Disclaimer: This is a personal theory, and while there's some research that says similar things, I'm not a cultural anthropologist. Grain of salt. I think it h

Disclaimer: This is a personal theory, and while there's some research that says similar things, I'm not a cultural anthropologist. Grain of salt. I think it has to do with the youth of tech as an industry. I'm 25, and I still very well remember the days when if you wanted to work on a computer, a screwdriver was required. They were heavy, too! Heavy enough that a ~3rd grader would have serious trouble carting them around, especially up the stairs. You can fit all the computing power you need into a messenger bag today, but that wasn't always the case. The women entering/leaving the tech industry today are still almost unanimously of the age where they were deterred not by the constraints of programming and computer knowledge, but of the more traditionally male-oriented tasks like screwing pieces of metal together and lifting heavy stuff. 2 decades ago, it was less cool for girls to get dirty with that kind of thing. Of course there are the same kind of systemic problems that plague the culture as a whole, but I think the problem was exacerbated by the fact that hardware free, strictly knowledge based computer work is only now becoming the norm. Hardware is becoming less stigmatized for women (albeit slower than programming), and it's also becoming less necessary, so my hope is that things only improve from here.