Why are fewer women engineers than men?

I think the cultural reasons for this in the US are probably related to a mindset of "traditional" roles which tend to get carried over from generation to generation.

During my days in engineering school, it would have been quite intimidating for a girl to be in a class full of guys. There were just a few girls and they would stick together as a bunch. Almost every one of the girls did very well though, very smart.

Engineering is not a social activity. Women are built for social activities. Since Homo Sapiens appeared on the planet 195,000 years or more ago, the woman had to keep track of a whole bunch of kids to make sure they don't get eaten by lions, leopards or hyenas. Thus freed of having to constantly make sure his offspring remain unconsumed, the male was able to concentrate on building things, like better weapons, more secure domiciles, etc.

Men are builders, women are social directors.

News to Blickers, whom I hardly ever disagree with: women vary in today's world.

I lived for a while in yesteryears. At my nice high school (not one I got to pick), in 1959, I wanted to be a doctor, and Carolyn wanted to be an engineer.
The nuns wouldn't send transcripts for Carolyn. I didn't find out what happened on that: I might remember that her father threatened to sue.

With me, I was interviewing a nun for the school paper, and it got turned around so she interviewed me, finding out I wanted to go into medicine. Then came the full blast effort to get me to join the order (I almost bought the shoes for postulants), enticing me that I could be a nursing nun in India. With help from my family, I got out of that.

A year or two later, when I was at university, I sent for the MCat catalog, and found that almost every medical school in the US had zero woman in their last year's admissions; a small percentage did, say, 6 women among 95 men. I no longer have that catalog, but I'll estimate that less than 10 percent took any women at all. Several of them just took one.

This was just before the Civil Rights Act, which changed our U.S. world - suddenly women could get into law and med schools and (I dunno) engineering classes. There had already been a bunch of us in chem classes, and that might have grown as well.

There is (or was) a bias that women are dumb at math. Hmmmm. My dyslexic cousin who used tape recorders in university so that she caught everything, had a perfect 800 SAT math score (that was the highest back then). She later worked for the US Gov in some capacity that was out of bounds to talk about.

What am I getting at? Brains differ, women's or men's.
Maybe there is a preponderance in varied directions; I take some bit of that is the vast weight of culture.

You're a brave man, Blick

Who is your builder ?

I'm no way Math Woman, and I know you are math smart.
This is probably usual with non mathy women and math smart males, the divergence.

I explored a lot of math when I was about to take my arch boards, and enjoyed it (although that was when I first got tinnitus, while studying).

Alternately, I've known men who were math 'dummies', however otherwise educated, but made it through school. Even I was math smarter, as I had to be for varied calcs.

Society is way too binary on imposed gender roles. A couple of months ago I went to a gathering in my country (it was a yearly event that took place to promote open-source software among the general public) and I got addressed twice as "a lesbian" because I was into computer science. Go figure. Maybe they're the same people who would label a man "gay" because he likes cooking his own meals. I sincerely don't understand how some people can be so narrow-minded