It’s all happening very late in the boom, though. In 2014 some companies began to release diversity reports for their programming teams. It wasn’t a popular practice, but it was revealing. Intel is 23 percent female; Yahoo! is 37 percent. Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft are all around 30 percent. These numbers are for the whole companies, not only programmers. That’s a lot of women who didn’t get stock options. The numbers of people who aren’t white or Asian are worse yet. Apple just gave $50 million to fund diversity initiatives, equivalent to 0.007 percent of its market cap. Intel has a $300 million diversity project.
-The average programmer is moderately diligent, capable of basic mathematics, has a working knowledge of one or more programming languages, and can communicate what he or she is doing to management and his or her peers. Given that a significant number of women work as journalists and editors, perform surgery, run companies, manage small businesses, and use spreadsheets, that a few even serve on the Supreme Court, and that we are no longer surprised to find women working as accountants, professors, statisticians, or project managers, it’s hard to imagine that they can’t write JavaScript. Programming, despite the hype and the self-serving fantasies of programmers the world over, isn’t the most intellectually demanding task imaginable.
+The average programmer is moderately diligent, capable of basic mathematics, has a working knowledge of one or more programming languages, and can communicate what he or she is doing to management and his or her peers. As these skills are not, in any way, related to gender, this can only lead to one inescapable conclusion: the problem with women in technology isn’t the women.
Which leads one to the inescapable conclusion: The problem with women in technology isn’t the women.