I think it takes a kind of ideology-fueled willed self-ignorance to ignore that men and women have different aptitudes and preferences and to completely neglect

I think it takes a kind of ideology-fueled willed self-ignorance to ignore that men and women have different aptitudes and preferences and to completely neglect it as an explanatory factor. Men clearly have a greater affinity for systems than women, women clearly have a greater affinity for people and living things, although one shouldn't exaggerate it to caricature and dichotomizing. Additionally, men have a higher variance on intelligence, which means that you will have more very smart men at the cost of having more very dumb men, and so you have two barriers that more men that women will tend to get across--a high intelligence floor compared to many professions, and an affinity for systems over people. The caricature statement to avoid there is "men are smarter than women"--not the case, only that it seems like you'll get a larger pool inclined to the profession out of men by the way the distribution of intelligence works. Not that rolling the latest CRUD app is rocket science, mind you, but it'd be silly to pretend that intelligence doesn't make a difference, and that intelligence distribution doesn't make a difference with sex concentration in the field.