More egalitarianism should be favorable to women /if/ you assume a priori that they are mostly disadvantaged through lack of access to education/resources, and the real expected outcome distribution is 50-50.
If you assume that there are underlying differences in interests and aptitude, more egalitarianism allows these differences to be expressed more since women are more free to eg. choose a career working with people, like medicine or law.
http://www.thejournal.ie/gender-equality-countries-stem-girl...
It also raises the bar for inherent aptitude to get into/(the top of) a career, since you're competing against a much wider pool of talent.
The point I was making to the parent was that his point "cross-generation drop in ratio proves it's cultural" doesn't hold up, because there have been many changes across those generations, you're comparing apples to oranges.
Not the parent and I wasn't around either, but I think accessibility of education counters your point, not supports it.
More egalitarianism should in theory be more favorable to women.
Back then I imagine it was much harder to program without access to university computers and education materials.
More women get higher education than men compared to 35 years ago.
More incentives (monetary and otherwise), combined with lower barriers to entry should also be favoring the supposedly disadvantaged.
And yet the drop in F-M ratio since late 1980s has not been overcome last time I checked.