I take issue with the idea that one must be an "extraordinary achiever or performer," or one is therefore not gifted. Hogwash. There are a million reasons why one might not be such (LDs, poverty, abuse, racism, mental illness, bad luck, lack of desire to achieve in conventional ways, a wish to focus on other things...you yourself seem to think that gifted women's life focus should perhaps be on raising children). It doesn't mean the ability is gone.
In the middle class suburb where I grew up, there were some kids in the gifted program in elementary school who were not taking mostly honors and AP classes in high school and who were not academic stars. They did not have big setbacks I knew of. There weren't dumb, and they went on to earn college degrees, but they did not present as "gifted" in high school.
Talent search programs typically allow you to qualify in
elementary school based on SCAT or Explore scores, but by middle school, good SAT and ACT scores are required to qualify.
Implicitly they are saying that early indications of giftedness need to confirmed by later results.
