My experience throughout my entire career is that the many females I have worked with could have done anything with their lives, perhaps law or medicine, but ch

My experience throughout my entire career is that the many females I have worked with could have done anything with their lives, perhaps law or medicine, but chose software engineering/design. I was in school before the Internet bubble popped, and there were tons of women in my courses because there was a ton of money to be made. That precipitously dropped off after the crash. The majority of men I have worked with, when asked, can't see themselves doing anything else. I have met exactly one woman in my life who has said anything like this to me. The best programmer I ever knew was an Indian woman. I worked with her for six years. She became pregnant and was a stay-at-home mother for a few years, no doubt in my mind she gave that 100% too. Now she is doing something related to the legal profession and is doing quite well. It is the industry's loss, and will probably be chalked up to sexism when it is included in aggregate numbers. But in the end I believe it's because she had a wide array of options for conventional salary work, and chose something that gave her more money and more social prestige.