This is completely a cultural thing. Plenty of female engineers from Eastern European and Asian countries. I worked with a Romanian female nuclear physicist-turned dev who realized slinging JavaScript was far more lucrative than academia.
> Men are just inherently more interested in "things" while women are inherently more interested in "people",
Why do men keep saying this? If it were true, wouldn't women be more qualified to comment, what with them being so much more inherently interested in people? Why should I trust men with such an obviously baseless opinion?
Oh right, because that would be a wildly sexist stereotype! Wow, yeah, I shouldn't do that!
This post-hoc rationalization without nuance and stated without evidence is not helpful, and misleading.
- C-level execs and upper management are all about dealing with people. Why is it so male-dominated?
- In a traditionally patriarchal society, stereotypically, the men went out into society and socialized with each other, whereas the women were atomized and kept to child-rearing and household labor.
- Accounting has a balance of the genders. I don't see the people-orientedness as significantly different from engineering.
>Men are just inherently more interested in "things" while women are inherently more interested in "people"
This makes evolutionary sense too: Socializing with your peers as a would-be mother improves the chances you will have children and have them survive. Focusing on your productivity as a would-be father improves the chances your tribe and thus your children, if any, will survive.
Women who don't socialize won't have children, and men who are too unproductive will drag their tribe down and fail to find a mate.
