I really appreciate your perspective, and agree that I could grow in my empathy for the harmful aspects of female socialisation. It's admittedly hard for me to not view it as butterflies, rainbows and dance classes, but that's just the "grass is greener" effect from my own experience. (I also had no sisters and didn't observe it directly in my own family.) I support everyone liberating themselves in the way that they need to.
I can totally agree that all of the studies and data that we have are taken from within the culture itself, and so it's pretty much impossible to see the biology through the culture. I often notice myself that biological explanations are used by dominant groups in order to reduce their responsibility, even if they may not be the most scientifically accurate ways of looking at things.
I intentionally worked on the basis of stereotypes or generalisations. If 60% of group A wants prefers X over Y while only 40% of group B prefers X over Y, it's accurate to speak in general terms, even if there are many individual exceptions. Any discussion of women in technology _in general_, as opposed to individual women in tech, inherently relies on the ability to make generalisations.
In particular, "Results showed that men prefer working with things and women prefer working with people, producing a large effect size (d = 0.93) on the Things-People dimension."
By "care to become them", I meant less the _desire_ to be a good engineer, and more _actually_ enjoying the hours spent in lone engineering. It's one thing to want to be a good engineer in the abstract, or to enjoy holding an engineering role at a company (and some engineering roles in some company cultures are much more people-oriented than other engineering roles), and it's another thing to be somebody who would happily spend a weekend understanding some algorithm, and evenings developing some new open source library as a side project. There are definitely some women who will enjoy these over the alternatives, but not many, and far fewer than there are men, as shown by the huge differences in the Things-People dimension and the huge differences in how many men versus women actually do those things.
And I'll speak just for myself: sitting away at a screen chopping away at some problem often just isn't emotionally fulfilling. And I don't think women who are not engineers really envy those who spend their time this way.
I definitely support initiatives to expose more girls and women to technology, and to raise the profiles of minority group role models in tech. And perhaps the lesson of the Things-People difference is not that engineering isn't for most women, but rather that engineering needs to be done in a more emotionally connected and social way, for example with pair programming.
As a trans woman in tech, who was also raised in a very gender normative environment (i.e. I was expected to conform to gender norms for boys as a child), I certainly see her point. I got into technology a child mostly because that what I could do within the environment's "boy" social role.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and relative to pretty much all cis women of the same age, I have many more years of experience of playing around with technology in my free time, and many fewer years spent doing the "empathising" activities which the author refers to in the article - exactly the kind of activities which girls are often nudged towards. As a consequence I am pretty good with technology.
And yet the more that I grow as a person, connect with who I am, and grow in my options, the more I find playing around with tech less fulfilling than e.g. spending time on relationships. I'd spend evenings tinkering with Linux when I was 13, but I'd be unsatisfied as hell doing that today. And I envy women and girls raised in environments that were more conducive towards them engaging in empathising and self-expressive activities - if that were me, it's unlikely I'd have gone down a tech track.
We need equality and freedom, but men and women are biologically different.
And it's not a coincidence that my first HN comment in years of reading is on an empathising topic, not a technology one... Women can be great engineers, we just rarely care to become them, unless circumstances unnaturally push us towards it - I suspect this is why it is developed countries which have the fewest women in tech, as wealthy people have the most options to choose from. Of course this is all generalisations and averages and there are true exceptions on both sides.
I can totally agree that all of the studies and data that we have are taken from within the culture itself, and so it's pretty much impossible to see the biology through the culture. I often notice myself that biological explanations are used by dominant groups in order to reduce their responsibility, even if they may not be the most scientifically accurate ways of looking at things.