But why doesn't this affect men's decision making as well?

It absolutely does. I know many men in India who would rather do something else than do engineering. Look at the background of most standup comedians in India for example. Most of them come from engineering/stem background and use that to fulfill their side hustle to be a comic and then become full time comics if successful. I was personally far more interested in studying classic Sanskrit literature, but was talked into becoming an engineer.

I should rephrase.

Why does it affect men disproportionately less?

I come from a very progressive family that always tried to treat me and my sister equally. Still, I think there was a much larger social pressure on me to be financially successful than my sister. And that is in a very progressive country, too, in more conservative countries the effect is probably larger still.

I do not know how to calculate that. At least few stem fields have very high number of women, medicine for example. So why more women do not choose mechanical engineering, hard to say. It is not because these fields are dominated by men. Women were not dominating medicine, but now they do. So clearly women are not afraid of taking up fields which are male dominated. Women are far more courageous than that. Women also dominate HR departments of many financial, software, and other industries. So clearly they work in the same industry as men do, just in different roles. So why they do not choose to be engineers in these companies instead of HR person, I have no idea. All I am contesting it, it is not because men have an invisible alliance to stop women from doing so.

My gut take is that our society is socialized to value men that have some sort of "breadwinner" status.

Not just society, but women especially. It’s not even an issue of socialization. Unemployed or underemployed men are heavily penalized in the dating pool. You don’t have to be a gold digger to value a stable provider as a partner. And women who are self-sufficient still generally tend to prefer men who are at least roughly equal in their ability to provide.

Because men have more options for careers that provide an upper middle income lifestyle in India than women. Tech is one of the few that women have access to that can provide that.

Could be a lot of reasons.... if STEM majors have a 'bro' culture, then more men would feel comfortable in that culture than women, and would not be driven away from it.

will bro culture explain women not enrolling to these majors or just dropping out of these majors? My guess is latter.

The hypothesis is that when economics are less of a factor, people tend towards work they find more enjoyable. Men control most of STEM, so it sucks less for them, which is why you see women disproportionately leaving.

Men and women are optimised for _slightly_ different thinking that results in _huge_ divergences at scale?

Why do you think the issue is biological and not social? Isn't this the nature vs nurture debate?

Like all things, it's not a black and white split between nature vs nurture, it's both.

I don't disagree but I think that in the average case nurture has a much larger affect on our lives that nature.

Because..Uterus. (Short answer)

Also just to add - In countries like India, it is incredibly difficult to defer which major to choose. You basically have to choose a major as soon as you have graduated high school and it is quite painful and costly(time+money) to change it afterwords. Which is why we see far higher percentage of engineers go get a MBA in India, as most do not want to be engineers in the first place.

> We would really like to find a non economic reason for some of these disparities

I don't even know if we like to find a non-economic reason or if most people simply don't know economics well enough to reason through 2nd and 3rd order economic consequences. Since they can't reason through it they choose simple explanations despite it being wrong. This is the same reason why people used to believe that deities controlled things like the weather and their fortune in life.

The "patriarchy" gets basically the same faith-based treatment as Zeus/Jupiter.

It is quite difficult to reason with people who would rather blame an invisible force. For example - most women did not work in factories until much later or even today. More Americans died in making stuff for the WW1 than in the actual war, as the conditions of factory work was brutal. Why would anyone want to subject themselves to that environment if they can avoid it?

Not even for a minute suggesting that women should not be allowed to work in dangerous environments. Having said that no one wants to subject themselves to dangerous work and it is perhaps slightly easier for women to avoid that.

If women started working in dangerous environments that harms their bodies, it would have a direct impact on their reproductive ability..which on a large scale would be detrimental to the perpetuation of humans as a species and hence our survival. This is how we evolved. Not likely going to be a popular opinion, but it is mine.

Also remember lot (most) of Marxism predates Darwin and evolutionary biology. Even though Darwin and Marx were contemporaries. Since left is still quite based on Marxists ideas, it just does not account for many evolutionary biology theories and hence tends to find reasons which do not explain things correctly.

I would take it one step further. Marxists/Leftists generally discount time as a variable entirely. It's all about addressing a concerns in the present. There's very little to no considering to the impact of time. There are two ways this disregard of time manifests itself. First, is what you mentioned, in that there is no consideration for the value of wealth building, which (1) takes time and effort, and (2) produces the greatest returns over multiple generations (Basically, every one of us are standing on the shoulders of our ancestors). The second is preference for distributing the fruits of labor in the present equitably instead of using the fruits of labor to create greater returns in the future.

While not specifically about time, the difference principle in Rawl's Original Position is also relevant. Under that principle, inequality is permissible if it can lead to the worst off being better off than they would if there were equality. This principles presupposes that time is considered when trying to maximize well being for the worst off. If you want to maximize the well being of the worst off in the present, you implement equality right now, but that may be worse for the worst off in the future.

This is a tangent, but,

"More Americans died in making stuff for the WW1 than in the actual war, as the conditions of factory work was brutal."

I'm doubtful that this is true for many other countries involved in that war.

Factory work was not yet as common place as America and England in many other countries. Ford assembly lines were not yet widely used when WW1 broke out, most of the WW1 was fought with less industrialized weaponry.

That's partly it, but what I really meant was that America didn't have many combat casualties, relative to other countries. 53,400 according to Wikipedia, which was less than Canada's 56,600, and much less than France's 1,150,000 or Germany's 1,800,000.

The US basically wasn't a major combatant in that war, so it's not a representative country to use as an example. I'm sure it does show that factory conditions were brutal, but it falsely implies that they were more brutal than combat conditions.