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.
Can we rank these fields by day to day... sociability? Or how solitary they are?
Say, by the number of coworkers you talk to on a given day for a given number of hours. Or the amount of time you spend not at all speaking, and staring at a screen?
Can we approximate these somehow?
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Can we rank these fields by prestige in the eyes of the median person? E.g. If you are a biologist, does a guy on the street think its more interesting and glamorous than being a programmer? Or less? Why?
From the people I've talked to about why they didn't go into computer science/programming, a lot of them see programmers as essentially overpaid janitors or hi-tech sewer workers. They make Facebook/civilization/the internet run, but just how isn't important, and it probably isn't fun. The people I talked to have no idea what the pay scale is for programmers (actually many programmers I've talked have no idea what the pay scale is for programmers either). So they don't consider a cost-benefit very clearly when rejecting CS/Programming.
Part of why I like computers is that I can spend my day not talking to these fucking apes that infest this planet -- present company excluded, of course. I say this as someone who's not a social moron, who's recognized as an excellent teacher, and who's actually interested in team-dynamics and debugging miscommunication.
If I'd wanted to be a social worker -- I would have become a social worker. Who let all these social workers into the computer lab?
Anecdata -- dated a kick-ass Data Scientist, and a Molecular Biology Prof recently (separately). Their professional interests were a large part of their attraction to me. As I got to know them, the data scientist confessed that she didn't really like the math and wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't so lucrative. The Prof. was much less interested in biochemistry than in how people relate to science in the context of health care.
So dissapoint.
Your expectations are pretty high if realizing this led you to be disappointed. Not expectations of your SO in particular, but in general about people.
I think this is inherent to most people - they generally don't enjoy the job they do, but they do it still to pay the bills and secure for yourself some form of retirement and safety net in your later years.