Who hasn’t conceded that half the citizenry have two-digit IQs, and concluded that the sheeple need to be lied-to for their own good? What better way to take control as a tyrant than to portray reason and consideration as “hand-wringing indecision and weakness”?

You’re right at a superficial level, ER, but I know you know better, that trafficking in villains and conspiracies, no matter how noble your rationalization, never turns out well in the end.

Science and reason matter. Still.

I tend to doubt that there’s really any shortage of skilled engineers, especially programmers, on a global basis. Not only are there huge numbers of potential employees physically present in places like Silicon Valley, a lot of programming is done remotely over the ‘net these days. The Internet’s like a teflon-coated H1B visa. There’s little geographical friction in programming employment any more, so you have to view the programmer employment market on a global basis.

As for the bigger question of why there aren’t more women writing code, that’s complicated, but I’ve known more than enough world-class female programmers that I can immediately dismiss the Google misogynist’s tired claims of a biological difference. There are women who are frighteningly good at coding.

But down-pyramid, women are definitely under-represented in the rank-and-file. That distribution is another knock against the claim of biological difference–it’s a sign that it’s not a skill deficit, but cultural barriers resisting general entry by women into tech. A few determined and brilliant individuals will always rise to the top, literally the exceptions that prove that discrimination is the rule.

That’s the pattern that results from discrimination against any group. Pointing to all the successful and wealthy African-Americans does nothing to rebut the claim that there’s still plenty of discrimination against Black people in America.

But to get back to coding, tech is clannish, and culture and power gets handed down the dominant channels: Males, predominantly white and Asian/South Asian, but almost never Black; powerful now and generally young when they made their fortunes. Tech culture not only has a bias for males, but for youth. The mythos is that only the young can be creative, and that makes the old and powerful feel comfortably nostalgic.

The tech industry’s discrimination against women is in the spotlight, but age discrimination’s pretty virulent too. I don’t begrudge the attention sex discrimination exists, because it’s been festering a long time. Wage inequality and harassment are overdue for a fix.

You describe there being a lot of female programmers in your time, ER, and context is relevant. Computing was a vastly smaller industry, rather obscure and geeky when that was an epithet. Those sound like mainframe shops, and mainframe computing’s cultural lineage goes back to the days when “computers” were ranks of women calculating with paper and pencil. Going forward in time, as electronic computers gradually supplanted the organic ones, the most skilled of those women were retained to became keepers of the new machines. There has always been a healthy proportion of women in the mainframe world.

It’s this new microprocessor-based world that arose in the ’70s that has such a dearth of women working in it. A lot of it is because that world arose almost entirely separately from the existing mainframe and minicomputer industries. It was self-consciously insurgent and separatist, and the culture was late-counter instead of post-war. The microcomputer revolution occurred right at the moment when feminism was gearing up, which means that the industry started out dominated by men. It would be a few years before anybody would find that troubling, and by then the first generation of pioneers found by men like Jobs and Gates were already entrenched and powerful.

Women often get a raw deal in the tech industry, and as a male who works in tech, it bothers me. If I were a VC, I’d find a female entrepreneur with a mostly female team with a good idea for the general market, and tell her to not worry so much about “increasing shareholder value”, and build a company that women want to work for, one that doesn’t doesn’t have to play catch up to achieve gender parity. The shareholder value will take care of itself.