The only valid broad generalization is that there are no valid broad generalizations.
My take? I think we men are used to having things handed to us, and women in our society are used to having to try hard, and with more or less equal opportunity, they're kicking ass.
That line doesn't really match with men being asked to try equally hard.
It seems to me that academic and professional societies are desparate to hit a 50/50 balance in new inductees, but they are finding that there is a paucity of qualified candidates due to upstream issues. (Remember that the current crop of peak career researchers started their training in the 80s and 90s, when the gender split among new trainees in the sciences skewed heavily male and when DEI programs for early career researchers did not exist nearly to the extent that they do now.)
But if you admit a class of inductees that's 80% men and 20% women in this day and age, it's very difficult to explain in a way that doesn't put you in a hot seat. It's much easier to apply asymmetric standards until you get a neat 50/50 split (or at least something close) because this is less likely to raise questions. So that's what the societies do.
You’re also quite incorrect about when DEI programs started, they’re just actually called that now. Women have outnumbered men in universities since around 1980 because of attempts to get more women into college.
Edit: hard to keep up with the ninja edits, the point in the last paragraph is significantly changed.
> Women have outnumbered men in universities since around 1980 because of attempts to get more women into college.
Outnumbered in undergrad, when you account for all fields. But that’s not what's relevant here. What's relevant is PhDs, specifically in the sciences, because that's the pool from which scientific researchers are drawn. And the gender ratios there have changed dramatically since the 80s [1].
> You’re also quite incorrect about when DEI programs started
I never said that these programs hadn't yet started. I said that they didn't exist to the same extent that they do now. There is plenty of data showing a uptrend in the number of university positions dedicated to DEI over the past few decades. And it's not just an issue of naming.
[1] https://www.aip.org/statistics/data-graphics/percent-phds-ea...
That’s an interesting perspective.
But that would imply anyone who goes through hardship becomes superior. So for example war. Men historically have been exclusively sent to war and suffer through hardships unimaginable to most people who aren't sent to war. Women are generally not sent to war so it's arguable in terms of raw stress and pressure they have suffered less than men.
Yet one still cannot say in this day an age just because men experience raw violence and combat in the arena of war that men are smarter. No in fact women are still better than men in every possible way even though they don't go to war.
So hardship isn't part of the equation. The only thing left is biological. Sexual morphology gives women biological advantages in terms of intellectual capacity and performance. This is utterly clear. That is why these women are getting elected far more than men. It is the only logical explanation.