I agree stress was a bad metric, I'm sure there are other metrics some sociologists would be able to enumerate, I can just speculate based on my experience: In

I agree stress was a bad metric, I'm sure there are other metrics some sociologists would be able to enumerate, I can just speculate based on my experience: In my country when I started studying computer science -- which was a niche area, I had 90% male colleagues; after 15 years with all the media coverage of high salary in the industry, the proportion shifted to 60-40, because the profession has become main-stream. So another factor could be risk -- women are more risk averse than men; hence they choose more established professions where the pay is less. Then, there's the drive and single-mindedness some high paying jobs require -- men are built that way, women are less likely to have obsessions on obscure-technical hobbies; heck, most men aren't built that way, it just happens that for those people that have such drive and single-mindedness, most of them are men. And that's the way it is -- unless there's some moat protecting your job, due to the laws of supply and demand the higher paying jobs are the ones nobody wants to do because of risk, discomfort and so on, and those that most people cannot do because of the dedication and single-mindedness they require, and for both categories men are the likely candidates.