its not just talent (intelligence) women (in the past, both distant, and not too distant) have been denied educations, or when educated denied opportunity, or when educated and given opportunity, have be socially ostrosized for persueing certain careers.
about 3-4 years ago, Stanford medical school appointed a woman as the of the medical department(or was it the whole hospital? medical school?) (a specialist in neuro-surgery i think) and once her appointment was offical, she went public and took action against many of the doctors and hospital administrators.. who's behavior was discrimitory..
She said, for years, she had bit her tongue, held back with complaints, dealt with sexist treatment, so she could advance.. and all the while watched other women become demoralize and discouraged by the same treatment, and drop out of medicine and neurosurgery, because they couldn't take the added stress impossed by sexism. All the men involved were shocked, and surprized not to many women were.
Most women realize they can't rock the boat and suceed, and have learned that when you complain, you commit career suiside.
often, while individual men are nice, the system and rules that are in place are not...collectively, they become bullies.
and a recent study of really successful women (the NY times published a story on it) pointed out that sucessfull women tend either to 1) not marry and have families, 2) have a spouse who has basically put their career on the back burner, (ie become "house husbands") or 3) had family money (trust fund or other extra assets) that allowed them to be able to "buy" service over and above what their salary would normally afford.
Successful men? they had wifes! many of whom didn't work in outside jobs, and so were able to do all the "family tasks". women with out "house husbands" or money are less likely to succeed.. it has little or nothing to do with intelligence.. it has to do with there only being 24 hour in a day, and families take time...
Men have wife's, and they take care of the family stuff...
as for genetics, many a polymath has come out of blue.. with no family history of great genius. yes, you are right, my parents just over 5 feet tall (circa 1.6 meters tall)don't have any children or grandchildren taller than 6 feet (what 1.9 meters or so?) but intelligence seems to be different...
it does help to have parents who value educations (no matter how much or how little of it they have)
cultures that do, (judism comes to mind) tend to have higher levels of women with education, (and that education is broad-- more scientists, more doctors, more engineers..)
when i was a teen, and reading the almost 10 year old best seller, the microbe hunters, my mother disapproved.
she almost never censored books, but she disliked the idea of me being interested in science and medicine...
my life has been interesting, and many things interfered with it following a normal course.. but even if things had gone well, i know i would not have had any parental support for pursuing medicine.. i know i would have been advised to become a nurse... my parents openly stated "medicine is no career for a woman"...
how many other woman heard the same message, over and over again? life is hard.. when those arround you, rather than encouraging you, and supporting you, go around discouraging you, and undermining your confidence (and in many cases sabatoging your efforts..) its not hard to understand why so few woman have succeeded!
i am a few years older, and i realize, things are much better today.. but there are still many more obsticals for women than there are for men.. i hope, as your career progress, that is less and less true, and you never encounter them...
