This is the kind of "science journalism" that I strongly dislike (and is promulgated by both sides in politically tinged debates like this one). Basically the author has a point of view, and sees in the study some numbers that support said point of view.

That aside, I think the biggest problem is not understanding where (the obvious) disparity in tech comes from. It's not discrimination, and least conscious discrimination. And I don't even think it's unconscious discrimination or side effects of so called "privilege".

It's simply that when tech startups are small, for various reasons (I'll get to this), they have a lot more males than females.* If the startup does well, early hires rise in rank by virtue of being there longer. If/when the reach the size where they are recognized by name, it's too late, most of the top roles (both engineering and management) are filled by males. Even if there was zero discrimination (or feelings of isolation), you would get the topsy turvy industry we see now.

Most studies focus on income but the far bigger disparity is wealth (both in this case and generally). The earlier employees in successful startups are phenomenally more wealthy than latecomers. These people are the ones who go on to start and fund more startups, and the cycle continues.

This is why PG's now infamous remarks about there being few female hackers (as opposed to CS students/engineers) are really insightful. Having Sheryl Sandberg or Marissa Mayer as visible leaders in large companies won't really change much (or anything when it comes to tiny startups). When these large companies hire, it's quite likely they do so scrupulously fairly. But even though the disparity is much better when it comes to new hires, the females amongst them (just as the males) start at the bottom.

Having more female founders is a start, perhaps, but it doesn't really solve the problem of too few female hackers. What you need are more female technical founders. I'm not saying that the non-technical founder role is less important (in fact it can often be a lot more important). But the technical founders are responsible for building the technical team from the ground up. Males tend to have more male friends, just as women tend to have more female friends. And the first people you try to hire are friends.

But even more than just technical founders, if you want to reduce the disparity at the source, there need to be more female "Mark Zuckerbergs" who come up with the idea and hack version 0 when everyone else is out partying (and, importantly, before fundraising is even a thought). This is when a founder has most leverage: when he/she has built the kernel of something that people want and everybody else wants in. Think of the scene from The Social Network (admittedly a hollywood movie) where Zuckerberg assigns roles and equity to his co-founders and basically brushes of the girls' offers to help.

This is a very difficult problem to have, if you want to increase the presence of women in this industry. It's difficult because there's nothing you can do to future "Mark Zuckerbergs" to force him to pick a more diverse set of co-founders. There can be no law, because this is almost like choosing your friends or significant others. A not insignificant percentage of startups with female founders in fact have their significant others as co-founders. This could be great for the startup (I know many great teams like this, obviously pg/jessica being one), but it again points to how difficult it is for females to find co-founders the way males do.

The only thing that would really work is for "these girls" to have been hacking since they were children and think that this is the coolest thing they could be doing. And there needs to be a critical mass of them so they can make friends with each other, because if you think that telling adult male developers to "play nice" is hard, try forcing 10 year old boys to invite 10 year old girls into their crew, (cooties and all).

* It would be cool if there was data to track the ratio of male engineers to female engineers as a successful startup grows. My hunch is the ratio improves steadily along with company size.