In case anyone is interested, here are the statistics on gender gap.
http://reports.weforum.org/global-ge...p-report-2014/
Too often we refer to "studies" and "reports" without actually validating our words. While perhaps it is common knowledge that there is a gender gap in STEM in the US, here's a global look. STEM is 70/30 male/female in the US, by the way, and this is the report that says so. (Interestingly, politics really knocks the US down a level in this ranking).
I want to re-post this article from earlier in this thread:
https://hbr.org/2015/03/the-5-biases...en-out-of-stem
It contains links to other studies that appear quite interesting. I haven't read them all, but they seem to be methodical, and I encourage your curiosity to take over.
Finally, I frequently encounter attitudes very similar to the ones in this thread... progressive men, young men, boys that treat women as their complete equal. They do not see gender in their activities, and this is great! However, they also feel that putting in extra effort to get girls and women involved might be (bluntly) sexist in itself. While I have grown to understand that this attitude is insufficient when trying to balance the scales, we can see some logic in this thought: fair is fair, and if we do things fairly, the situation should work itself out... eventually.
Maybe that's true when enough generations pass, but the timescale is not nearly as good as it could be if we are proactive instead of passive.