Further to Chitown's interesting reaction 2 posts above, I think that "someguy" is saying that, after the removal of social constraints against female composers and conductors in recent times, women have shown that they can perform on a par with men in these activities. Hence, by inference, if these constraints had been removed centuries earlier, the classical music world may not have been dominated by male personnel in the manner referred to by Chitown.

I would say that undoubtedly there were strong social constraints conspiring against women composers and conductors in times gone by, despite the odd exception like Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn. Undoubtedly, too, there are probably many successful females active in these roles in present day. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that there would have been female challengers to match the mega-huge talent of the likes of Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and several others, were it not for the social constraints of the time preventing the rise of women in the composing activity. In the absence of these constraints, maybe there would be have more good female composers, but whether they might have matched the greatness of the afore-mentioned composers is unclear.

I have no strong opinion on the relative importance of social or biological factors, and I would not wish to speculate either way. All I would say, however, is that even if it were true that there is some general biological advantage in favour of men in terms of classical music composition, it doesn’t rule out the possible emergence of a few rare cases of female supreme genius such as to match the quality of Beethoven et al, had there been no concurrent social constraints against this activity at the time. One will never know.