[vectorpush]

count the number of women they know who are fascinated by technology, mathematics and deep, impersonal abstraction

Classic nature vs nurture debate. You have no evidence to support the claim that women are inherently less inclined towards tech (instead of say, conditioned by society to be tech averse).

[discolemonade]

These social conditioning arguments are always non-sequiters. At some point you have to ask yourself, what conditions society? Something has to create the condition where people begin to notice that engineering and tech is kind of a male thing and, say, nursing, is kind of a female thing on average. Something must have created that original pattern for people to notice it. It doesn't just come out of the ether. Once the pattern exists, it's probably reinforced, but you can't tell me that with all the effort that goes into getting girls into STEM, the tide wouldn't have been turned by now had the phenomenon been based purely on nurture. Plus, you see this pattern all over the world. And it's always evident that there's bias in this argument because nobody gets upset when somebody points out that most elementary school teachers are women. And that leads me to think that there's a lot of people (of the female variety) who deep down believe that what men do is superior to what women do. And that's sad, because it's entirely untrue.

[vectorpush]

Something has to create the condition where people begin to notice that engineering and tech is kind of a male thing and, say, nursing, is kind of a female thing on average.

Yes, our disagreement is about the cause of those conditions. You've observed a correlation between sex and interest in STEM, but that correlation does not prove that sex is intrinsically linked to interest in STEM. Do you also consider black men to be naturally averse to education because black women graduate college 2:1 compared to black men?

but you can't tell me that with all the effort that goes into getting girls into STEM, the tide wouldn't have been turned by now had the phenomenon been based purely on nurture

It does not follow that women are less inclined towards STEM because efforts to increase women in STEM careers has not "turned the tide"

Women are just as mentally capable as men with regard to STEM, trying to link a nebulous concept such as "natural interest" to sex is absurd.

[Drbble]

Talk to a woman from Russia or Eastern Europe about how women don't learn college-level math or how personal individual preferences have anything to do with educational outcomes.