Short version: Boys and girls are different.

Or, vive la différence.

Or, "Men and women deserve equal respect
as persons but are not the same" (E. Fromm,
The Art of Loving, love and its connections
with emotions, psychology, and religion).

The article is awash with phrases
that constitute lying with statistics";
basically the article is a case of trying
to get attention based on nothing
very solid or new.

So, (1) a lot of what the article is
saying about so many women in college
doing so well can
be explained by:

"But men and
women tend to study different subjects,
with many women choosing courses in
education, health, arts and the
humanities, whereas men take up computing,
engineering and the exact sciences."

and

"A big reason is the choice of subject:
education, the humanities and social work
pay less than engineering or computer
science."

So, a lot of women are in college getting
Bachelor's and Master's degrees
as preparation for K-12 teaching.
Add in the women there on the way to
a nursing RN and have some more.
Law? Get some more.
Social science for work in HR?
Got some more.

The rest of the humanities?
Women on the way to their Mrs. degree.

Business? A CPA is a good career
career path, especially for women.

Women doing well in math in college?
Sure: They want to be K-12 math
teachers.

But, from the OP, apparently still

"whereas men take up computing,
engineering and the exact sciences"

so that the men are still there for
technical training for hard work
of applications, not just teaching,
in a career.

To be more clear,
for the "academically" part of the title here,
we're talking
the real goal of academics, chaired profs
at the top research universities, maybe?
Nobel prize winners in the physical sciences?
Fields Medal winners (math)? The girls/women
are doing better there -- gee, why'd I not
notice?

Oh, I understand! In part we're talking K-6
where the girls have better manual dexterity,
better hand writing, better verbal talent,
better social skills (how to please instead
of piss off the teachers, nearly all woman),
better clerical talent (keep those columns
in long division nicely lined up),
much more interest in fictional reading,
better social skills working in groups,
much more eager to behave well* in
class. Ah, now that's much of what is meant
by "academically"!!

Gee, what's that got to do with high
end academic success? Well, let's see:
Good starting attitude for such success is,

"That old stuff is junk.
Pitch it.
Let's do some much better, new
stuff. E.g., Maxwell did really
well, but he was never clear on
what would happen if the lab
were moving rapidly, say, near
the speed of light. So, looks
like need to tweak Maxwell's equations.

Or, the Riemann integral? Gotta be kidding!
Looks like we can redo integration theory
and integrate darned near anything and
show that a function on a finite
closed interval has a Riemann integral
if and only it is continuous everywhere
except on a set of length 0.

Control theory? Sure. But what about
in gusty winds? Now what? How
'bout some stochastic optimal
control?

Malaria caused by bad air? Gotta
be kidding. Let's find out what
the real cause is. How about
something from all those mosquito
bites?

I can't do linear regression because
some variable was listed twice or
some variables are linear combinations
of some of the others? Silly. Yes,
I know, the normal equations matrix
does not have full row rank and, thus,
doesn't have an inverse,
but why do we have to go through
that matrix inverse stuff? We don't!"

In the 10th grade I had such a case:
My plane geometry teacher was
a very ugly and angry woman.
It was a good high school,
and she actually could mostly work
the exercises, but otherwise she
was not much of a mathematician.

So, no way did I want to have my
knowledge of plane geometry, a subject
I loved, owe anything to her.
So, I slept in class and refused to
claim to do any of the homework.

But, I no doubt did by far the most
homework of anyone in the class,
solved every non-trivial problem in
the book including the more difficult
supplementary problems in the back.

So, on the state test, I came in
second in the class (the same guy
beat me by a few points on the
Math SAT also).

But on that test
the last problem was about
inscribing a square in a semi-circle --
two corners were to be on the
diameter and the other two, on the
arc. How to do that?

I said, go off on the side and
construct a square, bisect one side,
use that point as center and
the distance to an opposite
corner as radius, and draw a
circle. Extend the bisected side
to a diameter. Now have a figure
similar to the desired one.
So, for the given figure,
just need, say, the length of
half a side. So, that will be
a forth proportional. So
construct that and, ..., done.

So, I wanted to check this and
insisted over her objections that the teacher
see me after school.
She said I couldn't go off
on the side and construct that
other figure.
Sounded like nonsense to me.

As a college freshman, a girl
asked me, given triangle
ABC, construct D on AB
and E on BC so that AD = DE = EC.
Hmm .... Go off on the side
and construct a figure
similar to the desired one
and for the crucial length
AD, get that from a fourth
proportional.

The girl asked, "How'd you
know to do that?"

I told her it'd figured it out
in the 10th grade.

She said, "That's the
advanced technique smilitude
we are studying."

"Well, I reinvented it in the
10th grade, and the teacher
said I couldn't do that."

No wonder I didn't much pay attention
to the teacher.

High end academics is about
research, research, and research.
There have to do some things that
are new, and typically have to
be the first one ever to do that thing.
So, have to be able to
say that not everything from the
past is the best possible
and can stand up as the first
person ever to say how to do better,
and that's not what gets
good grades in K-6 or most of
K-12 or most subjects in
college.

Looks like the OP is talking about
nothing very new, different, or
surprising.

Or maybe: Men went for the technical
fields hoping to use such as a foundation
for a career, but now the main technical
career is computing, and there most of
what a student needs on a job they have
to learn themselves with/without
course in computer science. So, a lot of
people are concluding that college is
not really essential for a good start
in computing. For engineering as a
career, that's less popular than before.

Physics? A lot of the interest there
was in work in US national security,
but that work less hot as a field than
some decades ago.

But for K-12 teaching, nursing,
pharmacy, law, HR, CPA, etc., those
female fields have remained
relatively solid. So, women
are still doing well in their
fields while the men are
having to build careers heavily
outside of what is taught in
college.