Actually, women are not really interested in tech
Not the same way men are, anyway. Here’s evidence…
T he recent James Damore diversity memo and his subsequent firing and legal actions have triggered a left-lash that has blinded ideological critics to this natural disparity. The echo chamber has never been more resounding…
Here is the memo…
… and here is Google CEO’s Sundar Pichai’s internal counter-memo.
On the one hand, we want to lip serve the notion that of course men and women have cognitive, behavioral, and physical differences: 200,ooo years of being homo sapiens cannot easily erase those differences just because identitarians deem discussing the disadvantaging ones sexist or taboo.
(Of course, that is about to change… imminently…)

On the other hand, we want to sublimate those differences to advantage women whenever contexts that might naturally favor men arise, in order to force feed artificial parity in the age of identity politics and affirmative action.
That might actually be insane…
I’m a female CTO and have been deeply in tech for 18 years. I rose up as a foot soldier drone coder. I’ve been leading group technical effort for almost a decade, at companies big and small. I attained my position essentially because of business acumen, ambition, and a keen empathy for developers…
…and yes, because I can code, but that’s nowhere near the main reason. Ask me to whiteboard an algorithm that recursively reverses every word and its synonyms in the Esperanto dictionary O(n) and I’ll probably kick you. Many men who have worked for me code much better, but cannot come close to wrangling human effort when it counts the way I can.
That doesn’t offend me.
I recently perused the top 30 or so open source internet software repositories on Github. GitHub is a version control repository service, mainly for code.
For example, I looked at projects like Django, Python, React, React Redux, Redux Saga, Angular, Node, Bootstrap, WebPack, Vue, etc., i.e., the software that is fundamentally driving internet, gaming, apps, AI, etc. I dub this immanent or intrinsic tech.
These are unpaid projects, hence no hiring bias involved, and no high heels to take off to level the gender playing field. Anyone can play. Contribute to what impassions you, on your own time.
Result: women are not contributing.
Commits, pull requests, forks, issues reported or resolved, participation in discussions about features: overwhelmingly male dominated. No women in the top committers, for any of the projects I mentioned. I found a few minor female contributors deep down, but I had to really dig, and they were nowhere close to being top committers, architects, and in no way were they driving forces behind solving the big, hard technical problems exposed by these projects.
I hope this changes soon… because this pattern strongly correlates with the idea that women are fundamentally not interested in immanent/intrinsic tech the way men are, which, like it or not, agrees with the infamous aforementioned memo in some ways.
Maybe we’re contributing, but being real coy about it…

I expected to see the reverse, even a little bit. I expected the revelation that despite all the hiring disparity at big SW companies, despite the prevailing sexism in software claiming we’re biologically incapable of coding at the same level as men, despite all that, we’re so passionate about tech that we’re going to overwhelmingly contribute however we can and prove them all wrong.
That isn’t the case.
It’s curious, but doesn’t offend me either.
Why should it? Most would concur women have the edge when it comes to nuanced business discourse, collaboration, emotional intelligence, communications finesse. Does anybody really ever suggest that that is reverse sexist toward men?

I’m not a contributor to these projects, either. I don’t think that’s hypocritical: I’m way more interested in other things, like great products, user happiness, team dynamics, cohesion, interoperability, viability of the technical effort, being an entrepreneur, getting rich, making the world a better place…

Some women make fine career coders. But, really, women should be leading technical teams: that’s where our strengths and, hence, inclinations are and have been and should primarily remain.
Women should be leading the charge, commanding the vanguard, suffusing technical teams with our presence and empathy and shrewdness and drive and compassion and vision and technique and collaborative finesse as Directors of Technology, Managers of Technology, CTOs, VPs of Product, CEOs…
…and partly, but not mainly, as foot soldiers.

I call this extrinsic tech.
Until there is a sea change in women’s fundamental technical inclinations toward intrinsic tech (beginning with a boatload more projects like Girls Who Code, Women In Tech NYC, et al.), a way to begin diversifying technical teams is via sideways, or lateral osmosis, i.e., moving into extrinsic technical positions via product, digital strategy, project management, or business intelligence lines, vs negotiating with traditional, male dominated SWE orgs.
