I would just like to encourage you to consider that these differences in interests may have an intrinsic reason not entirely related to culture. It’s true that women have long had an aptitude for handicraft and a knack for skilled labor involving clothing.

It would be hard to establish your argument that women are not encouraged to be leaders while men tend to be denigrated within academia. The women in your engineering school first self-selected to attend, and then your school selected from among the applicants to pick whom they thought were most qualified.

This is a good example of the blank slate fallacy. For a good example of how sex defines the capabilities of a person, see below:

I live in a country where skills and workmanship have not been killed in the people and are highly valued by most companies and the society in general. By my observation, I can tell women are no less capable than men – in several cases even more, but this is not a point I’m making. I attend an engineering school and despite it is more popular among men, the women who do study these fields are bright and devoted.
Why men are more often on the technical fields is simple – women focus more often on more everyday fields that are more tangible – consider the local popularity in handicraft, something that requires high skills – or more focused on communication and humanities, something that could be done, too, while raising a kid. A real example from my uni: the most tangible field, technical design and technology of apparel (“engineering of clothes”) is ueber-popular among women(95%).

All in all, don’t believe that gender defines the mind and capabilities of a person. Look more towards what the society is telling us and our children to see why some things have the specific trends. I find that we, people, men and women should respect, understand and support each other instead of digging in old dogmas.

This is what’s happening with software, but it actually happened with nuclear power in the US long before, and countless other industries. I want to broaden the discussion past software, because that’s already been retread too many times by both us and by the leftist press.