I was surprised after meeting an analytics team (consisting of software engineers, data engineers, analysts) in my local state-run health system that all of them were women -- then I learned that so were most of the engineers throughout the organization and similar organizations in the area -- overwhelmingly women, older too. Not 20 or even 30 somethings, but people who graduated decades ago. I did some more poking around LinkedIn, looking at other state run services, like our local utility companies -- where again, most of the analysts and software engineers were older women.

I knew already that there was a huge divide in salary and culture between the highly paid software engineers at coastal startups + FAANG companies and all the folks that run critical infrastructure for state and local governments, health systems, and boring enterprise companies, but I wonder if the people in those roles tend to skew older and female too.

As an aside, I've heard coworkers at my previous coastal tech jobs express sentiments to the effect that the people described above who mostly work on Windows stacks aren't real engineers, or that there are good reasons for the vast pay disparities between these critical infrastructure folks and people working on Uber-but-for-clowns or whatever, and I think it's really silly.