> In the US, the proportion of female workers in tech rose from 31 per cent in 2019 to 35 per cent by the end of 2023, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It rose by an absolute 4 percent during the incredible rise of the fake email job. To me, it means that we're completely tapped on the amount of women that are willing to join tech.

If you look at college admissions, you'd think, "Hey, we're actually seeing an increased interest in women joining CS. Look at the percent of women graduating from top CS colleges over the last 15 years." What you're not seeing is the admissions statistics broken down by gender. Almost all admissions statistics that are publicly available are aggregated. I've seen how the meat is made on the admissions side and have had access to the statistics broken down by gender. There is a drastic difference in the admissions process based on gender. Often the only admitted male candidates have a GPA of 3.9+/4.0 to these top programs whereas the average on the female candidates have much lower at 3.4/4.0. That's the difference between perfect academic performance and above average. It takes a lot of effort to achieve a perfect score in some of these intense majors. It doesn't even account for the grading bias that these men will be experiencing in addition.

What's interesting to me is that you see very few women as ICs in later stages of their career. Most transition to management or out of the workforce. Straight women in tech typically marry someone else who makes same or much more. It's often plausible for the woman to become a SAHP and opt out of working as long as they're fine with either husband grinding insane hours to make 7 figures or moving to Dublin/Boulder Creek.

In addition, I think the outsourcing of tech jobs will be another way that companies will "improve" the statistics here in the USA. Engineering is overwhelmingly male. Companies love to outsource expensive software engineers to other countries (where they are also still overwhelmingly male but won't be accounted for in company stats!). I think this is the next move for DEI/anti-labor consultants. Expect your job to be outsourced not because it's saving the company money but because it improves the company's demographic numbers.

I remember a company I worked at bragged about their wildly high POC/black workforce. Everyone they were hiring in those roles wasn't making much money. They were just customer service roles that didn't pay a ton but this was peak fake email job time. The HR side of the company would then trash the engineering org because it was 75%+ asian (one would think it was 95%+ depending on org you joined) and most of the remaining <25% was a mix of white/middle eastern with a few token Nigerians spread in. (Not a single black american in over 1000+ employees in USA employer) Almost always the female IC engineers were under 35 - and none had kids yet. As soon as kids happened - transition to management or quitting. I never thought I'd see it so blatantly.

I don't know why we have to fixate on such a stupid non-problem. Women and a lot of minorities just have no interest in tech because it has the lowest social status of all white collar professions and it's an incredibly taxing job on top of that. The competitive jobs require an insane amount of effort to get into that requires nothing short of methamphetamine or autism. The only reason most women I know get into these jobs is because the hiring bar is lower for them. A lot of women get completely shellshocked whenever they encounter an interview that is at the level of a typical male candidate.