Just an observation, I really found this comment interesting:

We must be watching very different TV

Actually, you are. The report was published in 1991. TV was much different almost 18 years ago. Much of what you describe has changed during that time period. For a somewhat geeky example compare the female roles in Star Trek: The Next Generation with Babylon 5, the Stargate series, and Battlestar Galactica. Or for more mainstream viewing, how about Numb3rs, Criminal Minds, or the CSI franchise.

Television isn't the same as reality, but the roles in which women are portrayed as competent have definitely changed.

I tend to be aware of this subject because my wife has worked for more than 15 years on Expanding Your Horizons, a conference for introducing middle school girls to female role models in math and the sciences. When she started, many of the girls were completely blown away that women could do any of these jobs. Now, the girls are not surprised by the different professions at all.

Update: modify show list and minor edits.

Take the last 30 or so years. What we've proven is that if you bathe girls in self-esteem their entire lives, wrap them in advocacy you-go-girl programs, create a legal work environment that nearly criminalizes masculin behaviour around them, and try with all your might to drag them into certain professions, you will still end up with 80% of women employed in what are essentially specializations of of their tradtional roles - caregivers, educators, administrators, traders...

So you say that the "failure" of the programs that want to push girls to tech jobs is a proof that they just don't want to, even though many of them are still permanently confronted with the traditional role models at home?

On a somewhat related note I find it interesting that you list administrators as a traditional female role; with my limited historical knowledge I think that in the medieval age it wasn't one. So it seems that these roles do change over time. Maybe we're just in the medieval age of computing, and still have a long way to go?

I got lazy and used "administrators" in a more general sense.

Throughout most of history men and women have divvied up the tasks along somewhat similar lines. You have to ignore grossly perverting factors like our images of medieval nobility where roles are completely falsified by money and they apply to only a tiny proportion of the population. The correct model to consider of any time is the common man and woman.

Typically they've split things up like this - he concentrates mainly on things like hunting, heavy farming, war & defence, engineering & building, governing & keeping the public peace. She concentrates mainly on things like child rearing & education, caregiving, managing & administrating the household, local social associative activities, marketing (that is, getting products to and from market), light farming, and the like. Not that the lines were ever clearcut - when the fields needed clearing, she pitched in, and when the kids needed discipline he was an equal parent - so these were more tendencies than strict divisions.

Along came the industrial revolution and men left the home and the community from sun-up to sun-down to specialize in just one task in exchange for money with which they could pay other men to take care of all the other tasks for them. But they specialized in those typically male tasks, engineering machines, building an industrial complex and producing the goods women needed to make a household. All the white collar management stuff followed more as a necessary means to manage it all as it grew. The technology and wealth this produced was a great boon to mankind, but, frankly, the jury is still out on whether the particular way this re-organized daily life and society in general was a good thing. Men gave up independence and freedom for the shackles of a factory floor or office and a paycheck.

Fast forward 200 years, and women are hot to follow men into the industrial complex. And where do they go? Health care, teaching, retail, white collar manangement & administration, banking, service industries...they do exactly the same as men, specialize in those tasks they are naturally drawn to to earn money to pay other women to do all the other tasks they no longer have time to do for themselves.

But this doesn't suit some people's ideology, so we try to re-program kids and re-engineer people's natural behaviours (the 'environment') to produce the desired result. Mao's communists succeeded in training kids to turn in their own parents to produce the model of society desired by the central planning ideologues, which one would think runs counter to all natural human instincts. So it can probably be done, but at what cost.