No wonder I didn't much pay attention to the teacher. High end academics is about research, research, and research. There have to do some things that are new, and typically have to be the first one ever to do that thing. So, have to be able to say that not everything from the past is the best possible and can stand up as the first person ever to say how to do better, and that's not what gets good grades in K-6 or most of K-12 or most subjects in college. Looks like the OP is talking about nothing very new, different, or surprising. Or maybe: Men went for the technical fields hoping to use such as a foundation for a career, but now the main technical career is computing, and there most of what a student needs on a job they have to learn themselves with/without course in computer science. So, a lot of people are concluding that college is not really essential for a good start in computing. For engineering as a career, that's less popular than before. Physics? A lot of the interest there was in work in US national security, but that work less hot as a field than some decades ago. But for K-12 teaching, nursing, pharmacy, law, HR, CPA, etc., those female fields have remained relatively solid. So, women are still doing well in their fields while the men are having to build careers heavily outside of what is taught in college.