 boys have, to explain why their are more men at the top, without also mentioning that there are also more boys in special education classes than girls.
Boys are doing worse at all levels if education and their are more boys in special education than girls. We should not try to tear successful males down at any opportunity and then selectively ignore all the males at the bottom. It doesn't make sense that boys are incouraged more in an environment that us mostly set up against them. Whether you want to use sociology or individual biology to explain males greater success you can't ignore men's greater failures.
Do you think all the great mathematicians and scientists of the past had their educations handed to them?
Read up on some of their bio's and you'll see all the real hardships and little opportunities some of them had.
When I was a little girl I was a math genius in school. Next grades I hade lousy results and then I decided, when adult to study during evening, I got the highest degrees in math, but it is not me, it is my husband that is a Professor at a university.
And why, because I'm totally at his service at home. Clean sheets in bed, clean clothes, socks... I even buy books and choose interests for him, I arrange our/his travels... food...gardenwork, Im even a carpenter, plumber etc sometimes.
I'm a universal genius, but that gives me no credits in math.
But women still feel pressured to have children, and if you've never had any, you don't know how much time and effort it takes in raising them, much more than other "hardship." Most people can deal with hardship, it doesn't take a genius (no pun intended) to deal with hardships now and then, but I know that raising kids well is an extremely difficult and time-consuming job, and it WEARS YOU OUT.
And btw, this thing about hardships really isn't true. In a study done, it was found most geniuses came from comfortable middle class families. It seems if you're either too poor or too rich, genius eludes you as well.
Just for clarity, when I said "the supposed advantage boys have" I was talking about the myth that boys are given more support in education.
The idea is ridiculous given that boys are doing worse overall and that this gap had been growing for the past 20 years while little was done to address the "boy crisis. (There gas actually been more aid going to girls) Obviously boys should be doing as well and we know that girls do not have higher iqs.
And with regards to giftedness and encouragement there are actually more girls in programs for the gifted and girls are more likely to be seen as gifted, shown and discussed here, and better summarized here.
But this not be the case. Based on iq or actual achievements boys should be seen as gifted as girls if not more. In fact there should be more boys in schools for the gifted seeing how boys are over represented on BOTH the low end and high end of the iq spectrum. But we only see mire boys in special ed...
The people saying we give more encouragement to (gifted) boys are using old talking points and ignoring the realities boys face. It will probably take ten years before people can actually look at what's going on.
It seems that feminists and other egalitarians tend to see the average differences in male and female abilities as a *problem* to be somehow "solved" with social policies. It seems obvious that Nature has an extremely strong tendency to bifurcate (split into two) gender across nearly all species. We are mammals and all mammalian species have two genders with non-identical roles and abilities. Of course men and women have many similar abilities and can adapt somewhat to different roles but our biological socio-gender orientations are not identical and they are not supposed to be either.
Feminism as an ideological and political tendency seems to have its historical location in what we may call the proletarianisation of the population, where late industrial capitalism has made us essentially "workers" who sell our labour. Globalism has the same tendency to negate ethnic differences and reduce us to worker-citizens. But humanity obviously isnt all about obliterating the differences between sexes and ethnicities even if that is what capitalist liberaism wants. *Difference* is an extremely important facet of "human being". Indeed *difference* is transcendental to all higher life and I think that we would have to go back to some very basic single cell lifeforms to get identity or equality.
The egalitarians seem to have not merely a social agenda but also a eugenics agenda: they wish to use social policies and agitation to direct human evolution down a path where differences are obliterated in the name of some "moral" crusade of "equality", "tolerance" and whatever other buzz words. But their project seems radically contrary to the basic principles of mammalian life, if not of *all* life. Sure it seems "good" if women obtain higher abilities but is the basic egalitarian orientation mistaken? Im not against social policies that direct human genetic development but it seems that eugenics should work *with* Nature rather than against it. Quite what that means is obviously open to debate but I think that it is worth noting that most feminists and other leftists are overtly dead set against any form of eugenics but in fact their own policies are radically eu/dis genic.
In my opinion egalitarianism will have a very high price (social collapse) because the well-being of society depends on its good order. You have to have good leaders to make good decisions, for instance, and supposedly "moral" democracy is no substitute for meritocracy, as Plato explained long ago. We have inherited a highly advanced technological society from the past and we are able to prosper because of the abilites and common sense of past generations, at least for a time but their world is rapidly changing into something new that will have to take responsibility for itself where social stability and progress is concerned. My fear is that democratic egalitarianism (and feminism, multiculturalism etc.) is actually a forefunner to *tyranny* as Plato noted, even to the "worker state". Mensheviks believe that capitalist society will gradually prepare the way for World Communism and cultural Marxism is aimed at preparing or hastening the transition.
As for the idea that differences of ability are due to "discrimination" (another favourite leftist buzz word), we have had harsh "reverse discrimination" in the UK for decades. You could lose your job for saying that men and women have different average IQs let alone races, especially in the public sector. All are obliged to promote "equality" 24/7 or be ostracised and/ or have their career and their lives ruined. A lot of people seem to think that is a great idea and a sign of "progress". Afterall, equality is "good" and society used to be "evil".. right?
Don't even try to feed me the sentiment that raising kids is the "hardest job in the world". The hardest jobs are things like crab fisherman, working down in mines that might collapse, being deployed in battle, etc... Stay at home moms have it pretty easy and if you can't see that you aren't cut for the difficult high stress jobs at the top (one readon I think men have a shorter lifespan). Those mothers aren't even having to collect water from a well, wash clothes at the river, gather wood, build fires, pluck chickens, make pottery and textiles to sell, and so on. Homes used to be places of production and work but they are far from that now. They stay at home dads I talked to also confirmed this.
And sure, most well achieved scientists came from well off backgrounds but not all which is the point. Essentially every major scientific breakthrough has come from men even though not all those men were given much opportunities... Instead they made it happen. The hardships I was talking about were people like Euler who became nearly blind but continued to write prolifically by doing many of the complex calculations in his head and relying on a near picture perfect memory. Im also talking about Stephen hawking who can only get his ideas out through painstakingly tedious trial and error as he compress with his physical disability. That and he also has to do many complex calculations in his head.
Then there was Einstein who came up with the theory of relativity, not in a university, but while working in a patent office.
 You won't get anywhere with that attitude or ever be like the people you casually dismiss as having "petty" hardships.
It is truly difficult for someone from Mars to empathize with a person from Venus, and visa versa. Best to keep it genetic, and even then, limited to the essential 1.5% of human genes that make us different from chimps (and all the other lifeforms in this section of the Universe).
What an ill informed discussion. There are no female math geniuses? Rubbish.
What about Hypatia and Ada Lovelace. There were MANY others. Not bad given the fact that educating women has been very strongly discouraged for millenia. Wisewomen were even burnt as witches.
Women do better at all levels of objective education mostly because they are more likely to behave. But even in my generation the brightest girl at school was not allowed to go to Uni by her family. I myself caught myself instinctively down-playing my intelligence for social acceptance when I moved from single sex to mixed education. Women fall behind as soon as they are judged subjectively rather than objectively.
When I had my first child all of a sudden I was no longer invited