[Pingk]

Tech isn't siloed for no reason.

In the UK government, before programming was considered a high-value skill, the vast majority of programmers were women. So much so that programming was measured in girl hours (which were paid less than man hours).

When it became clear that programming was going to be a big deal, women were systematically excluded, flipping the gender balance (although they had trouble hiring initially because men saw it as lesser work).

[vundercind]

It flipped because the roles programmer (largely women) and analyst (mostly men) became programmer-analyst. The role women were dominating was collapsed into the one men already dominated.

At the exact same time (at least in the US), which was the 1980s, law and medicine (as in doctors, not nurses) rapidly shot toward near-parity of participation by men and women, while both being high-pay and much higher-prestige than anything to do with computers—now, still, but especially then. That the profession becoming higher-paying and a “big deal” was the cause of this shift doesn’t make much sense, given what else was going on at the same time.

[edit] to be clear, I’m not denying the existence of a gap, or making claims about whether it should be addressed—in fact, I think understanding the cause is vital if we do want to address it.