My examples for activities that don’t need to be sexually separated but just naturally seem to be anyway.
Audiophiles / Audio Geeks. I am not including females who have the expertise to obtain and use sound equipment for performance or DJing (like my daughter) in this group. These are people pursuing as much sonic perfection as they can afford as a near obsessive end in itself.
Watch collectors - I have never seen a female watch collector
Knife collectors - overwhelmingly male
Computer performance modding and tweaking - Might be a few women involved but seems to be an overwhelmingly male activity
For women -
Scrapbooking - might be some men but they are scarce
And for these, it seems to be mostly old men at that, at least near me. I’ve attended a few local model railroading clubs in my area and the average age there seems to be about 60. Typically a few small children can be found, and those tend to be both girls and boys. Teens are noticeably absent, and there are scarcely any twentysomethings or thirtysomethings. I visited the ham radio booth at a local fair a while back and everyone there behind the booth were also around 60 or above.
I was mildly into model railroading for a few years, when I was in my 20s (so, about 25 years ago). Even then, the hobby was largely middle-aged and older men.
More broadly, from what I’ve seen, most of the traditional “model-building” oriented hobbies (trains, planes, cars, rocketry) are still largely male hobbies, particularly when you look at who participates in them as adults.
Sewing, quilting, knitting, crocheting, needlepoint, etc. are all female dominated.
Cooking and food preserving (when done for pleasure not necessity or as an occupation) are still mostly female dominated but not as much as in past decades. Really serious barbecue aficionados seem to be mostly male.
Hunting is still male dominated, but not as much as it used to be.
The wife of a good friend of mine bought a yarn supply business a few years ago. She specializes in hand-dyed and unusual yarns for knitters, and her business is doing quite well.
My friend (an advertising art director) works part-time for his wife’s business, developing ads for them, as well as helping out at conventions. He talks about being one of the few men in that world.
My wife has been into the “fandoms” of various TV shows and movies for the past 15 years or so. Some of her big fandoms are Supernatural, Captain America, and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and she’s involved in the fan-fiction scene, as well. She attends conventions with her friends, and those fandoms (particularly those who write and read fan-fic) are almost exclusively female.
One of the things that bothers me about photography is that it seems to attract only guys, and only tedious know-it-all guys. Sadly, since I am a serious photographer, this probably describes me.
One of these days I will have a home machine shop. There are loads of videos of folks doing amazing things and teaching lots of great skills in machine shops. Every single one of them is a guy. Most of them are old men, and the young ones are the descendants of a long line of machinists (e.g. “This is my grand pappy’s Starrett 24 inch vernier caliper…I only bring it out for special jobs.”).
In my experience, hobby-level singers are more likely to be female than male, but not to an overwhelming extent… say, 65-35.
Dancers of the sort who are on their high school dance team and compete at dance competitions are overwhelmingly female… I suspect that the same is true of little kids who dream of growing up to be ballet dancers. And I’m sure it’s also true (if not moreso) for cheerleaders.
(Not sure what the OP means by “non-physical”. Dance and cheer are certainly physical but the physicality doesn’t seem to be what is causing the gender imbalance.)
But the two most male-dominated things I’m aware of are my profession and my chief hobby (I’m male).
Computer programming in general is male-dominated, but computer game programmers are almost exclusively male. I’ve been in the industry for 20+ years and in that time I’ve had maybe four female coworkers out of several hundred, across multiple companies. My current company has been around for 15+ years with between 5 and 30 or so programmers, and in that entire time has had exactly one. Currently, we have zero. (I don’t think it’s because we’re all sexist assholes, although of course it would be hard for me to tell, check my privilege, yada yada yada. Plenty of women work here as artists, designers, producers, HR people, testers, etc.)
Competitive: Magic The Gathering players are male to a truly ludicrous degree. Maybe 1% of players who are actively trying to compete at the Grand Prix level and higher are female. If that. (Not sure if it’s more or less than other similar parts of the gaming nerddom… say, miniatures games or hardcore strategy wargames. But the Magic tournaments are so big that the sample size becomes much more clear.)
(That said, look for “Other Day 1 Noteables” on this page for a striking and adorable exception to the rule… I know her dad fairly well, and she certainly seems to just love Magic, so it’s not some stunt…)
I inherited coin collecting from my grandfather. I also inherited a large part of his coin collection (actually, in bits and pieces as gifts over time) because I was the only one of seven grandchildren who picked up the hobby. He was a newspaper reporter who had the crime beat for the Wichita Eagle for years, and then after he retired wrote a syndicated column called Your Money. When I was the Secretary/Treasurer of the local coin club when I was only in high school (everyone else was an adult) I reprinted a column in each issue of the newsletter. (I also got a large chunk of his true crime books as well.) There was only one other women in the coin club.
I never understood why women aren’t more interested in coins. They are tangible pieces of history-- little artifacts anyone can own. Many of the dimes in my Mercury dime set were probably donated to the March of Dimes at one point. Anyway, many women are interested in history, so I never got the lack of women in coins. Or stamps, for that matter. I’m not interested in stamps, but I’m sure they hold the same fascination that coins do for people. I just prefer silver and bronze to paper.
Trains are an expensive hobby. You are going to find mostly people with the money to afford the hobby doing it, which will be men who retired with a sizable pension, or a stock portfolio, or something.
I know quite a few men into, specifically, pickling, but not any other forms of food preserving. I also know quite a few men who are vegan who are seriously into cooking, because they got into it when they discovered that vegans have to make a lot of their own food.
There was only one boy who played the flute in my band in intermediate school, and only one girl who played the trumpet. Clarinets were mixed, though. So were violins. No girl trombone players, no boy French Horn players, but only three people played that, so not a good sample. Couple of girls on sax, but mostly boys.
I know lots of women who play guitar, but they all play acoustic. I do not know a non-professional guitar player who is a woman and plays electric guitar. I do know one professional women electric bass player (Juliana Hatfield-- she plays lead and acoustic as well-- actually, I think she plays bass only when there’s no one else to do it).
Unless you are talking about gigging hobbyists. I’ve found that if you’re talking about hobby singers who go out and perform in bars and coffee shops, they are almost overwhelmingly male. They also tend to call themselves “professional” more often than female singers even when they are performing the same amount.