Science Friday: The Gender Divide

So during a tea break at work the other day we were discussing the gender divide when it came to science and engineering.  One of the main points of interest that came up was about the European Commission's video 'Science: It's a Girl Thing'.  

This farce of a video is barely disguised sexism that implies that all women seem to care about is lipstick and looking pretty.  But sexism is only a small part of the point I want to make in this post. 

When you look at certain subjects you do start to notice a pattern in the gender that seems to populate it.  For example I took my undergraduate degree in Chemistry and from my point of view the gender split was almost 50:50.  From another point of view I had friends who took physics and from what I heard in their entire year they had no more than about 2 or 3 girls total.  Why is it that you move from Chemistry to Physics and suddenly all women seem to lose interest.  Then again does it work both ways.  I'm only going speculate here but if you move to something like Biology does the number of males decrease and is this more of a female subject?  Certainly from my male point of view I see biology as my least favourite science.  So why is there this gender divide when it comes to certain scientific subjects.

So why science is traditionally considered a male orientated subject and you have applaud people for trying to encourage more women to take part in science maybe they just have to realise that they already are but they need to encourage women to take part in the sciences they currently have very little interest in.