There's also a "serious lack of diversity" on the lumberjack, trucking, and earth moving businesses... Stop with this pc shit, please.
If you're implying that race has something to do with career choice that's a much hotter potato that I'm going to deal with. It can't be ruled out because it's so polictically incorrect that nobody will research it.
Race and gender equality have a serious problem in that it's so dangerous to have the "wrong" viewpoint that any real research into the causes and possible solutions is never going to happening.
Something is stopping certain groups of people from persuing a career in CS and blaming tech companies for inequality is like blaming the sky for being blue.
We need to.research these things, even if we can't stop it we should know why. Knowing the reason alone would help tremendously whether it solves equality or not
A gendered toy preference has been demonstrated in infants at 3-8 months (!!) using eye tracking software[1]. To make matters even weirder, the same gendered toy preference has also been demonstrated in rhesus monkeys[2] and vervet monkeys[3].
From [2]: "We present here striking evidence of a sex difference in rhesus monkey preference for human gender-stereotyped toys paralleling that reported in humans, suggesting that gender differences in toy choice may reflect evolved sex differences in activity preferences not primarily resulting from socialization processes."
[1] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-008-9430-1
I personally think the regulators may be overreaching here, but have no problem with the regulations themselves. They are necessary, as humans living in the united states have historically been unable to rise above their biases. Without active pressure for integration, we end up with segregation, for reasons which have nothing to do with biological determinism.
Take access to schools and education. Education funding in the US is basically allocated through local property taxes. Thus, richer neighborhood have far better schools than poorer neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, red-lining and white flight have led to a society largely segregated on class and racial grounds. So certain racial groups have been systematically denied access to housing in areas with better education funding, leading to worse educational outcomes for their children, leading to less money for buying houses in nice neighbourhoods with good schools, and so on.
By the time I started programming, 50 years ago, the field had shifted. In one class I took, in a large lecture hall at MIT there was only one female student. In that same lecture hall the organic chemistry lectures were very roughly 50% women.
It's not as if programming is a fundamentally different beast today.
You draw comparisons to several industries which I think is not a reasonable argument, being as they are not as lucrative and imo not as desirable.
From another perspective; If we're willing to make an imo very fair assumption that inherent demographics have no affect on scientific ability (inherent meaning being e.g., a woman versus a non-inherent demographic such as e.g., people that don't like math), then a culture that broadly discourages people that would otherwise go into science from doing so will decrease the average ability in the sciences (unless that discouragement affects only those of lower ability than the average for that demographic in which case it would increase the average ability?)
Women dominate the fields of pharmacy, dentistry, nursing, and education. All fairly desirable jobs. Some paying better than software dev.
Asians are represented to a much higher degree for their relative population than whites in technology even though they're a minority.
Blacks are extremely highly represented for their population percentage in professional sports.
Is it fair that these ethnic groups and genders are overrepresented in these fields? You could make the same argument as with software dev that they lack diversity relative to population demographics, and that white males have less opportunity and it's not fair.
What I'm saying is that we need to look deeper into what causes these divisions if we really want to do something about it. It's not just as simple as saying "we have too many white devs we need to hire a bunch of wildly different people just because"
And to further support your point: this is clearly depending on the sport. All careers are determined to a large extent by youth aspirations and it would truly be a terrible stretch of the term "racism" if we blamed young people for choosing idols who are "like them". I guess that the set of kids who dreamt of being like Lance Armstrong wasn't particularly diverse and there certainly are no active gatekeepers to dreaming.
The same mechanism is active in every other desirable profession and we need to understand it well so that we can identify and act upon the cases where there is also something else at play.