[AgathaTheWitch]

I agree with almost all of this save the part about the gender balance eventually evening out.

I don't know that there ever will be parity and I don't know that that is a problem.

Proportional representation is not always desirable or natural. Different groups do things in different proportions. Such is true of men and women; in aggregate, they do things in different amounts. This is not de facto evidence of insidious discrimination; we don't seem to assume so in the case of men not being in female-dominated industries like education.

Ultimately the lack of proportional representation is mostly the result of real differences between men and women. To try to create proportional representation would either demand hiring tokens or heavy duty social engineering to reduce gender differences. I don't like either option.

[jenandre]

I think "even out" was a bad/lazy choice of words on my part. What I mean is, it will get to a point where the ratio of women in tech will be more or less equivalent to the ratio of women that WANT to be in tech. This may or may not be exactly 50%. It could be 25%. I don't know myself. It's getting better in certain areas, but when you talk about "technical" positions e.g. programming, sysadmin, etc the ratio seems to be pretty bad and far less than what it could be.

Right now I suspect too many women that are kind of interested and may want to do this kind of work are scared off/intimidated (or worse, they never even consider it because of the thought "I'm not that kind of person") by the stereotypes/culture/etc and that's too bad.