As a former member of the math team (among many other nerdy pursuits), I have to ask the question that nobody ever wants to answer: is an academically prepared girl with the ability to compete at the highest levels on math team better served by competing on the math team (or the debate team, or the scholastic bowl team)?
I mean, one could plausibly look at the statistics and say "Hmm, it seems like the girls who are getting high scores on our math SATs are not bothering to go for the geek cred and are, instead, merely maximizing their credentials via easier routes such as making sure they get the A in English. This gets them into marginally better colleges. There, they avoid geek cred paths like going for a PhD in math and instead choose easier majors like business, where they work less, earn more, and have more work/life balance. Confound all this sexism! All genders should share equally in the underpaid, overworked, unsung triumph that is being a graduate student in a field not one person in ten thousand can even understand!"
"For example, in the SMPY cohorts, although more mathematically precocious males than females entered math-science careers, this does not necessarily imply a loss of talent because the women secured similar proportions of advanced degrees and high-level careers in areas more correspondent with the multidimensionality of their ability-preference pattern (e.g., administration, law, medicine, and the social sciences). By their mid-30s, the men and women appeared to be happy with their life choices and viewed themselves as equally successful (and objective measures support these subjective impressions). Given the ever-increasing importance of quantitative and scientific reasoning skills in modern cultures, when mathematically gifted individuals choose to pursue careers outside engineering and the physical sciences, it should be seen as a contribution to society, not a loss of talent."
It occurs to me that it has now been ten years since I graduated from the math team, and that the existence of Facebook et al would make it remarkably easy to track how valuable being $OMITTED_FOR_APPEARANCE_OF_MODESTY is in terms of enhancing one's future career prospects.
If you were previously in a club like this, take a look around. Without compromising any other individual's privacy, "low-ranking Japanese salaryman" puts me in the top quartile in terms of pay among alumni from my year of math team. (That may sound like bragging, but only if you have a very poor understanding of what salaries for 27 year old salarymen look like.)
Speaking of which: what a social science researcher could do with Pig, string matching, and some decade old active Facebook accounts. Ooooh the possibilities. P(occupation: lawyer OR occupation: banker OR occupation: vice president | wasPreviously: math team) versus P(... | female AND graduatedCollege).
I mean, one could plausibly look at the statistics and say "Hmm, it seems like the girls who are getting high scores on our math SATs are not bothering to go for the geek cred and are, instead, merely maximizing their credentials via easier routes such as making sure they get the A in English. This gets them into marginally better colleges. There, they avoid geek cred paths like going for a PhD in math and instead choose easier majors like business, where they work less, earn more, and have more work/life balance. Confound all this sexism! All genders should share equally in the underpaid, overworked, unsung triumph that is being a graduate student in a field not one person in ten thousand can even understand!"