Reddit reviews How Schools Shortchange Girls: The AAUW Report : A Study of Major Findings on Girls and Education

I can't believe I hadn't thought of this, because it's important: Find 'The War Against Boys' by Christina Hoff Summers in your local library, or order a copy.

In brief, there was a survey done by the AAUW that painted girls as victims and boys as oppressors / benefactors of The Patriarchy. This report was a major factor in shaping gender policies in schools throughout the late '90s to the present day. She examines the survey and report, and shows its weaknesses and biases.

It's also possible that the women we've been seeing on the undergrad/graduate level are products of an education system that conditioned them against participating in classes, at least according to a 1998 study from the American Association for University Women:

>A large body of research indicates that teachers give more classroom attention and more esteem-building encouragement to boys. In a study conducted by Myra and David Sadker, boys in elementary and middle school called out answers eight times more often than girls. When boys called out, teachers listened. But when girls called out, they were told to “raise your hand if you want to speak.” Even when boys do not volunteer, teachers are more likely to encourage them to give an answer or an opinion than they are to encourage girls.

Education reform on the pre-collegiate level has done a lot to address this trend since then, but the students affected aren't pre-college anymore. So we could still see fallout from older educational methods for quite some time.