As usual, when one looks at the sources, it&#x27;s disappointing:  <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nextgeneration.ie&#x2F;sources-women-in-tech-project" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nextgeneration.ie&#x2F;sources-women-in-tech-project</a><p>Very few empirical sources, and lots of political soap-boxing.<p>Why are there few women in tech?  The intellectually honest will begin by pointing out that nobody really knows.  From there, we can talk about what we think <i>might</i> be responsible, but if we&#x27;re going to continue in the spirit of intellectual honesty, we must acknowledge that the gender gap in technology is part of a large and <i>very</i> robust phenomenon by which women prefer to work with people, and men prefer to work with things [1].<p>Granted, the people vs things dichotomy may well be the result of social conditioning, but it might also be indicative of an intrinsic difference.  (At this point, intellectually-honest feminists who oppose essentialism must also admit that the latter is a political and sociological theory, and therefore has no bearing on whether or not there actually are fundamental differences between the sexes from a cognitive and biological standpoint.)  Indeed, just as <i>de facto</i> gender differences can be fueled by social conditioning, so too can social asymmetries be fueled by biological factors.<p>While there certainly is evidence suggesting that the gender gap in technology is the result of systematic bias (or even discrimination), we must take care not to lose sight of effect sizes.  I have not looked into this myself, but I would be extremely surprised if, say, the use of gendered pronouns had an effect size that even remotely resembled the people-vs-things effect.  Social conditioning effects tend to be small compared to their biological counterparts (with notable exceptions).<p>So why are there fewer women in tech?  Those claiming to have the answer are at worst intellectually dishonest, at best ill-informed, and in all probability pushing a very narrow interpretation of feminism.<p>My fellow feminists (in name only, sadly):  disguising political ideology as science and abusing the connotations of the term &quot;source&quot; ultimately hurts your cause.<p>[1]  <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;19883140" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;19883140</a>