Well I did preface with unless…, but we are talking about the loss of people who start a STEM career and don’t finish. It is not an efficient use of resources to have people start a long career path and not finish. What has happened is more men are now dropping out so as a cohort they have the same chance of finishing as women.

As for why this is happening yes I agree with you that even men have figured out that the the whole STEM career path is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme designed to exploit idealistic young people. As someone who loves science this makes me so angry I can’t politely put it into words - by this I mean the running of science as a Ponzi scheme, not people realising this is the case.