Actually, the sheer difference in the number of women at college compared to men could explain some differences. If it's correct that 2/3 Americans attend college, and it's 60% women there, that is 80% of the female population and 53% of the male population at college in any one college-aged cohort.
Just assuming complete gender-equality of all talents, and a normal distribution of talent within each gender, the "top 50%" of one gender is clearly better, in terms of averages, than the "top 80%" of the other gender. So, comparing the bulk of male college students to female college students might not be as unbiased as we think: you'd expect the smaller cohort to be more selective, and perform better.
Some people make a big deal out of the fact that many degrees done by women aren't very rigorous academically. But when you have 80% of a target population doing degrees, it's physically impossible to have them all doing rocket science. There's just a big bunch of dummies in there to put it bluntly, and a lot of them will have to study easy shit. The equivalent dummies on the male side just aren't going to college in the first place. In other words, women are equally capable as men, but the female college population just represents such a large chunk of the female population that they're hitting rock bottom with ability. How dumb do you think someone at the 20th percentile from the bottom is compared to someone at the 50th percentile?
Gonna borrow the wigglary and say some as capable as some, we wouldn't characterize all men as capable as all men
And looking at variability,
there's more variability in men than women, less average men and more on the low or high end. The articles I linked earlier brought this up, where in Malaysia or Britain there's more men in prison, more men in high stations, more men taking employable degrees, more men dropping out e.t.c.
And then you have the non-college community. Conversely to the college population, that represents the "bottom 50% of men" and the "bottom 20% of women". Now, clearly, the "bottom 20%" of one gender is going to be objectively much more shit than the "bottom 50%" of the other gender, so this could go partways to explaining the deficit between non-college educated men and women's wages. The number of men who don't go to college is 2.5 times as large as the number of women who don't, and includes more people of average ability, who would be doing degrees if they'd been women.
Point I'm making with all these talks of wages and shit is that if you don't go for some career path that requires your degree (STEM and a few others, like those damn agronomists) you'd have been better off joining your career at a young age and getting experience in it
I should add as well not all STEM subjects are equal, I found out early in my life if I wanted to do Biology and make a living doing it I'd have better chances doing anything but Biology and hiring impoverished Biology grads to do it for me
Even in humanities there's a hierarchy, you know like how they say if you want to do Journalism don't take a Journalism degree, take English, or if you want to take sociology, don't
What can I do with my degree? Advice worker
Community development worker
Further education lecturer
International aid/development worker
Social researcher
Social worker
Youth worker
Charity fundraiser
Housing manager/officer
Human resources officer
Probation officer
Public relations officer
Some of these require no higher education qualifications and just require talent and perseverance (the latter being far more crucial - the talented and lazy are smashed by the untalented and diligent), and some of them can go far (dear gods if you managed to rise up in one of the big charities you make scandalous amounts of money) but most of them are £20k band and may hover to around £34k band, enough to live by and raise maybe two kids, send one off to a good school, but your bank's always going to be hard pressed and you'll have to look for jobs elsewhere eventually or else settle for the same wage versus inflation
The result you'd end up with is more men dropping out of higher education to immediately pursue a trades job, some job like brokerage, or the armed forces, where long term practice and early adoption is a definite prerequisite to rising in the ranks, or more pursuing shit like STEM, where if they're not siphoned off by med people, have wide employment prospects with high salaries and in some cases, also high advancement
Really I don't like including med and nursing because they're odd ones, they never get paid enough for their work considering their line of work literally consumes your life, at least in the UK. 2 years a level, 5 years med school, 2 years foundation, 8 years to a consultant and 20 years a consultant to reach the highest pay grade of £100k annual, if you're that hard working and intelligent and you're doing it for the money you could've done anything else. Also our nurses vary on pay, I know a nurse who prides herself on earning more than her doctor peers because she also became a manager for clinical trials, but for the most part the majority plateau on around £34-50k, so earn more than junior doctors but unless they've spent a long career (especially after cuts) only the top brass will make it to the £100k mark, compare this to say going to work for some north sea gas firm diving in their rigs; you might die, become infertile or develop some other health condition and so on but you can earn £300k a year right off the bat, or joining the armed services from the start and having accommodation/food/healthcare sorted whilst you learn skills that make you employable when you leave (also high paid ones factoring in as well reduced expenses, though again you might die). I suppose less extreme and less risky are engineering degrees, economic degrees and so on where the risk of dying is pretty much tied to how much you eat, as you'll stand a good chance of leaving with a £23k-£50k job with lots of chances of future advancement (where on the high end the money is ridiculous)
Heck, just look at autism.
Autism is linked with fantastic skill in
fields of science, engineering, music, drawing and painting, albeit at the cost of poor communication skills which fucks you out of managing and business pretty quick. And there's a gender difference in autism
ranging from 2:1 to 16:1 against men. They also bring up that girls may be more severely impaired by autism when they have it, but that just might be a result of under-diagnosis so no conclusion there.
Francesca Happé of King's College, London, is one of them. As she observes, obsessional interests and repetitive behaviours would allow someone to practice, albeit inadvertently, whichever skill they were obsessed by. Malcolm Gladwell, in a book called “Outliers” which collated research done on outstanding people, suggested that anyone could become an expert in anything by practising for 10,000 hours. It would not be hard for an autistic individual to clock up that level of practice for the sort of skills, such as mathematical puzzles, that many neurotypicals would rapidly give up on.
Attention to detail, practice makes perfect e.t.c.
And the most obvious, bleedingly obvious thing is hormones, influencing people's behaviours in ways that would influence their future life choices in response to the environment. Experiments where they
give women testosterone and see what happens are hilarious and educational and more should be done.
But yeah, I agree that causation is both the most important bit of information here, and the hardest to conclusively prove. It might be difficult to tell if any progress is being made at all. What if our society reaches a point in the future where the education system and job market are completely gender-blind? Would anybody be able to tell? What if a field like computer science ends up leveling out at a 70/30 ratio between men and women, and this actually represents the average interests of men and women? That situation might be indistinguishable from one where the 70/30 ratio is due to some kind of discrimination.
SWEDES