Are men systemically ecluding women in tech?

I have taught many software development classes, with dozens of students. It's completely open enrollment, no restrictions on age, experience, income, certainly not gender. Only 2 women ever asked, let alone attended.

The 1st was taking the class because her dad was a programmer, but she couldn't figure out how to use the mouse to save her life, and it was only frustrating for her after that.

The second one was taking the class because her dad is also a programmer, and she was bloody fantastic. She was the only female in that particular class, and she put older, more experienced men to shame with her critical thinking, problem solving, and pattern recognition over the course of the semester. A CEO of a multi-million dollar company was going over to the desk of a girl half his age to ask questions and get help. If I had 10 of her, I'd hire them all.

But I don't. It's like 1 in 25. And that's generous.

And it doesn't have to be someone's fault or society's fault. It just is.

I'll teach anyone that comes in wanting to learn. And for 15 years, it's mostly men are interested, and stick with it.

I've also had some exceptionally bad men in class, who realize they need to go do something else. The CEO took a semester, struggled, finished OK, and didn't continue. Meanwhile, the girl just finished her first year of a CS degree.

It's not like all men are great programmers because they show interest. But in my experience, most who show interest are men. And occasionally, you get a woman that's an absolute gem.

No. I was involved in interviewing a couple hundred people for a bunch of Sysadmin roles. I'd say 98% of the applicants were male. When a woman applied she would generally get an offer if there was even a chance she'd be decent, just in an attempt to not have the staff be 100% male.

If we were to rank a candidate on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being the most qualified person that exceeds anything we could have asked for in the job posting, and 1 being someone who can't figure out a mouse.... a 5/10 female applicant would win out over an 8/10 male applicant. If anything the bar is lower and it's easier for them to get in. And if I'm being perfectly honest, our bar wasn't that high to start with for these positions, many of the positions were entry level.

I can only remember maybe 4 or 5 who interviewed. Out of those 3 got offers. One of those 3 failed to show up her first day, because she was just using the job to leverage a raise from her current employer and didn't bother to tell us until after we called after she didn't show up. So it was 2 women on a team with about 20-30 guys. We tried and that's the best we could do.

The issue isn't males systematically excluding anyone, it's a lack of applicants.

One can be sensitive to the claim while, at the same time, working to ensure that all candidates get a fair shake. Some companies are better than others at making this happen, but it's not really THAT difficult to do in the first place.