The international mathematical olympiads consist of a very difficult math problem-solving competition bringing together the most brilliant teenager mathematical talents in the world. It takes place every year.
Even in the countries which most favor female participation at the mathematical olympiads (like Russia or Bulgaria) there are only 12% to 24% females, which means that males still make up 76% to 84% of exceptionally talented young mathematicians, much more in other countries. On a combined international basis, nearly all golden medals at mathematical olympiads go to boys. Girls just cannot compete against boys at this level.
The reason why there is such an overwhelming male representation in fields like top level mathematics, theoretical physics or astrophysics is actually very simple. It can be explained by the the fact that you need a IQ of at least 3 or 4 standard deviations above the mean of 100 (in other words a IQ of at least 150 or 160) to master the most advanced topics in these disciplines. Now there are numerous studies showing that the standard deviation of males IQ is significantly larger than the standard deviation of females IQ. If you add the fact that the IQ distribution is approximately normal (or gaussian) then you have a very simple explanation of the huge male over-representation in those areas.
Note that exactly the same factors probably explain why there is a huge male over-representation at top levels in games of pure abstract intelligence like chess or checkers. For example, according to the FIDE database of April, 2009 (available free online) there is only 1 female in the best 100 chess players worldwide (1%) and 21 in the first 1000 (2.1%) whereas females represent 7.6% of the overall FIDE chess rated population of about 100,000 players. All the big chess tournaments (like world championships for example) are open to both genders but as the result of the huge gender gap female-only chess tournaments had to be set up in addition to all the other ones open to both genders.
incidentally this male imbalance is not restricted to humans. For example male rats perform more accurately than female rats on tasks that require spatially organized representations. No social factors can explain better male rats performance, certainly not male rats chauvinistic behavior.

Fortunately, a class of small girls was nearby and they helped me to clean the mess. Together with their (female) teacher, we also gave special thanks to the winner of the contest who collected the highest number of sheets of paper. ;-)

The girl on the picture is cute and obviously relatively intelligent.

However, Janet Hyde’s science is just nonsense. Some added statements are clearly fabricated. But the old problems with her work are discussed e.g. here:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/07/janet-hyde-boys-girls-in-math-not.html

The higher variance of the boys’ distribution is clear, especially for kids above 15 years when the difference expands in the full force. Almost all winners of mathematical olympiads are boys, no woman has won a physics or chemistry Nobel prize for 45+ years, and so on, and so on. This difference of variances, which plays a key role in the vastly pro-male ratio in the very high percentiles, has well understood physiological, evolutionary, and psychological reasons, and has been demonstrated in thousands contexts.

I am sure that everyone who observes the world around her must be aware of these facts.

Boys get attention. I started uni at 15, and made sure that No media attention was allowed–it would have been a social disaster. The boy was in the newspapers and dropped out from the MIT
phd program at 19. I had emotional issues and got my phd at 22–solving a famous problem.

Some people thrive on media attention, like Terry Tao–others, such as one female math prodigy out of oxford, and one male prodigy out of caltech are destroyed.

my conjecture is that most girls are too socially intelligent to want the prodigy label–and most parents of girls are not interested in labeling their child this way.

In any case, many great mathematicians were not prodigies.

Now, we have “The Bell Curve”, also from Harvard.
Plus ca changr….

Those tests were weighted to tasks in which experience with certain toys matter a great deal–and it has recently been rediscovered that some practice makes a huge difference in the performance of females here.

Are girls smarter than boys? No, I think–but early 20th century girls were more practiced at sitting quietly. Spacisl IQ tests are extremely sensitive to anxiety. With the introduction –in the USA–of medis coverage that girls are spacially inferior, girls did perform more poorly–and this has been shown to be due to anxiety.

I wonder if the pooer performance of males on verbal tests is similar? After all, Shakespeare was a male!

I wonder how often the usual stereotype actually means something like this?

As many as fail to be supported by data.

I’m glad that you felt no reason to be bothered by the supposed superiority of boys, but what does that have to do with the confirmation, in hard numbers, of the scientific fact that there is nothing to be bothered about in the first place?