Finally! Someone had to say it. These sorts of situations (low percentage of women engineers) are not issues; they're just facts, and most likely caused by, generally enough, the way that women and men think/act/desire. It's not a problem, it's just a fact of life that people, oddly enough, are having a hard time accepting.
In my observation, the differences are in what is found intrinsically rewarding.
If I may over-generalized, men have a tendency to find the math itself, the technology itself, solving the puzzle itself, to be rewarding. Women find it more rewarding to see the impact/result of their work.
There is also a difference in how they view competition/challenges. I've seen this with girls in robotics. A robot competition is more likely to get the boys excited. Reframing the task as a "challenge", ie: "Can you make a robot to solve this problem?" with the challenge being more open-ended and the result being an objective demonstration instead of a head-to-head run-off is much more motivating.
So I think it is worth looking at what intrinsic rewards girls find motivating, and connecting those possibilities back into the technology is important.
People have said exactly what you are saying about every single underrepresented minority in almost any field of human endeavor. Almost every single time history has proven them wrong.
Maybe people are right on this one. But I doubt it.
Yeah, that's true, but my point was that gender differences are much more real on an individual level than differences between races.
Racial differences are extraordinarily superficial and hard to define. Gender differences by comparison are massive and very real.
Again, there is a very real debate on how much is culture and how much is biological.
But, it's not ALL culture. The fact is girls and boys are different and will continue to be different.
We don't know if their interest level in math/science is biology or culture.
If I had to guess, it would be both. I think we can do more to get more female engineers for sure, but forcing people to do something they don't want to do is just as wrong.
You bring up an excellent point that historically underrepresented minorities have gotten a bad deal. I wonder what kind of criteria could be used to decide if this case was similar.
