[wpietri]

> why do we see 50/50 male/female in tech as some kind of gold standard

This isn't even a hard question. The short version is, "duh, history". The slightly longer version is that many, many other fields have shifted from "no women" to "50/50" over the last century because patriarchy is finally starting to fall apart. Tech is a weird exception:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-...

Maybe you could read a book or take a class before opining much more on this?

> what if the problem had a lot more to do with how ingrained the drive for status is

You mean what if our organizational cultures are so fucked up as to reward status-seeking behaviors rather than more healthy ones? Organizational cultures that derive from patriarchal dominance hierarchies? The answer is to shift to more healthy and inclusive models of working, which is why modern diversity/inclusion programs do much more than fix hiring. Which fits nicely in with a lot of organizational improvement efforts that have nothing to do with bias reduction, because it turns out that raw primate dominance behaviors are a pretty terrible way to organize knowledge work.