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This is very weird logic. To take a parallel case: 75% of pediatricians and 90% of speech-language pathologists are female, give or take. Therefore on a male-only island children would die in droves, and stammerers wither into mutism, because obviously men can't perform these roles, or else they would do so in greater numbers?
I'd predict far greater numbers of women entering engineering in an Amazon society, because you're removing the substantial downside that is having to work with male engineers.
Thank you for perfectly exemplifying my point. Men get blamed for filling roles in engineering. The problem's not with men, or men's roles. The problem is the catch-22 imposed by those who dislike men.
I think I specified male engineers. (And in all fairness, many of the older ones I interact with IRL are great people; it's mostly the remarks one sees from nerd-id'd young and middle-aged men on sites like this that have recently made me feel very sorry for the young women trying to work in those spaces.)
However, we weren't discussing whether current male engineers should feel bad about their character, their social skills or their workplace culture. I was questioning your reasoning above that because somewhat fewer women than men currently choose to enter engineering as a profession (an observation consistent with a wide variety of underlying causes, including that talented women have more options or that the current cohort of men in the field is unpleasant to interact with), therefore we can conclude (a) engineering is inherently, as you term it, a "men's role", (b) that biological females can't do engineering, and an all-female society would have inadequate personnel to complete its necessary engineering tasks. (That's setting aside the broader claim you were trying to support, which was, if I read it correctly, that since engineers are also so incredibly valuable, the current gender balance of engineering partly justifies the existence of patriarchal social norms.) Could you say more about the reasoning that you feel justifies (a) and (b), if I'm getting those correct?
You specified "plumbing and engineering". Engineering, enough women could do if push came to shove -- most engineering fields in the US are 20-30% women last time I looked, but that's not so overwhelming. It's easily enough to suggest that there's something masculine about engineering, though.
Plumbing, no. 3.5% of plumbers are female. That's overwhelming. Without some sort of artificial bar keeping women out (which there does not appear to be), there's something very strongly masculine about the job itself.
No, but you clearly want to push that idea. You pushed it in the very message I'm quoting here. It's nonsense on stilts, unless you believe that male engineers are somehow the worst -- worse than male doctors, worse than male lawyers, worse than the mad men of Madison Avenue. It's not worth entertaining without extraordinary non-circular evidence.
The problem is the odd presumption that the only possible reasons for not performing an activity must be (a) artificial bar, or (b) innate incapacity. But again, a glance at virtually any other big group difference highlights how silly that is.
For instance, you haven't responded to the point about >3:1 F:M ratios in pediatrics or SLP; can I take it that you agree men are inherently incapable of delivering language therapy?
The US produces only 1/10 the steel that China does; presumably that's because metallurgy is a strongly Asian pursuit, and without their help we would have to build most of our skyscrapers out of mud?
Only 15% of bartenders are people with a college degree. So it seems, given that no law prohibits B.A.s from taking bartending positions, that something about college must erode one's ability to create mixed drinks? Populate a luxury space station with a bunch of Ivy League grads, and they'll all be flailing around smashing the vodka bottles and trying to drink from the soda sprayer.
Re: engineers, like I said, I know some lovely older engineers, so I don't want to rag on the profession too much. I can speculate that low-EQ professions would be canaries in the coalmine for for any kind of emerging populationwide issues with male socialization, though, much more than e.g. medicine or law, where men go through more of a filter for social competence; and some of the truly hair-raising comments by self-professed engineers on themotte and elsewhere make me worry that this is happening. But the gender disparity could equally well be explainable by engineering being a profession with only middling salary and declining prestige, limited flexibility and autonomy, and low levels of evident connection to the values that women are currently socialized to care about (like "contributing to the community" and "helping the less fortunate").
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