"If the main argument is that women do not [by nature of our scientific understanding] have minds tuned to engineering prowess to the extent that men do for whatever cause"
The main argument isn't about prowess; it's about preference.
But if other countries have more equal representation in tech, India and Malaysia for example, then doesn't the biological argument fall apart? The difference isn't between men and women but between America and other countries.
Not really, the societies are too different to draw such conclusions. In less gender egalitarian societies a women without income is at the mercy of a sexist society. In more gender egalitarian societies, there is more social support and safety for women at lower economic levels. So in these less gender egalitarian societies, the drive to secure income is much greater and thus you would expect women to take lucrative but otherwise unappealing jobs. In societies where these pressures don't exist you would expect women to be less attracted to income in career choice. And this is how it plays out.
Yes, this is exactly how it plays out. This isn't proof, in itself, but it does seem to have predictive power as a theory:
"Galpin investigated the percent of women in computer classes all around the world. Her number of 26% for the US is slightly higher than I usually hear, probably because it’s older (the percent women in computing has actually gone down over time!). The least sexist countries I can think of – Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, etc – all have somewhere around the same number (30%, 20%, and 24%, respectively). The most sexist countries do extremely well on this metric! The highest numbers on the chart are all from non-Western, non-First-World countries that do middling-to-poor on the Gender Development Index: Thailand with 55%, Guyana with 54%, Malaysia with 51%, Iran with 41%, Zimbabwe with 41%, and Mexico with 39%. Needless to say, Zimbabwe is not exactly famous for its deep commitment to gender equality."
It's the same concept as FU money. In societies with poor gender equality, having financial independence is a crucial and powerful defense against societal injustice.
For what it's worth, the stuff I've read on societies that flatten our social pressures for job roles, specifically the most egalitarian societies like in Scandinavia, have larger exaggerations of traditional job preference for the sexes rather than more equal distribution.
I don't think it's clear why both of these occur however and I haven't been convinced that people who try to derive a position solely off societal level trends tend to do anything other than show off their ideological preference on both ends of the debate.
> more equal representation in tech, India and Malaysia for example
Places where women also have less choice / self-determination. When women get to choose their career path, they do not choose tech. That is the relevant correlation suggested as a cause.
It would truly be strange if genetic divergence over approximately 100,000 years (between these populations) ended up affecting a behavioral trait that has only been important for about 100 years in one of these populations. Well, it might not be strange if humans had the same generation time as insects. But for a species with generation time of 20 years, this is a very unlikely hypothesis IMO.
It could as well have diverged by accident. Sexual dimorphism in these kind of interest may not have any evolutional impact, but be affected by genes that were close to other genes that improve male fertility for example. The closer two genes are on a chromosome, the more likely they are to be selected together.
Your position is scientifically illiterate but I suppose it's worth pointing out why: It would require basically one gene to control these complex behavioral traits, which is implausible. Moreover, such a strong, population-specific, selective force on the human genome does not exist, which we know from population genomics studies. Therefore, what you are arguing here is factually wrong.
... and more generally homeobox genes, SRY was taken as a blatant example of a single gene that controls many different traits, both micro and macroscopic. There are plenty of others.
Even more generally, transcription factors, and the way they cascade.
I think that a lot of the noise this whole thing drummed up as been a bit more about both.
The major concerns being how some perceive their prowess -- and who's preference is really deciding the solutions.
Aside: I've been around enough people in the general field to have heard enough thoughts about women in tech... and they're too often ill-reasoned and ill-positioned (relating to prowess and potential)... but that's more circumstantial, I admit.
The main argument isn't about prowess; it's about preference.