"The idea that women tend to find medicine, law and accounting more appealing than engineering and coding seems more plausible". Again, why? I'd really like to understand what is the connection between people's interests (which I acknowledge has a distribution) and what is required to choose engineering/medicine/law/etc. This whole argument starts with a very fundamental & deep set of assumptions that people are making and have internalized.

The problem with equating interests to career choice is that it leads to a very slippery slope. When discussing a femal engineers performance it's easy to see a comment like "She's a woman and on average women prefer people over things (whatever the heck that means) and that's why she is not a good engineer" being used as justification.

Full disclosure I say this as an engineering male who has had a lot of career success (and failure for that matter, lol) and would identify with the 'I prefer people and empathy' part of my gender's distribution.