And we can be similarly reductive about any profession. Lawyers are just paper pushers, academics are glorified grant Chasers, and so on
That's the question basically. Would it :)? One side says it would the other says that genders are statistically different.
- Boys on the other hand have other ways available to them to gain economic advantage
I don't know about them. Sure, the 0.1% of them can be politicians / CEOs, but it's not "available" for people in general ( it requires a very specific personality IMHO ). I don't think 10-20-30% differences could be explained by this small portion. For most men gaining economic advantage _is_ about getting a good job, and that's the only option.
In many of these countries there are a huge variety of jobs that are not available to women, because their ability to interact with men who are strangers is highly restricted. So most commercial, industrial and many administrative roles are not available, because they would involve often meeting 'random' men. In some of the countries, women can't even serve men in shops.
That cuts it down to basically office jobs or educational institutions where the men around you are a stable restricted group, that it's possible to gain social acceptance for, or jobs involving meeting men in highly controlled situations.
Even then, for many administrative roles in these cultures jobs are obtained through contacts and private arrangements rather than through an open jobs market. Again that's largely not available to women because these networks are almost entirely male and again lack of ability to associate freely with men closes them off.
STEM is different because it's jobs are only available to people with specific, quantifiable qualifications and skill the possession of which is an objective fact, verifiable through credentials. That's where the status comes from. Social networks and personal opinions of suitability aren't good enough for employers to fill all the roles they have open, so they have to look to a wider jobs market. They can't afford to close those roles to half or more of the available work force, so they have to make arrangements to suit women's working conditions or lose out on skilled candidates.
I think the idea is that STEM attainment confers social status, and in cultures with low gender equality it's one of the few ways girls can gain social status independently of men. They can then leverage that status to gain economic and other freedoms.
Boys on the other hand have other ways available to them to gain economic advantage, which are not easily available to girls in those societies.