One thing that bugs me: Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it. Maybe that tells us that sexism in software development is prevalent and they wanted out, which is no fault of theirs, and maybe they just wanted more money - but it definitely sucks overall.

I find blind technical interviewing easy because I don't usually remember new people after a few moments. My reports say "The applicant" not out of a deliberate effort to screen the potential hire's name, race, gender - anything like that but because if they left an hour ago I already couldn't tell you anything whatsoever about them besides that they've got this very idiosyncratic approach to loop structures or they seemed not to understand what thread safety means or whatever.

The only interviewee I remember at all now was a Russian woman for whom it was her first interview in the country, and her first interview in English, and my core goal for the entire time was to keep her calm enough that I could discern whether she knew how to do the job. It isn't humanly possible to stay terrified for say months, eventually she will relax if we hire her (and she did, she was fine within a week) - but she might manage to stay terrified for long enough that I can't tell if she actually understands what a compound primary key is and how these iterators I'm talking about work and if I'm not sure then hiring her would be a big risk.

" I am betting there is no significant difference in inherent potential talent "

I don't think it's talent, more so motivation, interest, cultural dissonance, choice - and of course all the 'bad stuff' like environments that are directly or indirectly not very conducive.

Most fields have some kind of gender asymmetry. Have a look here [1].

If one were to take some time to experience a handful of those fields, I bet the answers to why 'software' has asymmetry would be similar.

I guess I'm saying the issue may have specific roots in tech, but probably more or less rooted in more broad, cultural issues.

[1] https://careersmart.org.uk/occupations/equality/which-jobs-d...

I've noticed no talent differences. I've worked with men and women who were great devs, and I've worked with men and women who weren't.

I see a lot of different personalities and demographics including women coming out of coding academies.

But everyone in the bay area flirts with "getting into tech".

This has been discussed once or twice... What did your search engine tell you?

It is a documented (aka scientifically proven) fact that women generally prefer to work with people and men prefer to work with things. There are exceptions, of course.

In my 20+ years working in IT I met a single woman that was a developer and chose to stay a developer; a few moved from development to project management or operations, but most never wrote a line of code after graduating college, jumping directly in PM, ops or any role that allowed moving away from coding. I do not have any good explanation for this, my first sentence doesn't fully explain this.