From The Civilized Engineer (1987), by Samuel Florman:

"I hesitate to write about women and engineering, just as I hesitate to write about ethics, because it is a topic charged with emotion, one that has brought down on my head more impassioned comment than I care to recall. When my article "Engineering and the Female Mind" (the title was coined by the editors) appeared in Harpers in 1978 it elicited more mail than anything else I have ever written. Many of the letters expressed fury, some of them accord, all of them fervor.

In that article I challenged the reasons usually given for the low numbers of female engineers- male hostility, teacher prejudice, lack of role models, et cetera- and suggested that talented young women were avoiding engineering because they perceived other professions as a more direct route to political power and social prestige."

And (after the author's observation that female engineers are more likely to take part in cultural pursuits):

"According to one view of the female sex this is only what one would expect. Marilyn Ferguson, in The Aquarian Conspiracy, puts it this way: 'Women are neurologically more flexible than men, and they have had cultural permission to be more intuitive, sensitive, feeling.' Sherry Turkle, author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, has observed that the 'entities' that appear on the screen of a computer 'stand between the world of physical objects and the world of abstract ideas, and they are taken up differently by hard and soft masters.'

'The hard masters treat them more as abstraction, somewhat like Newtonian particles; the soft masters treat them more as dabs of paint, building blocks, cardboard cutouts. You can find examples of hard and soft mastery among boys and girls. But I have found that girls tend to be soft masters, while the hard masters are overwhelmingly male... The response of "soft masters" to programming- if they are given the time and the permission to develop their own way of approaching the machine- has a great deal to teach us.'"

Finally:

"Thus Stephen Jay Gould, reviewing a feminist book on biology, made this cautious statement: 'We desperately need more women as equal companions... not because the culture of feminism grants deeper vision but because we need as many good scientists as we can get.'"

I originally read this in the second edition of The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (1976), which is a rebuttal against elite morally-superior academics who dress up Luddism as Progressivism. Doesn't that sound familiar?