work toward what should beAy, there's the rub: what should we work toward? This issue almost never gets discussed, except by implication. We hear over and over how we "need more women in tech". But even if everyone agreed that we do, how much more is enough? Should we stop after reaching 33% women? 50%? 60%?
Often we hear the vague assertion that the percentage of women in tech should be close to the percentage of women in the general population—you can hear it echo every time the word "underrepresented" gets uttered—but this assertion is rarely justified. And indeed we can see how potentially absurd this criterion is by applying it to cases that don't serve the same political ends as "more women in tech"—i.e., by observing that women are "underrepresented" in prison, men are "underrepresented" in the daycare industry, etc. (Putting more women in prison isn't often offered as a way to stick it to the Patriarchy.)
The assumption that increasing the percentage of women in tech is virtuous—quite a different goal, mind you, from encouraging all interested parties (female or not) to pursue the subject—pervades our discourse, to the point where "improve the percentage of women in tech" and "increase the percentage of women in tech" have become synonymous. To see through this trick, simply consider the similar case of the percentage of college graduates who are female. Women currently constitute approximately 57% of college graduates; i.e., women are overrepresented by a gap of around 14% vs. men. The question then arises: what would it mean to "improve" this percentage?
We see in a flash that "equality" has nothing to do with it—I have never seen any mainstream source call for "improving the percentage of women among college graduates" by decreasing that percentage—unless, of course, by "equality" we mean that having women overrepresented among college graduates will help address other inequalities, such as the preponderance of male CEOs, male professors, and male billionaires. In this case, we simply return to the beginning: what should we work toward? Should we strive for proportional gender representation in every field of human endeavor? Unless men and women (and, indeed, all people) are perfectly identical, this is a prescription for eternal conflict—a fair characterization, I'd say, of our lamentable status quo.