I read something a while back that professions only begin to undergo a "cultural shift" when about one-third of the practitioners are women. Thus, many sciences, such as medicine, are already very welcoming of women because more than one-third of the students are female. Even math and physics are trending in this direction. Computer science and engineering are the last holdouts, and are still not women-friendly.

In 1989, in Montreal, a frustrated would-be engineer walked into an engineering class at Ecole Polytechnique with a gun. He ordered all the male students and the male teacher to leave, then shot and killed the 14 female students, yelling, "You are all a bunch of feminists!" Then he shot himself. Apparently he had been unable to win a spot in the engineering class and blamed affirmative action for his failures.

So, yeah. I thought twice about studying engineering after that.