Not to pile on, but publishing low quality pieces such as this really doesn't do "the cause" any favors. The obvious question the article avoids is "why then a

Not to pile on, but publishing low quality pieces such as this really doesn't do "the cause" any favors. The obvious question the article avoids is "why then are there so few women back-end devs?". That is really the crux of the whole matter. The article seems to suggest that women, for whatever unrelated reason, uniformly decided to go into front-end development, saw a wage and prestige drop and therefore decided to stop there since "men". As has been pointed out, less scarcity of skilled labour in any field will reduce wages eventually, so this wouldn't even be surprising in a gender-blind world. The problem I have with articles like this is the obvious omission of facts that explain the situation. Front-end dev is often a natural path from, or, even part of traditional design work. Traditional design work (among other things working with html), is not at all men dominated. It doesn't matter at all why this is the case, rather, it explains what happens in front vs. back-end development. It is not that women somehow do not react to monetary incentives or are driven out by men. Front-end development is just simply the natural extension and career path for many women somehow involved in the technology sector. The same can not be said for back-end development. The fact of the matter is however, and this is unrelated to the above, that front-end development requires (generally) far less specialized skills and has a far tougher labor market than back-end development. Hence, front-end devs earn less. The real question, and crux of the discussion, is therefore if women can be successful as skilled back-end engineers and earn their fair share there. Up until that situation, there isn't even any reason to debate some sort of male fault and this is so obvious that shoehorning a gender debate into this matter is simply bad journalism. I think the equal pay movement can really "thank" journalists for producing such garbage articles because it truly calls into question the validity of the whole deal.