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There are very real differences between "typical" male and female brains which have been shown with current imaging tech. The differences explain a lot. For me, the most interesting anecdotal evidence of this was the reporting of a woman changing her gender. She starting taking massive doses of testosterone to jump-start the change and she described her thought process changes as bizarre: checking out women on the street in an obvious and rude fashion she couldn't control; geeking out in general about scientific topics she hadn't cared about last week.
I only mention this to say that without being sexist, science is showing us real differences between the sexes (all 4 or 5 of them). We all exist somewhere along this continuum and perhaps the women so inclined to be engineers are off to one side of the bell-curve or another.
As for your students, if they're mostly guys, then that explains them, too. Territorial, horny, looking for a girlfriend and/or mother-figure. A friend tried explaining it to my wife by saying that all the complex behaviors of men boil down to the next orgasm. Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. See? The sex comes first - the other are just substitutes because we don't get enough sex (after all, how many partners could you find to have sex every 15 seconds when it crosses our minds?).
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