Earlier quoted context omitted.
The amount of brainpower in that room is incredible. Now think about it this way: probably half of what was available at the time got lost somehow. Makes you wonder where we'd be technologically if we had not systematically repressed one half of the possible scientists. On the positive side: probably a lot of that research got done anyway, with some guy taking credit for it.
I may be going on a limb here, but I have a sense of the same broken logic here as the ubiquitous argument of lost revenue[1]. To be clear, I don't argue the point of suppression and cultural standards affecting the scientific (or, not specifically, any other) thought, but using such simplistic way to quantify that effect. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_sales
Denying half (or even more than half) of your citizens access to education and more prestigious stem jobs means you are tossing away an Einstein or a Bohr once every generation or so. The cumulative costs of that are enormous, and are compounding, compared to that a couple of $ of money that does not end up in the pockets of media moguls is very small potatoes.