I understand your point, but I think you're combining a lot of different issues into a single argument.
Yes, men dominate leadership of most fields. That's a widely known problem. The stats are glaring and blatant. It's difficult to fix, but we generally know some strategies that work. The challenge is building political will.
This article is about a problem that is not widely known, which is obviously why she chose to write about it.
Forgetting about whether elementary school performance results in leadership positions, first look at the effects of penalizing high-energy children (regardless of gender):
- ADD over-diagnosis
- poor grades due to teacher bias, which the article mentions (academic grades are artificially deflated based on unrelated behavioral issues)
- school-to-prison pipeline (not mentioned in the article, but a huge problem for boys and not at a problem at all for girls)
Maybe a solution would be to have gender-only schools, but that might cause other problems. It seems that most of the problems in education are a result of treating children as a homogeneous group instead of individuals, which is another thing this article points out.
There may not be enough money to have individual lessons for children, but perhaps a more college-like system (where high-energy children can enroll in physical classes while low-energy children can choose to do something else) would work.
For the record, I was extremely high-energy and not athletic at all. The solution for me was not to do competitive, physical classes. It was to do active classes that involved working (even if "working" was just filling out worksheets) instead of sitting still and listening to a lecture.