People are still trying to make weak links between biology and interest in a subject, as if there are some mysterious laws of nature that link work to body chemistry. There's no overwhelming scientific evidence proving this.

Others (like this article) assert that simply increasing the amount we invest in education will result in an immediate change in not only who decides to stay in tech as a career, but also, who gets hired. This of course ignores all the other factors that stop women from pursuing the jobs themselves, and the barriers they'll face when they get there.

A different perspective on the issue at hand (gender diversity in tech work) could be taken by modern intersectional feminists. It is generally thought now that progress should come from women, for women, and not "gifted" to them by the benevolent white male dictators who graciously allow them to work at parity in tech. By including all the different factors that lead to different kinds of oppression women face, they could better advocate for themselves and address their various needs. But this would mean that for women to reach parity in tech employment, they would actually have to want to reach parity, and fight for it.

Of course, this route is more challenging, because not only do women have to change biases and fight discrimination, they would have to do it without the exclusive support of the existing power structure. But it would eventually allow a natural system to emerge, rather than artificially modifying the system to account for a perceived natural imbalance.

In Eastern Bloc countries during the cold war, women living in socialist states had more rights and more support from the state that allowed them have greater mobility, more freedoms, even better sex lives. The state identified the various unique factors that affected women's ability to be happy, healthy, and equal to their male comrades, and they provided support structures to achieve this. After the wall fell, young women had a harder time making a living, and generally were less happy than before, studies showed.

What do our supposedly superior capitalist democracies offer women today? Oppression! All over the US, women are limited by the government in their access to abortion, birth control, child care, a fair wage, a good job, etc. Society then steps on them further with heightened expectations for their gender and a generally demeaning attitude. Add in race, ethnicity, class, and other factors, and we have a veritable stone soup of oppression. And after all this, the biggest question we can muster is "Why aren't more of them working in tech?" Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees!

Somehow we consider technology this great bastion of the most ideal lifestyle anyone could aspire to. The fact is, tech is a boring, sometimes soul-crushing, time-demanding, rote, emotionless, competitive job market, where creativity is really only seen in brief spurts of code from time to time. For a high pay check, we dedicate our lives to making a blinking box perform logical feats, to allow our society to share pictures of cats.

To receive the privilege of these tasks, women get to work twice as hard in a field surrounded by people who don't relate to them and don't face the same challenges they do, get talked over and ignored, passed up for promotion. At the end of trying to juggle raising a kid/family, living up to western society's heightened expectations for their gender, and find some balance in between, and maybe a little harassment thrown in for good measure, they get a paycheck that's slightly lower than their peers.

Can someone please tell me why a woman would want to work in tech in the first place? Maybe we should be asking why men are dumb enough to work in tech?