You said in other comments that you didn't intend "bears vs. foxes" to be "men vs. women," but it still reads that way a bit, so let me take a stab at being mor

You said in other comments that you didn't intend "bears vs. foxes" to be "men vs. women," but it still reads that way a bit, so let me take a stab at being more explicit: The bears are the kids that grew up fascinated by computers, and just knew they were going to do something with them when they grew up. Maybe they didn't always get the best grades in school, but as early as middle or high school they could blow you away with the knowledge they gained purely out of self interest. This group is mostly (though not entirely) male. Most (not all, though things are a lot better today than the used to be) of the bear's earliest experiences with computers were solitary endeavors free of gender bias; if you're the elementary school kid picking out computer books from the library and pouring over them at home, you aren't even aware of a gender bias or skew in tech, you're in your own little world. Sure, when you grow up a bit and start meeting i.e. dickhead teenaged boys in IRC channels, the skew makes itself known, but if you made it to that point in the first place, a few jerks aren't going to be enough to scare you out of your passion. Given that there seems to be a lot more male bears than female bears, this and other anecdotal evidence suggests to me that there could be some kind of unavoidable neurological difference that makes men on average more likely to be innately interested in this sort of thing from a young age. We can make things more welcoming for the female bears and attempt to insulate them from the aforementioned dickhead teenagers (though I don't think that is great idea either), but you can't just force any girl into becoming a programmer any more than you can guarantee that every boy with a computer will use it for programming instead "wasting" it on video games and porn. The foxes are the honor roll students that worked their asses off in school so that they could get into good colleges, get a good degree, get a good job, and continue their family's upward mobility. Whether it's business, medicine, law, or today computer programming, they didn't really care so much about what they did and didn't really worry too much about it as children (though of course they probably developed genuine interests in their field of choice during study and employment), but whatever they decided to do, they were willing to work hard to become good at it. They are at a bit of a disadvantage in tech vs. other fields that mostly lack a group of self-interested bears, but their strong work ethic helps to make up for it. This group pretty much already has gender parity (when you look at college graduates as a whole, not just in tech-related fields), so while the programming foxes may be made up of less women today, it will surely reach gender parity in time. (Yes, this is a false dichotomy; many people can be described by both the bear and the fox. Ignore it for now, or treat it as a suggestion that the foxes may come close to but never reach true gender parity either.) Any tech company is going to be made up of both bears and foxes. The proportions of these groups will vary, and the gender ratio within both groups will slowly shift closer to gender parity over time as barriers are torn down. However, if you accept that there may be a natural reason for the bears to be made up of more men than women, then it becomes clear that due to the bears tipping the scales, there will never be perfect gender parity in tech candidates, and that there can only be perfect gender parity in employed tech workers if the male bears are actively discriminated against by all potential employers. Sadly this philosophy does not seem to be very far off from what many employers and prominent figures here seem to actually believe and practice, but on the bright side for the male bears, it is almost impossible for them to be completely excluded; for as long as tech is a competitive field, ignoring a male worker because of his gender will just result in him being snatched up by someone else. So while I do support initiatives to reduce gender bias and punish blatant harassment in tech, I think that some amount of gender skew is unavoidable and not worth worrying about. The people that push for a perfect 50/50 split strike me as misguided at best (if you disagree with the idea that men could be "better" or more interested on average at tinkering as a whole, while simultaneously believing that women are "better" on average with emotional and social skills, then while I see where you're coming from, I think you have some cognitive dissonance to work through), and at worst, far left radicals and those they dupe, more interested in raging a never-ending culture war than in making any real progress. But hey, as a bear, I'm biased.