Maggie's Farm

Though the average IQ's of males and females are approximately the same, the male bell curve is flatter, and has has more representatives at both extremes. Men are, in fact, more genetically variable than females in many ways, and can be thought of as a vast evolutionary experiment carried on by women.

High-IQ societies (and no, I don't mean Mensa) are disproportionately male, and this is more pronounced the higher you go. This is particularly true of math and the physical sciences. This may be because some male brains are more damaged in areas relating to subtle social cues, and are thus better able to focus on single subjects for ungodly amounts of time. This is true in general, as women's brains have three times the connectivity between the two halves that men's do, and males are much more likely to have Asperger's. The oversimplification is that women multitask, men focus. The tribe needs both to survive.

Individuals vary greatly, and the highest measured IQ does belong to a female.

As to Math 55, I greatly suspect that the boys (and a few girls) down the river at MIT could handle this "hardest undergraduate math course" as could students at Caltech and a few other places. Almost anything that advertises itself as having the best of the best, when you are talking about people under 20, is FOS. Too much variability, too many bright stars that burn out, too many Mandelbrots who wander in from elsewhere with new ideas that leave others in the dust.