Exactly. And once you look at the sub fields, medicine stops looking so gender equal. Most nurses are female. Most surgeons are male. Most family doctors are female, etc. In aggregate the field is about 50-50, but medicine specialties are not gender neutral at all.

> And I suspect - but didn't check - that if you expand the definition of "software" to include supporting fields like design, UX and testing, the overall gender ratio will be much closer to 1:1.

Could also look at careers like "developer evangelist" and "solutions engineer", both of which are technical but much more people-oriented than being a regular software engineer.

Are women better represented in those roles?

Anecdotally, it seems like it at least for developer evangelist. But I haven't seen any hard data.

This was true when I was working as a developer evangelist at Microsoft. But Microsoft has been specifically recruiting women out of college to try to increase representation. Most of the men in my org were industry veterans while most of the women were fresh out of college. This leads to an imbalance of experience and often means the women are relegated to less technical aspects of the job which hinders their progress.

The evangelists also have to deal with not just the environment at Microsoft, but also the partners we were helping architect solutions for. On more than one occasion I know women had problems delivering solutions to a partner because that partner had blatantly sexist stakeholders who would constantly try to question or circumvent them in ways that didn't happen for men. One of the college hires I was mentoring was the point person on a project, yet every single question was sent my way and I had to keep redirecting them to the woman who was perfectly capable of answering the question and was actually in charge of the account.

So yes, there were a lot more face to face interactions, but the women still didn't stick around for these roles. Some had much better experiences actually writing code on the product teams. Some moved into project management or research.

> There's this hypothesis that men statistically tend to pick jobs involving working with and treating patients as things, and women tend to pick jobs involving people and socializing.

Data to support this hypothesis here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge...

ObGyns are 85% female, Pediatrics 75%, while radiology is 72% male and anesthesiology 63%.

One caveat is that OB-GYN falls under much more of a surgical specialty so it doesn't really fit that hypothesis.