This comes from a previous comment, but one that is pretty relevant given the "anti-diversity" hysteria that has gripped valley-connected people since some guy at Google suggested that maybe it might be worth considering the possibility that the Emperors clothes could be seen as a tad revealing.

Women still don't choose STEM careers because generally, they understand their natural advantage in life comes from group acceptance, and not tournament performance.

Many women can and do succeed in the natural tournament culture of STEM, but given their options, the effort/reward ratio and natural advantages, they prefer something that provides in-group security.

Given your esteem and position in that in-group is based on whether your peers can accept your code or not, and group survival is based on how little work your peers have to do to get your code checked in, STEM careers below the management level do not provide in-group security, or give commensurate rewards for the natural charisma and social navigation skills most women have. It's almost impossible to get people successfully into those management roles without having proven themselves at the tournament level. It means fewer women, but it could as plausibly be explained by women just having better effort/reward options to compete for than slugging it out as a code monkey. Outside academia, STEM jobs are indexed on these single, simple factors.

Men tend to invest and take tournament risk to achieve higher peer status, where women tend to seek security from relationships that insulate them from negative accountability or group censure/expulsion. Lots of exceptions, but it is a useful filter.

Where are the smart women? The smartest class of women are over represented in professions like medicine, law, academia, and others because for the same 7-10 year investment it would take to be a top tier engineer, scientist, programmer, you get a certification and you are in effect, "made," in society. For them it's a no-brainer. In group security, jobs for life, and no zero-sum performance-based existential threats to their certification status for the rest of their careers. The smartest women "get made," in these fields.

Second to those, you get women who work in large institutions that are hyper-political and lack objective accountability measures like P&L, works/doesn't-work, sales quotas, etc. where get-along skills trump outlier-level performance by a high margin. Government, social services, teaching, nursing, etc. Jobs where nobody actually gets fired for failure or incompetence, and rewards are either fixed or relationship based.

Smart men skew toward tournament careers like sales, finance, tech, advertising and others because the work they put in comes out as higher status among their peers, and failure means exile.

I have met great individual contributor women in science and on engineering teams, but their low numbers/high quality could be explained by the polarizing effect of a survivorship bias that weeds out women faster than men in STEM, leaving only the very strongest ones behind.

When a lot of women look at their options and real natural advantages, they quite logically select out of tournament careers in favor of political ones, leaving only the very best remaining technical ones in STEM.

It's like why we only meet rich hedge fund managers, because there is such a long tail of failed ones we never hear about so we mistakenly assume rich fund managers are the norm. Same is probably true for why the distribution of talent among female engineers is so polarized. The top quintile are genius level, and the below industry average ones just haven't selected out in favor of better options yet.

SJW culture in tech companies is the result of an investment bubble. People without a real problem to solve or a mission to accomplish, but with a sea of cash, are cannibalizing their own with witch hunts and purges as a means to seize control of these giant bubble assets. If a company can afford to waste time on invented social justice problems and political purges, it is probably rudderless, ungovernable, or both.

What should change? Smart women should recognize that their destiny is not shared with stupid women, just as most smart men recognize their destinies are not shared with stupid ones either. The tribal divisions defined by progressive identity politics are designed specifically to disadvantage intelligence, work, investment, genetics, family, and ethics, by people with a cancerous ideology that is very good at organizing to take things from you instead of building them themselves.

There is nothing sexist or anti-anything about having a serious discussion about political means and ends. There are kick ass women in tech, but they aren't staying home and being buthurt about their feels. This culture of "political accountability" for discourse needs to be put down decisively, and permanently.