Here's a thought-- as to why "prodigies" tend to be male... in all but a few areas:
Perhaps this is either a nurtured/innate difference in level of competitive/cooperative tendencies in the individual. Girls are frequently taught by well-meaning parents, extended family, and other caregivers from a rather young age that being "competitive" is not very feminine, at the very least. Those messages are pretty insidious and difficult to avoid. Girls learn quite young that being a cutthroat competitive personality is a route to social misery, at least within one's own gender. Some of that seems to be biologically driven.
There is no way to play chess "collaboratively" so that nobody loses. KWIM?
What I find rather interesting is that so few domains are designated "prodigy" domains to start with. LOL. Most of them happen to be male-dominated pursuits for one reason or another-- if one takes sports, for example, most of those ARE going to be male-dominated by definition, and they certainly are seldom co-ed by virtue of biological differences between genders.
But what about music, where physiology would seem to play no role at all? That one would have to be entire nurture, I'm thinking, since nature probably distributes the ability rather evenly.
I have two musical prodigies in my extended family-- one of each gender. The male one was encouraged to pursue it as a career-- the female one was DISCOURAGED to pursue it as a soloist because it wasn't "feminine" to be beating others in competition, I presume.
Honestly, the female was the more talented of the two, and had a better solo instrument (piano, other keyboard, guitar, etc. etc. etc.) than the male one (clarinet, other woodwinds). Just as an aside, the female one was also probably a potential MATH prodigy, though this too was strongly discouraged in that family. The male prodigy wound up doing the conservatory track and made a living as an symphonic musician and teacher, albeit not at the elite level. Though he did spend time showcased as a military band member during the Vietnam era, so.
If this hypothesis is true, then one would expect the appearance of high level talent to be quite unevenly distributed-- by nationality as well as gender-- on instruments where size is mostly irrelevant, such as the brass/woodwind instruments and the smaller string instruments. (Not everyone has the hand size to play piano or double-bass, and this is uneven by gender).
That does seem to be true. Internationally, male soloists seem to be somewhat more common than female ones, but within individual instruments, there is a CLEAR cultural influence-- consider the flute or trumpet for example. Few female trumpet soloists in the US where brass instruments are a "guy" thing, and most international flautists are male, though almost none of them are American... where nearly all flute soloists are female. Heck, nearly all FLAUTISTS in America are female. Just as many danseurs are European, and yet America seems to have no difficulty producing prima ballerinas.
It's an interesting thing, to look beyond the obvious explanations that break down once one examines the evidence for counterexamples, and questions "why" those counterexamples exist. Are they merely outliers? Perhaps-- but then again, everyone who is a prodigy or PG either one is already an outlier.
I'd be very interested to see if male prodigies have a wider range of IQ than female ones do, at least unless one ventures into female-dominated domains like dance or musical theater. My guess is that they do-- because for a girl, social interaction is biologically a prime directive. That offers a powerful innate motivation to NOT engage in competitive activities that would damage one's social interactions and standing among peers. However, if you're already "weird" and you can't do anything about it, then all bets are off-- you have nothing to lose by being yourself and exploring an area of this level of ability. I'd expect that the same thing should hold true within female-dominated areas in the arts-- the boys that pursue them avidly probably have some other factor that makes them non-normative to begin with, be that gender identity, intelligence, or something else.
Does that make sense?
I certainly experienced this myself. My own LOG tended to be higher than the males in the male-dominated domains, as often as not. And really, those were domains where the price of admission to begin with is usually IQ > 135. It's just very obvious when you can make cognitive leaps that others can't, or just DO things that others have to work through step by painful step. Well, I'm sure that everyone here gets what I mean by that.
Girls by and large-- and women, too-- would often weigh the social cost of being themselves as being "not worth" the possible glory in standing head and shoulders above others. That's still seen as being distinctly UN-feminine.
