I don't disagree with any of your assertions, but it remains a mystery how women then are excluded from top jobs if they do better in middle school through college and are less likely to be diagnosed with something that would impair their job performance.
I don't think it's simple enough to give a single answer to or to be able to answer entirely (and I'm not an expert at all), but I think there's a lot of factors...sexism, the competition at the top level and the natural aggressiveness of men, rewarding aggression in business, the negative view of babies and women with families in culture (again, sexism).
Honestly though...I think one of the biggest factors is that success in school does not predict success in a job. The traits rewarded in school do not correlate to the traits rewarded in high-competition jobs. Being quiet, listening, doing your work on time, not challenging the status quo, parroting things that teachers want you to, not challenging others...none of those things are traits you think of when you think of CEOs. Not that I think that aggressiveness necessarily SHOULD be what we're rewarding as a culture, but when the only goal is profits...it's hard to think that those things make a top company.
I'll probably get down-voted for mentioning him (and that's fine, I don't care), but Jordan Peterson has some really fascinating talks about personality traits between men and women and why personality traits in men lend toward more aggressiveness which is rewarded in competitive business.
Landing a "top job" is a zero sum game: on top of skill and intellect, you've also got to put in more labor and hours than anyone else to get there. For a large constellation of reasons, women are more likely to choose to put extra hours into childcare, and men are more likely to choose to put extra hours into the kind of market labor that lends itself to reaching those top tier jobs.
Young women now earn more than young men on average. Most high paying jobs go to people near the end of their career who are part of a different generation. I think it’s too early to know if young women are still discriminated against in the workplace.
It's not a mystery to me. If I want to excel at my job, I have to be willing to tell my boss he's full of shit and then elbow someone else out of line to get my idea implemented. This is not what I practiced in school for all that time and it's not what I get rewarded for in the rest of my life.
Men get the "benefit" of bimodal outcomes, in that they're disproportionately represented in the highest-paying jobs and in prison. Women get the steady middle, doing what needs to be done but less big risk/big reward. I'm dissatisfied with it on both sides. A system in which 'overactive' boys (or kids more generally) are not served well is not good, and a system that optimizes for the wrong outcome for 'good' girls is not good. It's clearly not doing that well for America given our susceptibility to mis- and disinformation and our need to import skills rather than effectively developing talent here.
