The workaholic stereotype may apply to other STEM fields, but we're talking about programming here. It's a lot more complicated to set up a home infectious diseases lab than it is to set up a home VPN tunnel into the corporate network.
I disagree. It's easy to set up an infectious diseases lab at home. You just have a child, send the child to daycare or school, and start collecting samples within about two weeks.
Seriously, I think the workaholic thing depends on where you work. Bay area tech startups tend to be pretty demanding, and the demands increase as you climb the ladder. That said, even startups aren't always as bad as the universities, which are definitely high-stress, long-hour environments.
I'm not sure about making a claim that men or women are inherently better at certain things, given stereotypes and gender expectations. I accept that different fields are dominated by certain sexes right now, but that fact could be a correlation without causation via inherent ability.
For example, it used to be that nurses were nearly always women, and doctors were nearly always men. There was an assumption that this was a natural order of things. These days, you find nurses and doctors of both sexes. And let's not forget that women and certain minorities weren't even allowed to vote because they weren't considered to be
capable of voting. I suspect that what was really going on with disenfranchisement (then, as now) was fear of change. Yet inherent lack of ability was claimed.
