I tend to agree with everything you say. I'd like to call out this part: I believe women should really get into technology, and become actual tech people inste

I tend to agree with everything you say. I'd like to call out this part: I believe women should really get into technology, and become actual tech people instead of many faux-techie types I was surprised to read this, but not totally surprised. I've been wondering when this phenomenon will start to be publicly discussed. I think women faking technical skills to benefit from "women in tech" hype is a really serious problem that isn't discussed anywhere near enough, probably because people are scared of the crazed feminist witch-burning crowd. But women and especially actually technically skilled women need to start addressing it head on. The problem of fake "women in tech" seems to have grown astronomically in the last few years. I've been writing software for decades but I don't remember noticing this even as recently as 2010. It will, eventually, if not strongly discouraged, cause men to quietly and silently start assuming that a western female who claims to be a programmer or claims to be technical is probably lying (10x so if she's attractive!). This risks setting back equality of opportunity in technology, which I think everyone agrees on, by many years. In the past year alone I've encountered perhaps four or five cases of women who exaggerate their technical abilities to the media or others online, to the extent that they're just deliberately deceiving people. One case was a journalist who claimed in her bio she was also a contributor to a somewhat well known open source library, which surprised me because why would you be a low paid journalist on a low traffic tech news site if you had programming skills good enough to take part in that project? Turns out her "contribution" was a single character typo fix in a comment, submitted through the github web UI. Another case involves a woman who was put in charge of a corporate funded open source project and liked to loudly and repeatedly claim to the media that she was a 'hacker' with an interest in machine learning and cloud infrastructure, who hung out and gave talks at hacker conferences. She actually did give a talk at a security conference once: on suicide prevention. She has no program traceable to her anywhere, no history of doing any programming work in the past and no github account despite the project she led being hosted on github. In short, no evidence of these supposed hacker skills are anywhere to be found. She is allowed to make these claims about her skills unchallenged because nobody will criticise a "woman in tech". Of course most cases aren't so blatant. But they add up. It makes total sense for women to do this. Claiming to be technical has become a free pass to jobs, status and wealth and they know nobody will call them on it. Unfortunately in an environment where Damore can't even suggest that men and women are different in ways that cause them to have different interests without getting fired, the far more touchy subject of deliberately deceptive behaviour by women is unlikely to ever come up outside of anonymous forums. The problem will fester until many years have passed and attitudes have become entrenched. Neo-Victorian attitudes may rise again. It could be a terrible pity.