Some industries or professions are male-dominated because the industry itself has been around for a long time and thus has historically been male-dominated. We

Some industries or professions are male-dominated because the industry itself has been around for a long time and thus has historically been male-dominated. Weirdly, those industries are probably diversifying faster than IT because they were the first obvious targets for women wanting to "break the glass ceiling" - being the first female lawyer, professor or general in a particular firm/university/country is quite a prestigious achievement, and books and movies are made about those kinds of people (though actually this makes me realise that I'd love to read a book or watch a movie about a woman who does something cool as a software developer - and no, Hackers doesn't count). It's easier to bring external political pressure on those industries partly because everyone regards them as important, and locking women out of 'important' industries was probably regarded as a major problem to solve for politicians. Also, the first women to achieve something close to workplace equality with men were probably relatively high-status women to begin with, and they would have wanted to break into prestigious professions. Programming and IT has not, until recently, been regarded as particularly high-status, and it was not regarded as a problem for society at large that most of the people doing it were men. But now people regard software and IT as very important - people like Steve Jobs or Aaron Swartz or Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Berners-Lee have a similar order of influence in society as, say, senior judges, politicians or scientists. It now seems unreasonable that, if "code is law" (in Larry Lessig's phrase), the law is being written mostly by men. I guess those are the political reasons why people regard the gender balance in software as 'problematic'. There are other reasons too - greater gender diversity may lead to greater diversity of thought, and this is generally a good thing; women may bring different skills and attitudes which may be beneficial (though this is by no means guaranteed, and certainly doesn't mean that any given woman is going to do this); purely personally, I've worked well with women in project management, business analysis and other roles and I'd like to see similarly talented women doing programming too. The question of why Etsy are doing what they're doing is intriguing though. If one believes that sexism is rife, and that self-interest of the firm concerned argues against spending money training female developers who aren't necessarily even going to work for you, then it is almost impossible to explain the behaviour described in the OP. One of the assumptions must be wrong, I guess.