1999 Helena Cronin vs Germaine Greer: Different outcomes for men and women

More dumbbells but more Nobels: Why men are at the top
What gives rise to the most salient, contested and misunderstood of sex differences... differences that see men persistently walk off with the top positions and prizes, whether influence or income, whether heads of state or CEOs... differences that infuriate feminists, preoccupy policy-makers, galvanize legislators and spawn 'diversity' committees and degrees in gender studies?

I used to think that these patterns of sex differences resulted mainly from average differences between men and women in innate talents, tastes and temperaments. After all, in talents men are on average more mathematical, more technically minded, women more verbal; in tastes, men are more interested in things, women in people; in temperaments, men are more competitive, risk-taking, single-minded, status-conscious, women far less so. And therefore, even where such differences are modest, the distribution of these 3 Ts among males will necessarily be different from that among females — and so will give rise to notable differences between the two groups. Add to this some bias and barriers — a sexist attitude here, a lack of child-care there. And the sex differences are explained. Or so I thought.

But I have now changed my mind. Talents, tastes and temperaments play fundamental roles. But they alone don't fully explain the differences. It is a fourth T that most decisively shapes the distinctive structure of male — female differences. That T is Tails — the tails of these statistical distributions. Females are much of a muchness, clustering round the mean. But, among males, the variance — the difference between the most and the least, the best and the worst — can be vast. So males are almost bound to be over-represented both at the bottom and at the top. I think of this as 'more dumbbells but more Nobels'.
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