One hypothesis is that for most of history, the difference in results between being "above average" and "exceptional" was very large for men, and a less so for

One hypothesis is that for most of history, the difference in results between being "above average" and "exceptional" was very large for men, and a less so for women. So you've seen men go on dangerous trading journeys, fight for honor/prestige/titles/land, engage in duels and competitions, fight wars, break paradigms, take on establishments, and so on. Whereas for a woman - historically speaking - by simply being reasonably capable in all of the duties society expected of a woman, she could find a husband. For a woman, the best strategy would be to be a bit above average and work to progress, but not take huge risks. For men, taking victory or death type risks might've made more sense. This is almost certainly true, but clearly many women doexhibit very high levels of risk taking and status-seeking. I think that we may have underestimated the evolutionary rewards for risk taking among women. Regardless of how you feel about Hillary Clinton's politics, it's impossible to claim that she took a low-risk approach to life. And why would women strive so much to become top models, actresses, musicians, and artists if the evolutionary rewards were so low? Even women they don't exhibit quite as much risk-seeking behavior as men, there's still an awful lot of it. One thing I've read (mainly in popular evolutionary psych type books and articles) is that very high status women have two big advantages: a much greater opportunity to mate with the highest status men, and the ability to confer this status upon their children (violence is rare among the matriarchal bonobos, but apparently females do fight pretty viciously over their son's status in the mating pecking order)... People often point out that males can reproduce much more than females, which justifies a higher degree of risk taking (again from the pov of DNA trying to spread), but if status can be conferred on the next generation, females have almost as much ability to do this too...