It's not about your opinion. It's about how you deliver it and the assumptions you made about someone because they differ.

I actually agree with both you and the parent in different aspects. But yes, you can have a productive discussion that starts with someone saying it doesn't exist.

I've learned on this board that a lot of the contention is more that women want to be ABLE to work in tech if they choose and have a good experience; not that we need to have 50/50 representation necessarily. I support that. I don't support quotas or trying to force women into certain occupations just because they're higher paying. In fact - a lot of the pressure is probably because STEM demand is high and large companies know that getting a bigger pool requires them to pull more women.

Tech definitely needs to be more welcoming to women, but I don't buy that tech is worse than other industries. I've worked in retail, real estate and hospitality before. In comparison - those are some extremely unfriendly environments for women.

As the parent commentator said - pushing women into STEM jobs is also a way to say that their preferred alternatives are not as good of a choice. I agree with that. If women want to dominate nursing, teaching or stay-at-home moms - why should society try to redirect them?

Now, is there a wage gap? This seems to be debatable as there's data on both sides.

Personally I believe there is, but at a small adjusted amount and I think it's mostly due to negotiation skills and the way we raise boys versus girls.

Generally speaking, women are raised to be more reserved than men and to not rock the boat, especially in groups. I run a business and anecdotally, three of my best female friends are what most would consider alpha. Two of them are in marketing and one is not. The two in marketing are excellent negotiators, the third is not - I've actually negotiated on her behalf in a marketplace once. I asked her about it - she's mostly afraid of offending the other party. My wife - same thing. I've negotiated her salary before and she got 10k more than she would have. In real estate - she's afraid of offending the seller with a lower offer, although she's getting better with experience. I don't care - it's business and that's part of the game of getting a good deal - ideally you pay less than market value. The seller gets a data point and an offer in hand. At worse - they're offended for 5 minutes.

Anyway, learning marketing/sales/persuasion/negotiation is a great investment for anyone. You make more money by solving more problems for more people. And you make a lot more money by being a good negotiator once you've sold yourself. There's some good stuff on Everyone Negotiates [1].

Expecting the market to pay you more than you are willing to work for is futile. The good companies will pay you market rate without you having to do anything and revisit salaries every year to make sure they are fair and inline. That's a small subset though. If you're not good at negotiation - there are third parties that can help you or you can ask prospective companies how they set and revisit salaries. I turned down a company's offer once because they were so set on market values and the use of third party data that I felt it would always be limiting no matter how I performed. For some - they may prefer that route.

Apart from negotation, any desired cultural shifts will take a lot longer but I think a lot of it starts with parenting.

[1] http://everyonenegotiates.com/topics/negotiating-tactics