This is interesting. I'm a female Electrical Engineer in the United States. Females are obviously a minority in the Engineering teams, but interestingly enough, there are a few older female Engineers I know who came from Eastern Europe after spending 10-15 years doing Engineering there, and said they never had an issue with sexism until they came to the U.S.

I'm not sure whether an elaboration by them would indicate that they experience more sexism by men, or that overall its more of a topic brought up by women, but they did say there were more issues with men here.

I think alot of the issues with women in the U.S. vs Europe are due to the fact that Europe is more urbanized and concentrated. Women and men live and work in closer quarters with more socialized economics where women are overall more educated, urbanized, financially independent, and the sexual and in general culture is more liberally progressive.

In the U.S., we are way behind when it comes to womens socioeconomic equality, and education quality in general. Concurrently, there are large number of men live suburban lives, with housewives who are to some degree financially dependent on them, and the idea of an a women who doesn't fit the housewife/trophy wife/soccer mom/etc etc whateve that American culture props up as a way of life for women to idolize, causes more cultural friction and results in more emotional isolation for women working in male dominated work forces.

Not all of it is intentional. Most guys I work with are fine, but older than me, married. I'm 27 single and don't intend to settle down anytime soon, maybe travel more if anything. So every company I've worked for, is filled with men who golf together or do other things. I'm not explicitly excluded anymore than I'm not interested in doing those things and they know that. If I was invited, I wouldnt go.

This is overall pretty a pretty trivial example, but I am trying to emphasize how the undercurrent of culture in America is a large contributer to this, and not necessarily any one persons fault or a mans conscious decision to come across as exclusionary.

Regardless, the document this article refers to goes far beyond that, and I have to say, as an INTJ female, this biology crap is ridiculous. I am introvert and would prefer any day to stay inside and read, code, play video games than go out and "socialize".

In my experience, as an educated female introvert, I am demonized for NOT being a social butterfly, I have been called a bitch for not smiling when I say something in a meeting, because there is a subconscious expectation that girls are supposed to be adorably cute in everything that they do, or ease poltiical or social tension and are viewed as "out of line" for being the source of it, and men are rewarded for agressive aberrhant behavior and lauded as the leader of the group for equally outlier behavior. If a man is confident in his capabilities, I've found him to be considered respected, but if a women is confident in her opinion in a meeting or her belief in her own capabilities, I've often been told I'm a know it all, and am reminded immediately why I need to be "knocked" down a peg to be reminded how I'm not as great as I think I am. It can be a little confusing to work in male dominated environment and be punished for the same behavior that men are rewarded for. This does not happen to me as much at my current job, or on my team or my department, but you have to wonder how much day to day life in the long term impacts what paths women take in their lives and careers based on the rewards and punishments they receive and their economic incentive to act and perform like a man, which is all subject to current socioeconomics and politics, moreso than a woman's "biology"

This document serves one purpose and on purpose only, to perpetuate stereotypes that many women do not meet, and recategorize all actions and behaviors they have that women DO meet the "White male" stereotype and according to this document I mean "objectively qualified software engineer with an open mind and idealogical diversity" as non lady like.

Furthermore, the fact that this document is even being considered as potentially accurate to some degree by any "intelligent" software engineer is more of a testament to how they probably should supplement some of their tech education with history.

The last time I checked:

The very first compiler: Grace Hopper

Nuclear Power: Lise Mitner

Code that got us to the moon: Margaret Hamilton

Spread Spectrum Technology/Wireless Communication: Hedy Lamar

Inventor of Acorn Computer and ARM Processor: Sophie Wilson

Current CEO of AMD: Lisa Su

Those are just off the top of my head and by the top of my head I mean

Nuclear power, which is the most abundant clean energy source on the planet right now,

First flight to the moon, the precedents for Wifi

etc etc, I'm probably missing some awesome women, there is no proof whatsoever that a females biology makes her less capable of being an equally qualified software engineer.

This general argument has been used for thousands of years in various flavors to justify a lack of womens rights or capabilities and they have never in retrospect sounded anything less than ridiculous, with their conclusions implying nothing less than the ONE thing ANY software engineer, and anyone who listened to day 1 of Intro to Science in the 5th grade should know, and that is correlation is not causation.

Women used to suck at math before they were allowed to go to school.

In the same way, technology is a new industry, and women are already a minority status in so many other industries its bound to reflect here as well, but the existence of a gap is a correlation to biology, as well as the many contributing factors to the cultural differences that influence the mass aggregation of how far women go when it comes to being socioeconomically independent individuals with advanced careers.

less than 50 years ago it was argued women shouldnt have careers because how can we procreate our species if women are working passed when the can have kids.

Well now we have technology and better healthcare to enable women to be healthier live longer and have kids much later in life.

Every excuse about biology as an objectively and permanently limiting factor to womens capabilities is a blatant lie that has shown itself to be one time and time again throughout history .

And to answer your last question, I personally really don't care about the diversity of my team if they are all good people who can work well, but I WOULD care if a coworker propogated a document saying I'm inferior to them because of my biology as a female.

On a very similiar note, to further this argument with studies and words that are not mine, by some of the mst lauded Economists of our time, I recommend the book "Why Nations Fail" which goes through many countries and places in history showing that the socioeconomic advancement of a people or a country, despite many arguments about certain countries or ethnicities being "less evolved over time" which was and in some places still is an argument and justification to why so many countries and millions of people persist in poverty, and actually that the ability for a country and a people to advocate for themselves is very much a result of the soecioeconomic system they live in, supplementing studies of groups of people an entire cities with the same biology and ethnic evolution and history who live in prosperous countries or not, entirely based on the political structure of that country incentivizing venues for massive growth in healthcare, education, human rights etc.

I would argue the existence of highly educated competitive female software engineers is just like most of history and people in the world upon objective studies, based on a complex structure of what incentivizes people and how much their culture allows/encourages/or punishes the advancement of womens education and independence, and this is a snapshot in time of which it would be irresponsible for us to make permanent conclusions about the mental capabilities of women due to their "biology" without efforts to extracate and analyze nature vs nurture in mass.