One thing all these fields have in common is that they are more intellectually rigorous and harder to succeed in than the computer software industry.
Clearly, they have something else in common. We just need to figure out what it is.
This essay, which invokes the "Google Memo", is subtly attacking a straw man. Even those almost the entire rest of STEM is better than CS, it's true that it's not balanced; it remains deeply imperfect. Physics and mechanical engineering, clustered with CS, remain the province of men. There's a expanse of STEM fields with female participation between 25-40% that you'd want to explain or correct. Is it stereotype threat? Implicit bias? Who knows? Probably not?
But that has nothing to do with why Google has so few women engineers. The work that a commercial software engineer does --- even at the lofty heights in which the profession is practiced in such a cathedral of software design as the Alphabet Corporation --- is simply not that hard; most of it is just wiring form fields to databases in new and exciting ways.
Whatever is holding women's participation in our field at or below twenty percent is artificial, and a travesty.
It's unlikely that's due to two completely different mechanisms, so I'd put more stock in theories that explain both situations.
Software developers have a $102,280 median salary. [1]
[0] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/mobile/registered-nurses....
[1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
They make 80k, I make at most 80k if I work at the highest-end webdev firms.
For example, according to Glassdoor, a software dev in Chicago has an average salary of about 82k compared to about 120k for a nurse practitioner. Or if you want to compare earlier career, a junior developer is at about 67k vs. 68k for a registered nurse. You need to bound your statistics geographically to control for skewed labor markets when comparing salaries like this.
Becoming a Nurse Practitioner requires, at a minimum, a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, followed by licensure as an RN, followed by a Master's in a NP specialty, followed by certification as an NP. Practically, it requires more because most NP programs require practice as an RN in the specialty for at least 1-2 years prior to admission. Its a very small, elite subset of nursing.
Further, Glassdoor estimates are something like a real-time estimate of what the current values of a nonrepresentative measure would be; they really should be marked "for entertainment use only". Per BLS data, the median salary of the 1,930 NPs in the Chicago-Naperville-Arlington Heights Metropolitan Division is $101,930, about on par with the far more numerous software developers (Software Developers, Applications: 20,570 jobs, $99,430 median salary; Software Developers, Systems Software, 9,930 jobs $103,620.) [0] The Glassdoor numbers you give are way high for NPs and way low for devs.
Contrary to your suggestion of massive geographical distortion in median salary due to concentration of tech jobs in high-cost locations, this elite level of nursing is paid generally similar to software developers nationally, as well. (Nurse Practitioners, 150,230 jobs, $104,610 median salary; Software Developers, Applications, 794,000 jobs, $104,300 median salary; Software Developers, System Software, 409,820 jobs, $110,590 median salary.) [1] (Yes, these national numbers are a little different than those from the Occupational Outlook Handbook, also from BLS, that I posted upthread: the OOH is a high-level publication updated more recently, which also uses slightly different categorizations; so here I've used the national data that corresponds directly to the geographic specific data.)
I'm also trying to figure out what your point in the third paragraph is, exactly. If NPs are geographically distributed roughly equally and software developers are not, you would see exactly that median salary distribution. Again, that's the whole point - if you look only at national medians or averages, you're completely ignoring the effects of regional outliers. Take away SF, Seattle, NYC, and Austin, and then tell me what the median software dev salary looks like nationally. If you can't do that, look at non-tech cities and countries for an indicator of what unskewed salary comparisons look like between professions.