Exactly what proportion of the gender imbalance is accounted for by a "Thing vs People" disparity, according to those studies?
Is it only a question of sex-related disposition? If so, what has caused disposition to change so radically over the last 30 years?
And why, for example where over 50% of nurses men in the 1900s in the US, but it is now only around 7%? What caused men to apparently become so much less interested in people over the last 100 years, starting to become more interested in people again in the last 10?
Historically most nurses were related to war, men fight war and thus become nurses. Even in the modern military you learn how to apply bandages, identify different kinds of wounds and how to treat them etc to keep your mates alive even in the modern military, so you could call everyone in the army a "nurse". But of course they are not modern nurses, the profession changed over time from mostly patching up people after fights to mostly treating diseases as our understanding of diseases improved.
The same thing with programming, women were dominant when it was mostly low level computations, but more and more men joined the field as computers grew more powerful and people saw the breadth of programs you could create. So the job changed, early it was more about maths and algorithms, and then we added more and more engineering tasks on top and people started to create huge programs which doesn't resemble math at all. So the gender balance of programmers shifted from the relatively equal applied math field to the extremely male dominated field of engineering. You can look it up, STEM without E has a very balanced gender ratio, while E tend to have above 80% men.
Gender Imbalance is a presupposition -- it begins from the place that a "gender imbalance" exists.
I can't justify for you your presupposition [nor demonstrate the existence of your chosen, yet unjustified presupposition given the evidence], you'll need to do that for yourself. Sounds like the news & entertainment media told you something repeatedly (without evidence), and you accepted it on its face without critical analysis.
Now, like many, when presented with evidence, you feel a sense of cognitive dissonance and would prefer to refute clear evidence rather than adjust your public opinion-- as to be expected given human nature of desire to save face.
However, what is apparently demonstrated in the studies is that the vast majority of individuals in a normal distribution favor a particular occupational set of interests based on gender: Men -> Things/Systems. Women -> People.
"The most relevant finding here is that about 15% of women have the same level of interest in engineering as the average (Read: 50% i.e. 50th percentile) man;"
"Straight Talk About Sex Differences in Occupational Choices and Work-Family Tradeoffs"
> I can't justify for you your presupposition [nor demonstrate the existence of your chosen, yet unjustified presupposition given the evidence], you'll need to do that for yourself. Sounds like the news & entertainment media told you something repeatedly (without evidence), and you accepted it on its face without critical analysis
But you're pointing out the imbalance yourself...
> The most relevant finding here is that about 15% of women have the same level of interest in engineering as the average.
But when presented with evidence, you feel a sense of cognitive dissonance and would prefer to simply presume some biological effect. Is there any evidence that this is a biological effect?
No, imbalance would presume things are out of balance.
Your presumtion is that balance = men and women have the exact same interests and should therefore be represented exactly identically in occupations of things & people.
That is an irrational posture, foisted upon you by your media overlords, and accepted by you wholeheartedly without critical analysis.
I do not believe men and women are equal-- if they were, we wouldn't have two names for two genders in a dimorphic species.
If apples equal oranges, we wouldn't have two names for them.
I don't know what sort of mentality you live within, but it isn't a rational nor informed one, in my estimation.
Given the psychological science (again, many studies over the course of decades), and given the biological science (hormonal and brain differences between sexes), I think it is very clear: Women prefer working with people, men prefer working with things -- On average.
I don't think you understand how statistical distributions work. There are two distributions here: One for men, one for women.
They don't both fit onto the same normal distribution-- if they did, it would be bimodal, not normal.
Good lord, I see you're trying to argue against biological differences between men and women-- You must not be aware of hormone differences, which in fetal development, yield either a male or female.
OK, I am done talking with such a brainwashed person. Your ignorance does not offend me, I just think it's pointless to discuss this with an irrational person who prefers to block out the daylight of reality falling upon their presuppositions, and media-informed (not science-informed) perspective.
Is it only a question of sex-related disposition? If so, what has caused disposition to change so radically over the last 30 years?
And why, for example where over 50% of nurses men in the 1900s in the US, but it is now only around 7%? What caused men to apparently become so much less interested in people over the last 100 years, starting to become more interested in people again in the last 10?