Outreachy: an intern's perspective

Good comments. I would add a couple elements I find fairly substantial. You didn't talk much about why that gender differentiation was there, but of course others have. Traditional patriarchical sexism and subjugation. Perhaps with some kernel of legitimate brain differences that explain perhaps a small fraction of that gender gap in young advanced mathematical study. But of course that has been abused by sexists, and in turn become almost a taboo topic for the timebeing. Which is fine, it'll probably be easier to talk about in 5 years after we've had the first female POTUS for a few years.

But the one glaring angle I feel obliged to speak out for- I recall the days of watching Cindy Crawford stream in line of pixels at a time (over 56k) as I was a young teenager, without access to the modern internet's trove of inexpensive 'pornography'. And witness to the sale of porno mags in every gas station behind little black bars that covered most of the covers. And witness to the mainstream local religion's massive and systematic persecution of personal sexuality and liberty. And witness to the mainstream professional mental health industry's similarly horrific perversion of the word 'deviance'. And witness to the VCR technology allowing masturbators access to more inexpensive home viewing tech- vs the other option of the mainstream movie theatre downtown showing X rated films. I mean wow. I think that all has something to do with it too. Kids these days are probably like I used to be. You hear some horrors of how society was 30 years ago, and it doesn't sink in how far the world has come in the last 30 years. And you are much older before it sinks in how real those horrors were for your parents, and how it helped create and shape the human terrain we currently live in.