One of the great head-scratchers of our time is that women are generally better than men in math and science when measured by school grade. Yet it tends to be the men who go and do all of the interesting and well-paid engineering and science jobs. Various explanations are put forward for this, including “Men just like this sorta stuff more” all the way to, “well, D’Oh, it’s the patriarchy.”

A new paper in Nature Communications gives us an entirely different explanation, that of David Ricardo on trade. This is the only nontrivial and non-obvious result in all of the social sciences, comparative advantage. It’s nontrivial as it can and does explain this gender segregation and its non-obviousness is shown by how many get it wrong – Peter Navarro and President Trump on the original subject of trade, for example.