Come on people. Look at the stuff in here. I am an engineer who loves what she does (I build robots!) and I have the good fortune to work in Cambridge, Mass, where women engineers are often no big deal... and yet if I knew I was in a room with all of you, thinking that my brain is different and I'm just not meant for this stuff, and if I *am* good/interested in this it's just because I'm "weird" and going against my gender norms... well, I'd hightail it out of here, too.
And in other countries there are many female engineers. My mother worked with a Ukranian woman who thought it odd that engineering was considered a "male" profession here, rather than a female profession as it was back home. Most of the women I do see in engineering are of Asian descent. You don't think, just maybe, that we're doing a crappy job as a culture of encouraging American kids (not just girls, but even boys too) to get excited about and be interested in this stuff?
I don't deny that women think differently from men. But I do question the suggestion that this means women can't or won't do engineering or science. I question why engineering or science can't handle the way women think. It's not a matter of dumbing it down; it's a matter of figuring out how to leverage diverse ways of thinking about a problem. A group of people looking at a problem in different ways is more beneficial than one geek sitting in a cube doing what he thinks is best. A group of men is good. A group of men and women is better.
