I've been thinking for most of the day on how to phrase this. I think I might have it. By the way, this does not apply only to the gender discussion--there are other discussions it can apply to as well.
Men and women are not equal, and will not necessarily like the same things. And, that applies to individuals with the same gender as well. So, each person should be free to find out what they like to do. Everybody with me on that? Reasonable enough?
What happens when one gender strongly dominates one area? Well... The other gender can be intimidated into not even trying. I think that's kind of established. And when they do enter that field--and this is not limited to engineering--they can be the proverbial nail that sticks out (result: it gets hammered down). I've seen a couple of news articles recently on how women are working on just getting interest in traditionally male-dominated fields, or how women in those fields are, how shall I say this, subjected to non-workable working conditions. By the way, I realize that I'm totally ignoring social conditioning. That's also part of it, too.
Now, part of my take is that in order to know it's not for you, you need to try it--whatever it happens to be. If you're too afraid/pressured/etc. to try, then you're probably not going to try--so you're not going to know one way or the other. It takes a great deal of courage to go through that pressure.
My take on it is, if you can pass the test, great, come on in. And by "test", I mean that you meet the requirements to do whatever career field you're entering. (All I'll say is that if I'm in a house on fire and can't get myself out, whoever comes in there better be able to pull me out!)
The question is, for someone who is not interested in trying due to societal pressures or similar reasons, how do you get them to try?
And what the answer to that, according to the event organizers for these events (and, also, according to the
'07 and
'08 versions of team 842), happens to be to remove the pressures temporarily. LET them try, encourage them to try--and once they figure out that, yes, in fact, they CAN do this, and do well at it, then they will tend to be more assertive at doing it the rest of the time. And the general idea is that if you get one group of a larger group "in the door", more will follow, with a better support structure, until the support structure is no longer needed because it is the entire building that that door is in.
Whether that is the correct answer for all cases, I don't know. On the other hand, it does seem to be a popular answer for the general problem of "Group X is underrepresented in Y", along with "make a support group".