[gavanwoolery]

The article provides a lot of interesting questions, but occasionally without enough data to answer them. But maybe the questions are a good starting point, from the perspective of logical deduction.

On an additional note, I find it odd that software always gets so much focus: for example, 99 percent of construction jobs are held by males in many countries (and a large portion of these jobs do not involve heavy physical labor, if that is a concern - i.e. heavy machinery operators, foremen (forewomen?) etc ).

http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2010/07/27/where-women-work/

See link above. I think we might be asking the wrong question, focusing on too narrow of a field. The better question might be, why do certain fields get dominated by women, and certain fields are devoid of them? I think there is a much broader hypothesis here to be tackled then one concerning a single field.