> when we have every major university and large tech employer bending over backwards to find more women who are interested
I swear this is always at the core of it. Trust me it’s not as glamorous as you make it out to be. Yes tech companies are bending over backwards to find and hire competent women because we’re rare (and why!) but that statement is not at all the same as women have lower standards. You have to understand that literally no team ever is going to burn their hire on a perceived less qualified woman because she’s a woman. The desire to have the best person because the team is lazy and wants someone who will make their lives easier always wins. And not to put too fine a point on it but your average team of tech folks is pretty anti-woke liberal-tarian meritocracy so you’re not getting a whole lot social justice bias there. I guess this could happen if you have HR hiring in a vacuum but I’ve never seen a place where the team doesn’t have the final say.
> putting up with so much more bullshit
The bullshit is the culture. Look I wish this wasn’t true but it’s the unfortunate reality of being a woman in a CS major. Your male classmates do not see you as an equal. there is an in-built presumption that you don’t know what you’re doing; any normal mistake you make that guys make too just cements it. When you’re doing group work nobody listens to you and you get the “fun” experience of waiting for them to catch up and then having no recognition at all that you had already told them. Getting study groups together is awful one because guys will not let you join because they think you’ll be a drain, or they will let you join and then hit on you. Do you know how many fucking times I got told to go make me a sandwich? In more than one class I just asked the professor to do group projects alone. And that’s before dealing with how isolating it is to be the only girl in class and having the shock and head turns the first time you speak.
It’s not perfect by any stretch of imagination but I would have been driven out of tech had I not by chance landed at a few companies with older teams and realized that maturity makes a huge difference.
> and that we can show notable although weak bias in favor of women
Well yeah, of course you expect that. I just talked about a situation where a woman saying something is more impressive than a man saying the same thing. Context matters.