>What about this comment is causing this to be downvoted?
Well
> If the degree programs are 80% men and 20% women, statistically the men will outperform the women in outlier achievements just because there will likely be more positive outliers in the larger group by definition even if the means are similar.
This would predict 20% of outliers would be women. However this is not the case.
A reasonable hypothesis to account for the gap in yoyr reasoning is that higher male variance in intelligence drives more male outliers in physics. I find your explanation for the lack of representiation of women to be comparatively unsatisying.
Now there is a better counterargument from the world of Chess. Chess has similar controversies about Men saying things about women having lower potential. Well a father didn't buy the nature based arguments decided to prove child rearing played a huge role in success and taught his daughters how to play chess. One of his daughters became arguably the greatest women player of all time although she wasn't ever considered world champion material.
Essentially though thia case may indicates its differences in early childhood rearing that causes the differentials. It's not participation in a specific educational stream that's the issue its girls being brought up in a fundamentally different way from how boys are in general. Yet I see much of the comtemporary political discussion focus on higher educational and workforce equity. Really groundbreaking physics tends to be discovered by younger physicists so if education is truly the problem this is waiting too long to address any potential childrearing problem.