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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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