[James]

There's an effect called the Norwegian Gender Paradox. This is a documentary about it.

Youtube video

The short version of it is that Norway is the country with the most gender equality, but has men and women in traditional male and female jobs the most.

So 90% of nurses are female and 90% of engineers are male.

In countries which are poorer, like India, you get more women as, say engineers. The theory is that where people have more of a choice (like Norway) they do what they want, but in poorer countries they have less choice to do what they want because of financial reasons.

They talk in the video about an experiment where new-born babies (hour-old if I remember) were shown one of two pictures: a face and a shape, and it was recorded which picture interested them most.

The experiment found that girls showed a preference for the face (which suggests empathy) and boys preferred the shape (which suggests a preference of systems).

They think it is because of the influence of testosterone.