Here, just as in the US, we have way more female nurses. However, we are also going towards way more female than male doctors; more women than men are admitted to medical school.
What we are not seeing however, are more women in science (biology is a bit of an outlier, though) and technology.
Outside of managerial roles, IT in particular is as bereft of women as it has always been.
As we have more women in medicine and law I have a hard time believing they are setting their expectations lower. I think it's as the article claims: for whatever reason they just aren't interested in STEM (in average).
Getting through medical school and residency requires absolutely horrendous working hours including night shifts, and extremely long work shifts that seem unreasonable or unsafe to me, but that doctors have just accepted. Becoming a medical doctor definitely seems like it's in the upper echelon of demanding jobs. Within the field of medicine, men also disproportionately select the most demanding specialties like surgery while female doctors are more likely to become pediatricians.
The theory that men and women have different preferences concerning demanding jobs and work-life balance has been scientifically studied, and there's evidence in support of it. I'll share a quote from one publication that contains citations to further studies: "Women, careers, and work-life preferences":
> The majority of working women seek a large degree of work-life balance (Hakim, 2005), certainly more than men do. Women are more likely to ask for shorter work hours than to ask for higher pay or promotion (Babcock & Laschever, 2003).
https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2011/SPP457/um/23632422/Hakim...
That doesn't make the profession less noble or endearing or anything -- but by any metric that we use to judge modern occupations, a nurse ranks lower than a doctor in most every way besides number of hours worked.
so, all those high-power, highly-paid, female lawyers are likely to have just breezed right though?
Why did you even post this acerbic and wrong reply that ignored the whole point of what I was saying?
How about doctors vs nurses? I think this is a much more relevant comparison. In the united states (sorry) male doctors outnumber female by about 2:1 [1], while female nurses outnumber male nurses by more than 10:1 [2]. Comparing these two professions it's a lot easier to make the argument that women are implicitly encouraged to set their expectations lower than men, who actually may feel emasculated as a nurse.
STEM jobs are seen as more difficult to train for and to achieve than non-STEM jobs, similar to the job of a doctor compared to the job of a nurse. If you're confused as to why women choose 'difficult' jobs less often, I hope this line of thinking is convincing...
[1] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/physicians-by-gend... [2] https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/total-number-of-pr...