The Pink Washing Problem

Most companies' approach to gender equality in tech is performative. There are initiatives, there are panels, there is a Women in Tech page on the corporate website. Then hiring managers go back to recruiting through their existing networks, which are overwhelmingly male.

I've seen this first-hand. Colleagues and managers who participated enthusiastically in DEI workshops would consistently gravitate toward male candidates. Not out of malice. Out of comfort, familiarity, and pattern matching against their own career trajectory. The result was measurably lower quality hires compared to what a more deliberate approach produced.

DEI programs, in most implementations I've encountered, are pinkwashing. They might make women feel more welcome, and that's not nothing, but they don't change who actually gets hired, who gets promoted, or who gets the interesting work.

CVs Are Rigged

Here's where it gets structural. Hiring processes and job requirements are implicitly optimized for the statistically "normal" male career path.

Men do significantly less care work. This produces cleaner CVs with fewer gaps. A two-year gap on a resume gets penalized in screening, regardless of the reason. We all know this, and we all pretend we've fixed it.

Men have more free time to tinker. Side projects, open source contributions, conference talks, blog posts about the latest framework, these are resume builders that correlate directly with having evenings and weekends that aren't consumed by childcare, household management, or eldercare. When job postings require "passion for technology" or "active GitHub profile," they're selecting for people with disposable time, not people with superior skills.

Men take up more space at work. They volunteer for the high-visibility projects. They take risks on experimental work. They claim team achievements more aggressively on their own record. None of this is controversial to state, decades of organizational research confirms it. But most hiring processes still reward exactly this behavior through how they evaluate "impact" and "ownership."

The net effect: a man and a woman with identical actual capabilities will produce different-looking CVs. The man's will scan better in every standardized process. Not because he's more qualified, but because the system is calibrated to his life.

The Attrition Problem

The low percentage of women in IT isn't just a pipeline issue. Women enter the industry and then leave it, systematically.

Bro networks determine who gets the good work. In most teams I've observed, there's an informal layer of relationship-based task allocation that runs underneath any official process. The people in the network get the greenfield projects, the new architectures, the presentations to leadership. Everyone else gets maintenance, documentation, onboarding, and bug fixes.

The "high performer" myth covers for extraction. The developers celebrated as high performers are often exactly the ones who externalize team maintenance work onto others. They cherry-pick the shiny, novel problems. They delegate (or simply ignore) the care work that actually keeps a team functional: knowledge transfer, code reviews, mentoring, keeping documentation alive. This invisible work lands disproportionately on women. The visibility, and the promotions, go elsewhere.

Sexism isn't punished when it comes from "valuable" people. Micro-aggressions, being talked over in meetings, having ideas attributed to someone else, unwanted comments, these are daily realities for many women in tech. Companies tolerate this behavior as long as the person generating it is considered a top contributor. The implicit calculation is always the same: we can't afford to lose this person. So we lose the women instead. Quietly. One by one.

What Would Actually Help

If you're serious about changing the numbers, here's what that requires. None of it is comfortable.

Quotas: A binding minority quota is the only mechanism that has been shown to force structural change. Everything below that, voluntary targets, aspirational goals, feel-good declarations, gets abandoned the moment it becomes inconvenient.

Actually punishing sexism: Including the micro variety. Including from your highest performers. If there are no consequences, there is no policy.

DEI that changes decisions, not optics: This means redesigning hiring criteria, promotion processes, and task allocation, not organizing another networking event with prosecco. DEI needs to operate where actual power is exercised, not where it looks best on LinkedIn.

Protected networks for women: Women need spaces to warn each other about bad actors, share experiences, and coordinate against structural discrimination. These networks need to exist independently of the power structures that create the problem. Sometimes that means they exist without leadership's knowledge, because when the hierarchy is part of the problem, the solution cannot depend on the hierarchy's permission.

The Uncomfortable Bottom Line

Twenty years of comfortable measures have produced no meaningful change in the gender ratio in IT. The numbers speak for themselves. Anything short of actively correcting structural bias, through quotas, through consequences, through fundamentally rethinking what a "good candidate" looks like, is decoration. Well-intentioned, maybe, but decoration.