>There is a great deal of variation between countries and companies.

Well yes, that was also part of my point. I travelled and worked all over the world in my youth and what I noticed is that women typically choose engineering careers only for the money, stability and benefits of working at engineering corporation if the alternatives like humanities, soft sciences or social/government work pay like shit and the welfare state is lackluster like it's the case is North-/Latin- America, Asia or South/Eastern Europe, not because they're really passionate about engineering.

But if you're in a wealthy welfare state, with high taxes, low income disparity and and well funded government services where a women working as a school teacher for example can take home nearly the same as an engineer while having great government benefits, like Nordic or German speaking countries for instance, then women are more likely to choose those types of humanities careers or other such careers that revolve more around interacting with people over working in engineering.

It is literally that simple. There's no 4D chess psychology to dissect. If you have easy access to easy money, most people will choose the path of least resistance. It's all transactional following Maslow's pyramid of needs. SW dev would also have far fewer people in it if it weren't so well paid.

>but there are definitely places where it is very difficult for women.

Can you explain in detail how exactly those places make it difficult for women and it's not just the correlation I explained above?

Like I'm sure there's some toxic workplaces out there, but that's the case for everyone in a lot of jobs, including(or maybe even especially) those where women are majority, like HR.

In fact, from what I saw in engineering they tend to prioritize attracting female candidates in order to try to break up the massive sausage fest of this profession even if that part is never said out loud.