Yet among the boys who stick to the task, the success rate in careers later on is much better than their feminine competition. What happens?

This is a hard subject because we want everyone to have a fair chance. The topics of the early school years agree more with girls than boys so girls get a developmental head start. There are exceptions, but generally girls develop social skills more rapidly, learn to please adults, teachers and parents, and surge ahead in school grades. The boys want to do things, do sports, do cars.

Late bloomers are very unlikely among dropouts. The Washington Post reports that a male dropout earns $421 per week compared with $1,089 for male college graduates. Without a college degree the divorce rate is 50 percent; with college it is 25 percent. Crime rates among those who have not gone to college are five times higher than among college graduates, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In college, the school-performance gap between girls and boys is widest among African-Americans, only a little less between low-income white boys and girls and between Hispanic boys and girls. At higher incomes, the American Council on Education says the school-performance gap between the sexes becomes less and disappears altogether in the top 25 percent of family incomes.

Hilary Clinton’s success in bucking the trend of career burnout is a tribute to her intelligence and perseverance and I am sure to the models set before her. Warner concludes in the NYT, “There’s something more at work here than relative levels of skill or laziness or drivenness or privilege, though all that clearly plays a role. From an early age, men seem quite clear about what expenditures of energy are worth their time. Like kids with A. D. D. (the majority of whom are boys), they’re able to spend great amounts of attention and energy on things they find interesting, but show considerable signs of challenge when it comes to tasks they find boring or personally unprofitable.”

Maybe there is a lesson to learn from the boys who blossom later. A girl’s motivation to please everyone is an advantage in the school years and the broad focus means wider success. But when the graduations are over, juggling the added adult and family responsibilities may force a career woman to fumble part of her daily agenda.

A boy’s motivation to put the wrong priorities at the top and ignore the rest is a risk factor in the school years. He needs encouragement to tackle the hard tasks in school first. When school is over, we all need to keep the priorities straight and distribute our efforts carefully.