Think women in tech is just a pipeline problem?

People in the 70's thought work life was hellacious and going deeper into hell, just like today, and every decade since (and probably every prior decade). I recall people declaring they weren't going to have children and bring them into the rotten world. Of course, the politicians all campaigned on fixing everything, just like today, and nothing changed, just like today.

Source: I was working for a living in the 70's.

I honestly have a hard time with any such figures since they take entire heterogenous regions and distill them down to a single figure that isn't going to hold true for all places. Single figures suggest homogeneity and that couldn't be further from the truth.

The UK is not the US. There are totally different cultural forces at play. I'm half British and all my aunts do most of the housework. My female and male cousins are one generation younger and share homemaking responsibilities with their male/female counterparts. The effect is stronger for those that live in larger cities. I've also live in China and Brazil. The homemaking habits of either country are not in the least bit applicable to the US.

Even within the US, there are big differences between California (where I live now) and North Carolina (where I went to school and college). Many of my classmates that stayed in Raleigh-Durham area have lifestyles where women are likely to handle homemaking responsibilities relative to those that left the region to live in places like SF, NYC and LA.

Here in the Bay Area, it's even more extreme. I wouldn't assume that any of the women I encounter does any more or less housework than any of the men I encounter.

Since all this talk is about the SF Bay Area and regions that aren't the least bit comparable in terms of homemaking activities. I don't even know many tech couples that live together. If they live together, they both handle homemaking activities.

You can't take a bias from somewhere else and blindly apply it to the SF Bay Area.

Furthermore, the modern house is sufficiently automated or simplified that handling home chores is hardly the full time or even part time job it once was. Laundry you can do once a week to every two weeks. You can get a roomba. You have services like homejoy to take care of the heavy duty chores like cleaning the bathrooms, mopping floors and cleaning the kitchen. I'm one of the few people I know that actually handles such chores themselves instead of hiring help to do it. It's not that hard and it's not that time consuming, especially considering that most people can hardly afford more than 300 to 600 square feet of living space per dwelling inhabitant in this city.

At the end of the day, these figures just aren't compelling as a way to describe the housekeeping chores division between men and women that work in tech in Silicon Valley.

That is not how it works. Tech is as pure marketplace of ideas as possible. So while we should all collaborate after the decisions are made, the process before them is by definition adversarial. We must nitpick and deconstruct each other's solutions. Because we programmers cannot work if we don't understand anything in full. To grok it.