Christ, a lot to unpack here so this is going to have to be long.

The issue with your argument is you are viewing this issue as something that is solely practical. Women have programs now, dammit! What more could they possibly need?! Unfortunately, that is just not how the world works. The topic of female innovation and education cannot be accurately examined without reference to historical, cultural and sociological contexts - something your argument fails to do in favour of “but they have stuff now, don’t they?”

Firstly, the evolution of society is a long and drawn out process. The implementation of equal rights and legislation does not magically alleviate centuries worth of implicit gender bias, nor does it suddenly revolutionise the rigid, child-bearing perception of women society had held for thousands of years. Essentially, you’re expecting the modern working woman to have undone centuries worth of oppression within two or three decades, despite them not even having the right of equal pay until 50 odd years ago. Legislation might dictate the law, but it has no holding on our behaviour, attitudes and expectations of women as a society. We’ve had to unlearn our expectation of women to put motherhood before their careers, to leave the “breadwinning” role to men, to live private lives as homemakers and to only do jobs considered “suitable” for women. We’ve had to unlearn our perceptions of women as less rational, intelligent and stoic than men. For example, women have been allowed to gain degrees from 1831 in the US and 1880 in the UK. However - despite women having had access to education for six decades, polls show that most people in the 1940s still believed that men were inherently more intelligent than women. This, alongside the long-held expectation of women to assume the role of child bearer and wife, meant that it would take until 1982 for women to start achieving more degrees than men. That is 150 years from when they were first allowed access to higher education - as I said, the evolution of society is a slow process that takes more than legal equal rights.

As for the dominance of male innovation - quite simply, they’ve had more time. Moreover, the current underrepresentation of women in STEM fields can be attributed to a range of things. For example, studies have indicated a strong correlation between male dominated industries and (sometimes perceived) gender discrimination. In 2015, a survey of 200 senior level women working in Silicon Valley. 66% reported that they had felt excluded because of their gender, 84% stated that they had been described as “too aggressive” and 60% reported unwanted sexual advances in the workplace.

And even after all that, you are forgetting about the brilliant contributions of women throughout history - many of whose accomplishments have been undermined or overlooked (bc of all of the above). Without women, you wouldn’t have had significant contributions to chemotherapy, the discovery of HIV, the discovery of sex chromosomes, the first car heater or windscreen wiper, one of the first compilers (COBOL), the dishwasher, the first gas powered central heating system, the first house powered entirely by solar energy, caller ID, Kevlar, the first computer algorithm - the fucking fire escape! I mean, the only reason you’re able to be on Reddit right now is because an actress and inventor named Hedy Lamar developed the concept of frequency hopping. And that is all DESPITE the constant disadvantages women have faced.

You can frame the exponential head start that men have had throughout history as them “just being more innovative than women” - but you’re just perpetuating the same old worn out dialogue. The point is that representation of women in STEM fields IS increasing. It isn’t increasing at the exponential rate you seem to think is possible, but it is. And alongside that is where we’ll start to see even more of an increase in female innovation.