Women like working with people, men like working with things, all over the world

Not sure you'd learn the most from the hunter-gatherers, who have the narrowest leeway in their survival and must have everyone doing exactly what they're best suited at. A fat rich society with more money than they can spend, like Norway or Qatar or Brunei, is likely more instructive.

The study in the topic seems to contradict this, although the summary is a bit confusing:

"Considering gender inequality, the authors report that “in countries of higher gender inequality, women’s stronger preference for working with people versus things compared to men was smaller.” However, this effect disappeared when cultural dimensions were taken into account.

"Instead, it was those countries with greater uncertainty avoidance that had larger differences in interests in people/things between men and women. Uncertainty avoidance refers to the degree to which a culture teaches its members to feel unpleasant in situations that are new, not previously known, surprising, or generally just different from usual."

You can try to take whatever job is available, but if you're a typical "people person" you're less likely to have developed the skills to get hired in most technical jobs, and if you're a more technically-oriented person you're less likely to have developed the people skills to get hired in jobs where those are important.

Almost anyone can develop either, but when they don't, through whatever combination of chance and default temperament.... very few employers will give someone a chance at crossing that divide without some prior indication the prospective employee will be decent at it, because chances are they won't be.

The definition of working with people vs. working with things doesn't seem obvious to me. As a software engineer I am working a lot with my computer. Therefore I must be working with things! But... I am just as much working with my soft skills. Scrum retros, talking to stakeholders, discussions on design with fellow engineers, testing with end-users. Some days I don't spend even a minute working with "things".

I don't think the distinction of working with people vs working with things is clear enough to say wheter my job means I am doing the one or the other. So how could the participants in the study do the same? I'm assuming there are lots of occupations in this grey zone and even situations where in one company the same occupation is considered working with people while in another company it would be considered working with things.

I can see multiple issues the study runs into which would be interesting to see how/if it answers. A) Does it measure peoples perception of wheter they work with people or thing? B) Do the authors make their own interpretation of which occupations lands in which category? How do they then eliminate their own biases in what working with that occupation means? C) Did the authors observe the participants and make a judgement call based on their day-to-day activity? This would likely be the most accurate, but I can't imagine they did this because of the sheer cost of such an experiment.

Those are just two points out of a long list of actions required in a society. I don't think it really adds that much weight to the argument, even though it is true.

To go back to your other comment:

> Why is that a problem, and if it was due to upbringing then why that would be a problem?

It would be a problem for upbringing as that is something adults have agency over. It's a bias that may not need to exist.

A great example of that is when women were highly represented in computer science as it was initially becoming a field of study, but later got pushed out by boys who'd had technical skills nurtured in them when they were young while the girls did not. Oversimplifying that a little bit, but most of us have experienced it or seen it in action.

Women in STEM is a supply issue that starts with parenting, and continues all the way along the pipeline, with schools, universities and peers all filtering girls out of the pipeline that puts butts in seats in tech roles, even though they're perfectly capable of the roles.