It&#x27;s not 100% a meritocracy, no, although it seems to be more of a meritocracy than other industries.<p>And a lot of the gender skew starts real, real early. Anyone who took Computer Science in college could see the gender skew in action. I regularly had between 0 and 1 women in my 30+ student classes. They just weren&#x27;t signing up for Computer Science classes.<p>And there used to be quite a few female computer scientists, but that trend changed in the 70s. There was probably a cultural aspect to this (i.e. parents or peers influencing their decisions away from computers because computers are for asocial nerds, and you don&#x27;t want to be a nerd!).<p>It does appear that the cultural influence is shifting at least slightly in favor of women being programmers again, with nerd&#x2F;geek culture becoming more fashionable and so many people using computers&#x2F;smartphones all day long, so hopefully we will see more women pursuing computer science, but the root of the problem is mostly right at high school&#x2F;college age, not nearly as much in the workforce.