That's now how that works. That's not how any of this works. Why are software engineering jobs being looked at in a vacuum? And why is capability to do the job

That's now how that works. That's not how any of this works. Why are software engineering jobs being looked at in a vacuum? And why is capability to do the job the only metric being looked at here? We could do the same thing with men and teaching children (the distribution there is even more skewed than software engineering, only the opposite direction) and say that there's no need for female teachers. We won't because that also simplifies a very complex equation to a handful of variables. It appears that most men don't want to be teachers because the incentives don't align with what most men want. Teaching is a field that doesn't pay very well, but requires a lot of social interaction, compassion, empathy, and generally is suited to more maternal people (this may be considered controversial, but on average women are stronger in these traits, according to psychological studies). Software engineering is the opposite. Full disclosure: I'm a male software engineer that lives with a female preschool teacher. She was on the path for medical school (a field also somewhat dominated by women currently but pays much better than teaching) but decided that becoming a teacher would be more rewarding for her. We've discussed our career choices and I realized I could never do what she does because it requires more patience and compassion than I want to exert on a daily basis, I wouldn't feel as much gratification from it as she does, and it pays a fraction of what I currently make. I realize this is an anecdote, but it does represent the average distributions of male and female careers and the incentives for each gender. Could it possibly be that in general men and women want different things out of a career? And maybe software engineering offers more of benefits that are valuable to men, in which case it would be fine that there are more male engineers, just like it's also fine that there are more female teachers. I'm using in general and on average a lot here because I don't want to imply that there aren't compassionate men or women who want high paying jobs - they're just less common than their opposites, on average. And note that I'm not saying that these preferences are due to biology - whether it's that or sociological factors doesn't really matter here. Trying to artificially equalize the distribution between males and females in a given industry doesn't make sense either way.