"> I am more infuriated by the idea that if women are underrepresented in technical fields, it must be the fault of the men in those technical fields.
Who's saying that?"
Well, the article itself:
Promoting equality in your organization
If you start actively working to attack inequality in your organization, I guarantee you’ll realize you were already a feminist.
When your heart’s in the right place and you’re constantly examining your own actions and your organization’s, you start to notice bias and prejudice in more and more places. Most disturbingly, you notice it in yourself.
The implication in all of this is that there is inequality in our field that is due to our behavior i.e. the behavior of adults in the workforce. It is simply assumed that if we promote equality in our profession, and make it a team effort, then we will get equality.
"What do you mean by "go to middle school" - who do you suggest should take what action in that particular venue?"
I did not claim to have a solution, I was just pointing out where the problem lies. At some point in a girl's life, long before she is even thinking about college, something happens to undermine her interest in science and math. Years down the road, she winds up majoring in something that is not engineering or computer science, and fails to acquire the technical skills needed for a career in such fields by any other means. Obviously this is not something that all girls experience, but to a large extent it is the reason that engineering schools have so few women and so many men.
Maybe it is something girls are seeing on TV. Maybe it is something they are reading on the Internet. It is pretty clear that a young teenager is not seeing whatever prejudice exists in the workplace (how often do middle schoolers wander into your office?).
"What's mysterious about it? What expectations do you have that this observation runs counter to?"
Absent some reason to think otherwise, why would anyone assume that girls who have a talent and interest in math before a certain age would suddenly abandon their interest upon reaching that age? If puberty is the answer, why does it not happen to boys? For that matter, why does it seem to happen to a different degree in our country than in others?