FWIW, I would consider myself on the same side of the argument as you. I agree that institutional/systemic sexism and racism are "things", I agree that intersectionality is important, etc. I wouldn't consider myself a SJW, but I have been called one before.

However: I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the difference between systemic sexism and actual sexism.

The tech industry suffers from systemic sexism. That doesn't mean that HR departments and senior leadership are all staffed with cartoon villains eagerly waiting for the opportunity to sexually harass a subordinate or assault someone at an office party (aka, plain vanilla sexism), although I think we can all name a couple companies that, it turns out, fit this mold pretty well. It doesn't even mean that senior leadership is full of misogynists who will systematically underpay women and undervalue their contributions and talk over them in meetings (again, it does happen, it's just not the main issue here).

Rather, it means that the entire structure of the industry is one that yields unequal outcomes. There are a lot of different factors here: Things like policies on working from home or flexible hours, expectations about overtime or vacations, the practical impact of the dreaded "culture fit" evaluation or implicit assumptions about what a good engineer "looks like". But also, absolutely, the "pipeline" problem.

My company - like yours, I assume - is eager to hire diverse candidates, but we can't hire candidates that don't exist, and our demand, alone, isn't going to fill up high school, boot camps, or college classes with the missing candidates. But when the graduating classes are overwhelmingly male, your junior devs will be too. And so will the intermediates, seniors, tech leads, principle engineers, etc. And when everyone is mostly male, it becomes self-reinforcing. When everyone at the table discussing policies is male (or even all but 1-2), it's very hard to figure out whether a policy seems sensible to you because you've got twenty years in the industry and know what works for successful teams, or because you're a guy, and knows what works for successful teams of men.

> They call it a pipeline problem when it's really a willingness problem. If they took it seriously they'd already have a solution.

I think you're seriously underselling the scope of the issue. Taking it seriously and being willing to solve it does zip point nothing. We cannot hire engineers that opted to a different career path and are not only not really qualified to apply now but also aren't even applying because they have no interest in tech and haven't even considered it as an option.

In a later comment you say:

> The solution is to drop the ridiculous credentialism that's infected the field. You do not need a CS degree to contribute usefully and advance a career in this field.

Sure, absolutely, one of our better recent hires we made is a woman who took a break from her (non-tech) career after having kids, decided she wanted to give tech a try, attended a bootcamp, and then applied to us. We hired her, she's been great. Which is fine; really that's the bare minimum any tech company should do.

...but systemic sexism is still a thing. One company (or fifty) being eager to solve it doesn't actually do anything. Hiring one good engineer with a non-traditional background is fine, but we're trying to double the size of the engineering team this year, and if we hired every woman who applied without a CS degree in the last year that would go exactly 0% of the way to meeting our hiring goals, because they're not applying.

Your condescending "oh, the solution is so simple, you people just aren't thinking of it because you don't care" is nonsense. The issue isn't that 100% of companies are sexist and won't hire women and/or women from non-traditional backgrounds, the issue is systemic sexism which means the (very large) number of companies that are not sexist and are eager to hire those women cannot do so.

In short: You seem to think that talking about the pipeline problem is way of minimising or avoiding grappling with the hard problems. I think your attempts to minimise the pipeline problem is a way of you avoiding the hard problems. :)