I don’t want to be the pink elephant in the room

>those cultures are doing that's different than us.

1. One of the very few jobs that is well paid. So you are either a software engineer or poor.

2. There is not social stigma associated with being an engineer. infact its the opposite, see point 1.

3. Even in India "math is for boys" meme is strong but point 1 overpowers everything else.

> The gender gap is purely cultural

Unless you can point me to a non-poor country where this is true, I would say 'The gender gap is purely economical '

Its nice that author ended up going to engineering school via massive social and economic inertia afforded only to a tiny sliver of indian population. But there are lot more women who need the helping hand and encouragement provided by those groups. So perhaps a little empathy towards those programs and what they are trying to achieve, even if it causes minor distress?

> There is no room for “maybe” - and there is no room for “is this a woman who wrote this or is it a man”. All one should care about is - is this excellent or is it not? Is this right or is this wrong?

The general way that I have understood folks who advocate the programs that are being presented as problematic here is: whether or not there should be room for "maybe", and whether or not one should care about anything else, people inject maybes and do care about gender. That is, the diversity programs and the sense of “I should support this person because she is a woman” is rooted in an observation or impression that being a woman puts you at a disadvantage in one way or another. The bias is already there, and the attempt is at a counterbias.

I think it's very good that this isn't a problem in the author's experience, but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem at all. That said, I'm wondering if there can be a better balance between supporting women who are good but aren't judged to be, or feel like they aren't even though they are, and women who are perfectly confident in their abilities and just want to operate like a sexless engineer at work. Certainly I'm hopeful that women don't experience that bias in every organization, and a (hypothetical) organization that's already structured in an unbiased way would perhaps not want to focus on gender.

From a purely practical standpoint, though, it feels like the right question here is, does the approach the author doesn't like reduce the number of women who don't enter or who leave the industry due to bias more than it increases the number of women who leave in frustration from being treated as ‘different’. If the problem these programs are meant to address is ‘many women leave the industry or don't join it because of perceived bias’, then that's the real metric. In a perfect world, nobody cares… But in a world where people are biased against women, perhaps you have to try to adjust explicitly for that in the short term, so that you can get to the goal of a world where nobody cares in the longer run.

i don't think you're allowed to speak that heresy in polite society.

You've got a huge number of confounding variables here that you're not accounting for. Gender equality and cultural attitudes towards gender roles are not simple metrics, you can't infer that just because some aspect of a culture demonstrates superior gender equality to another that this culture is necessarily superior in gender equality in every way. Attitudes are vastly more complicated than that, and there's no reason to believe that a society that is more progressive in one sense can't be more regressive in another.