So yea, the more likely reason is C) Women don't want to become engineers as much as men do, for whatever (social/biological/cultural) reason
Look, if women are being unfairly excluded from the pipeline then fight THAT. Don't blame Google or Facebook or X company for hiring the best they can. They have "diversity consultants" on their payroll for christs sake. This isn't an issue that is gonna magically be solved in a few years. Making the "pipeline" more diverse takes years of investment and education and encouragement. What I take an issue is with people blaming these companies when they're actually doing a reasonable job of trying to become more diverse. As if these companies are the ones really holding people back. and if only they could overcome their biases they'd have a perfect diversity ratio overnight.
We know there's a pipeline problem, and we are fighting that. We don't think it's going to be solved overnight either, and critically, not just by addressing the pipeline because, as numerous stories from the tech industry have made clear recently, even when qualified women make it through that anemic pipeline, they still face individual and institutional sexism. Or have you forgotten that one of Uber's recent departures left Google after an internal sexual harassment scandal that was quietly handled?
this is in regards to Google.
" the more likely reason is that women are being filtered out of the pipeline by sexism, not some mysterious "maybe they just don't want to" handwaving."
So you're alleging that Google is judging women more harshly than men, "at all phases of hiring".
Provide a source for THAT, please.
Willful blindness is what it is.
- http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/07/26/426...
- https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/10/the-lack-of-women-in-tech-...
Or is it merely that the pipeline being fugged doesn't mean that everything else is fine and dandy? I'd agree with that, hell yeah, and that claim matches the actual content of those links quite well. But I don't think it in any way suggests that the problem is a myth.
I also don't think the pipeline is unfixable, but that's both my day job and another rant for another day.
What I think the original comment I replied to was saying though (and what most people in the industry with hiring power that I've talked to about this have said) is that "the pipeline problem" is the main thing preventing them from hiring a diverse team. That's bullshit though; there have been a million and one studies showing implicit biases in the hiring process, for one. We definitely need to improve the pipeline — the "pipeline problem myth" I'm referring to is that that's the extent of the problem.