There's some evidence of gender preferences here, that, broadly speaking, women prefer people, men prefer things. This post goes into it more (see section 4):
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagge...> What is this “object vs. people” distinction?
> It’s pretty relevant. Meta-analyses have shown a very large (d = 1.18) difference in healthy men and women (ie without CAH) in this domain. It’s traditionally summarized as “men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people”. I would flesh out “things” to include both physical objects like machines as well as complex abstract systems; I’d also add in another finding from those same studies that men are more risk-taking and like danger. And I would flesh out “people” to include communities, talking, helping, children, and animals.
> So this theory predicts that men will be more likely to choose jobs with objects, machines, systems, and danger; women will be more likely to choose jobs with people, talking, helping, children, and animals.
In there, there's a link to a study, though that link appears to be dead right now. Here's the study's abstract and a different link https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1751-9004....
> How big are gender differences in personality and interests, and how stable are these differences across cultures and over time? To answer these questions, I summarize data from two meta‐analyses and three cross‐cultural studies on gender differences in personality and interests. Results show that gender differences in Big Five personality traits are ‘small’ to ‘moderate,’ with the largest differences occurring for agreeableness and neuroticism (respective ds = 0.40 and 0.34; women higher than men).
> In contrast, gender differences on the people–things dimension of interests are ‘very large’ (d = 1.18), with women more people‐oriented and less thing‐oriented than men. Gender differences in personality tend to be larger in gender‐egalitarian societies than in gender‐inegalitarian societies, a finding that contradicts social role theory but is consistent with evolutionary, attributional, and social comparison theories. In contrast, gender differences in interests appear to be consistent across cultures and over time, a finding that suggests possible biologic influences.
Anyway, while it's not an open and shut case, it's very hard to explain why these preferences are stronger in more egalitarian/less sexist societies, rather than weaker, using conventional social progressive thinking. If the idea behind these preferences and decisions is "well, that's because of societal sexism", why are the least sexist societies doing the worst there, and the most sexist societies the best?
I'm socially progressive on most issues, but I find much of the arguments and reasoning from other social progressives for this topic to be fairly disingenuous. They often strongly give the impression of having decided that basically all strong gender preferences must be because of some kind of oppression or stereotyping, any scientific inquiry that indicates otherwise is morally unacceptable, facts be damned.