Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you need to make a LOT of money to pay for daycare per kid That's true. But as it happens, engineers do make a lot of money. Many of us even make enough to support one-income families. You can't just assume senior engineers leave tech because of childcare costs, when most of us make well over the amount where you "might as well just stay home."
I don't think that the parent comment is assuming one way or another, just offering a plausible explanation given the very limited perspective of the metrics being quoted. For example, how does this compare to other trends for female jobs in other sectors? How do the figures compare when you separate the population between those with children and those without? When someone wants to make a claim like: "These numbers…
It's not academically dishonest, it's the application of a reasonable epistomological presumption: we presume that observations are not caused by biological differences without concrete evidence of those differences. The corollary to that is that disparities in outcome are prima facie evidence of disparities in opportunity.
It's not that people are unwilling to acknowledge biological differences between genders. Nobody argues that women have as much upper body strength as men. Rather, people are aware of the longstanding practice of chaulking things up to biological differences, and adopt a presumption against such explanations. You can see that clearly in this thread, where people are arguing that women might be biologically predisposed to being primary caregivers without any concrete evidence backing that up.