it has bless to do with competence and intellect then a systematic exclusion of women from learning dating back to around thr Middle Ages. Around that time some charming pope decided nuns were no longer allowed to study. Over successive generations exclusion was reinforced and led to a self perpetuating sexism.
so yes you acknowledged the educational barriers but it simply means we are not talking about an even playing field when comparing womens scientific achievements vs men. What if we did it differently and looked at the percentage of women in science making significant contributions to science compared with the percentage of men.
That places things in a more even footing.
the difficulty with these direct comparisons is that they ignore the systemic, significant and multi generational barriers put in the way of female public achievement.
instead people prefer to make it mean something about inherent capability
on which point I might refer to Ben’s oft repeated comment that men earn more and thus deserve more recognition or glory or so something
the problem is that pay rates too are the result of a systematic approach to setting relative values that has its foundation in a post war view of Women’s roles.
posg war governments needed to get women out of the jobs they had been doing during the war so that returned soldiers had somewhere to go and something to do. So began the re domestication of women pushing them back to the kitchen
the systems used to benchmark pays were the result of manipulating job values to reflect the status quo that eventuated - paying male jobs more than female jobs. It was blatant, but unaware sexism and social engineering. I know this because I spent time with every provider of these systems and unraveled the statistical methods behind them. What presented as structured and systematic was based on flawed statistics, and poor application of important scientific principles.
