If I were asked the most important difference between men and women, I would answer...

Men are curious enough to try to do the impossible or ludicrously to see if it can be done and how even when there are no apparent, immediate monetary or status benefits to doing so."

There are many examples of this throughout history. Andrew Wiles spent years trying to prove Fermat's Last Theorem even though men have for centuries (since 1637) tried to prove it without success. Eventually he did. If he hadn't, some other intrepid man would have. No woman, however, would have even made the attempt.

Michael Faraday contributed immensely to the study of electrodynamics back in the mid-19th century, long before the practical applications of electricity were even dreamt of. Today, our entire civilization is built on electricity and electronics.

Alan Turing proved what computers could do and what they couldn't in the 1940s and 1950s. His insights are the basis for the computer revolution that has greatly increased per-capita wealth and ultimately led to the Internet. Also responsible for both these things are Edgar Codd, inventor of the relational database; Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web; Ron Rivest, Adi Shamirand, and Leonard Adleman, inventors of RSA public/private key encryption, the basis for the kind of encryption that makes financial transaction on the web possible; and William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain, inventors of the transistor, an electronic switch that allowed miniature electronics including modern computers.

If you look at educational videos on YouTube about any subject matter from microbiology to astrophysics, they are almost all created by men. Occasionally, you see a female spokeman, but usually she's just a face with a team behind the channel doing the actual work. On channels ran by a single person, it's almost always a man if the channel is explaining something in science, mathematics, or engineering. This is true despite there being plenty of female STEM graduates.

In the game Minecraft, you can create circuits using in in-game mechanic that gives you things that are very fundamental electronic components. But from those components, you can create diodes and gates, and from those, you can create arithmetic logic units, and fully functional computers. Men have done this. Women have not. There is no practical reason to do so, but I will argue it is important nonetheless.

I could go on and on with examples, but there is one particular example I want to give that demonstrates the principle above that men are curious enough to do hard things without a reward in site. In 1970 the mathematician John Horton Conway invented a small, simple simulation called The Game of Life. He showed many interesting things about the emergent behavior of the simulation which has only four simple rules.

If that is not enough, other men have expanded on this work to show that you can create NOT, AND, and OR gates along with switches and reflectors in the Game of Life. This means that the Game of Life is Turing complete, i.e., you can write general purpose programs in the Game of Life including the Game of Life itself. So, of course, some men have done exactly that.

Game of Life in Game of Life

Explanation of how it works

This is awesome. And here's why it's important. In order to be a good mathematician, scientist, or engineer, you have to find things like this to be awesome. You have to be motivated by curiosity to such an extent that you are willing to spend countless hours trying to solve a problem that has absolutely zero monetary or status benefits. And 99.9% of the people who do that will either fail or solve the problem and nothing comes out of it. But that remaining 0.1% is every single important advancement mankind has made since the Stone Age.

History is really "his story" because history is a chronicle of the advancement of mathematical, scientific, and engineering knowledge made by men, not women. And the reason it's not women is because no woman is curious enough to spend countless hours of very hard work solving a problem without a damn big, immediate, and obvious reward of money or status for solving it. Even then, few women are motivated enough to work that hard and that long, but without such a reward in site, there is no motivation for women to even try.

Ultimately, this is why all great achievements, save a few flukes, will continue to be done exclusively by men. Yes, very few men have the drive and curiosity to do these things, but 100% of the people who do have that drive are men, and so 100% of the resulting achievements in history will be by men. No amount of bitching about women needing to be encouraged to go into STEM will change this reality. The only people making these grand achievements are the ones who are self-motivated to go into STEM because of pure love of the subject matter, an insatiable curiosity, and a drive to create something that is hard to do. Until women become psychologically like these men -- something that won't happen without genetic engineering -- they will continue to parasitically enjoy the benefits of technological advancement without ever contributing to that advancement.

Sure, they will want to take credit for those advancement because they had an easy job of middle management where they bark out orders to scientists and engineers, but barking out orders is not contributing. The only real contributions is the mental labor done by the few STEM workers who go to such extremes as programming the Game of Life in the Game of Life just because it's possible. And that is what makes men great.

Unfortunately, John Conway died on April 11, 2020 from Covid-19. He contributed more to the advancement of humanity than 99.9% of the human beings who ever existed. He will be missed. We need more John Conways, not more middle management and social influencers.