EDIT: unintentional tl;dr as it seems :)
> “Countries with the highest gender equality tend to be welfare states,”
> they write, “with a high level of social security.” Meanwhile, less
> gender-equal countries tend to also have less social support for people
> who, for example, find themselves unemployed. Thus, the authors
> suggest, girls in those countries might be more inclined to choose stem
> professions, since they offer a more certain financial future than,
> say, painting or writing.
And not gonna lie, even I, a guy, picked STEM partly because I see it as the best escape route from this country, I would have picked something more fun and less demanding otherwise
In other words, this is not about what the article claims (girls are just not interested, presumably for biological reasons) but about expectations hammered into all of us by society.
I come from Morocco (quite similar to Algeria/Tunisia, which seem to have the highest % of women in STEM), and people are first looking for a job that will guarantee financial freedom. STEM jobs seem to be the most likely to guarantee this, and as such there's more women interested in these fields.
Looking at the graph however, this doesn't seem to explain the full variance (many developing countries have lower levels of representation).