Citation for that first paragraph and last sentence please.

I can see a demonstration of 50/50 in a controlled study, but I don't see how you get to 50/50 at a real company in this industry in the Bay Area without actively discriminating against those who meet the hiring criteria and are not women or minority, since 50/50 is so far from the base rate of potential applicants available to hire from.

To answer your question, yes, I would work in a place or field like that if that is all I heard in the above link, because I also know that nothing I read in that article is isolated solely to tech companies in Silicon Valley. AFAIK (and I haven't seen numbers otherwise), everything described in that article happens in many industries and many regions, including other industries I've personally worked in or with previously that weren't tech and weren't in the Bay Area (or necessarily the United States) (including one industry that is mostly female).

I'm not saying that we shouldn't address and change the culture so these unfortunate problems don't happen to anyone, but painting one industry and region as being uniquely a bad apple does a lot to deprive good people interested in that industry from entering it in the first place, leaving those already there further isolated.

I work/worked at one of Silicon Valley's many unicorns on the same team as one of the women who founded the female engineering group at the company and who champions the hiring of more women and one of the greatest challenges I heard her complain regularly about when trying to recruit women to improve our ratios was trying to overcome how the biased tech media likes/liked to portray our company (and any unicorn once it starts experiencing success). I heard of several instances where a woman turned down our offers and went to work elsewhere merely on account of what the media said despite my colleagues claims to the candidate otherwise. The way I see it, the chicken little sky is falling way of talking about things highlights problems but also actively discourages people from joining and making it better. Lots of great female engineers declined a seat on a rocket ship on account of what was being said, and I have no idea how many more didn't even consider applying in the first place.

There are ways to highlight and address the problem without discouraging people from coming to work in tech. I would love to see a comparative analysis of the transgressions in your linked article across multiple industries. Raising awareness for these problems everywhere helps get them solved, but raising awareness for these problems in one particular industry is both productive and counterproductive as it highlights the problem while simultaneously discouraging people from entering that industry to expedite those solutions.

Before I conclude this comment, I want to be very clear that I wholeheartedly agree that everything in that linked article is a problem and needs to be improved, but my particular complaint above and in this comment is about people who seek results without applying logic and rationality to understand the problem and don't also apply logic and rationality before arriving at solutions. Basically, a society that demonstrates logic and rationality is the social cause I most advocate for above all other social causes because it keeps all other social causes and those that advocate for them honest and grounded in reason.

In fact, this colleague who took on the important work of trying to recruit more female candidates started out as one of those women who had a job offer at our unicorn and went to work at another unicorn on a different coast with a better reputation first and ended up back at our unicorn less than a year later finding out that while our reputation was worse, our conditions were better (but still need improvement).