Not sure women have filtered away from tech so much as we’ve driven them off. (Speaking statistically, although I can point to a number of individual cases…).
As a “thinker” who retired from tech at 59 upon realizing there was only room for “doers”, an observation: wall street’s reward mechanism for companies (and therefore for executives in companies who are senior enough to have P&L responsibility), and the incentive structures boards put in place for executives, are at the root of the culture you describe.
I would point to Tracy Kidder’s book “The Soul of a New Machine”, published in the early 1980s, as an inflection point toward the tech industry asking its developers to simply use overwhelming effort to make target dates. Those dates are about making financial numbers, not about serving customers.
One more observation: my son’s law school class was more than half women, and the people he practices law with (as a beginning attorney) are at least half women, including his next two levels of management. Laws and regulations have a lot in common with code, and doing research on a complex legal topic strikes me as not that different than chasing a squirrelly bug through dozens of modules of code trying to figure out the interactions. Oh, and it’s a lot harder to offshore legal work than it is to offshore writing code. Who’s the smarter gender?
