Reading a bit more of 'Living Dolls'

I finally finished the first segment today, ending on the note of biological programming.
Accoring to Simon Baron-Cohen's book "The Essential Difference", having a 'female brain' or a 'male brain' will effect the way you play as a child, and also influence your choice of occupation as an adult. Eg. Girls will play with dolls and generally have more social skills as adults, thus they become nurses, teachers, therapists etc. Whereas boys play with building blocks and plastic tool sets, making them ideal engineers, scientists, tradesmen, etc.

Now, I don't know about you, but when I think back to my childhood, I remember being in love with transformers, k-nex, lego and from as early as 4 years old - computer games. My friend and I used to spend maths class drawing blueprints for space ships and twinking over 'Mangere bridge primary school' on our ballpoint pens in order to replace it with out space company's logo. Does this in Baron-Cohen's book make me some sort of uber-dyke super-freak? I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only girl to not be 100% interested in dolls, and I'm pretty sure there were plenty of boys who were impartial to the odd dress up as well.
As for the career part, I've always found the idea of dealing with people (especially of the young variety) somewhat torturous. Why would I want to spend all day being ignored by rowdy children, or listening to some tool's problems for an average salary and the privilege of being bossed around by some control-freak? Especially when there's more interesting and highly paid jobs out there.

I was so taken aback by the fact that Baron-Cohen's work could be seen as anything but chauvinistic in this day and age that I even looked up the year it was published, only to be further astonished that it was released in 2004.
What stunned me further was the multitude of people (mainly male, funnily enough) who were virtuously defending the book, claiming that there is no sexism because science proves that women are better at reading emotion than men.
Once again I'm going to use myself as the example here... I have no ability to read emotion whatsoever. I normally don't realize that someones upset until someone else says "hey what was wrong with such'n'such?" to which I usually reply "huh? they seemed pretty happy to me..."
I also live with three men, all of whom always seem to be emotional about something, and all of whom seem to read each other and our extended network of friends with ease and the kind of intuition that I could only dream of having.
I'm pretty sure I'm not some kind of weird one in a million anomaly here, I meet plenty of people on a daily basis that share my traits. So how can someone like Simon Baron-Cohen draw the conclusion that 50% of the world's population operates on the same biological programming? It's pretty obvious that although playing with dolls and liking pink is the cliche, it's overwhelmingly common for girls to cross those boundaries. How can you say that men make better lawyers, or have better brains for science than women and get away with not being 'sexist' just by saying that women are made to read emotions and therefore are more suited to nurturing jobs?
As Natasha Walter states, it seems that the chauvinist views of 'women's work' aren't so dissimilar to fresh research.