>Why is this? What is the ethical justification for why addressing the gender imbalance in STEM/software engineering should be such an urgent moral priority?
My conspiracy theory is that software engineering is the last real, single, meritocratic, growing career path that costs a lot of money for employers and they'd rather tank the market by making sure the other 50% of sex is able to participate to wreck wages.
Nobody cares that nurses and teachers are majority female dominated fields ripe with discrimination and harassment because they don't make enough money. They're overstressed, understaffed, and underpaid and society needs more of both yet the bar is so low and so biased against men that nobody is even trying to fix it.
I don't think your argument quite works. Suppose I'm a superintendent worried about the teacher shortage. Wouldn't it make sense for me to try & bring more men into the profession, in order to keep salaries low and fill my vacant teaching positions?
I think maybe there's a workable argument along these lines: Both nursing and teaching are bureaucratic industries with heavy government involvement. The price system doesn't function effectively in those industries, which means that a shortage of workers doesn't cause wages to rise. And the overall dysfunction means that managers in those industries don't think strategically about how to increase the supply of workers, the way managers in the software industry do.
EDIT: Another point is that the oligopolistic industry structure in tech means that big players have a stronger incentive to do things that benefit the industry as a whole.
>Wouldn't it make sense for me to try & bring more men into the profession, in order to keep salaries low and fill my vacant teaching positions?
I think at this point salary already doesn't matter as wages are already depressed. In other words, fishing for true workplace equity isn't an altruistic endeavor as much as cost savings. Once that is achieved, it's irrelevant who populates the industry.
Nobody is interested in hiring male teachers as costs are already down and there's plenty of female applicants lined up, even though they actually should in the interests of equity and workplace representation.
Your government bureaucracy argument brings up an interesting tangent. Government agencies should be one of the most inclusive workplace environments, (looking at some US administrations, they generally try to espouse that trend [0][1][2]) so it's only reasonable to assume that the same principles would trickle down to heavily regulated industries. If anything, heavy government involvement would mandate such quotas. But they don't. Which leads me to believe there's something else afoot.
My conspiracy theory is that software engineering is the last real, single, meritocratic, growing career path that costs a lot of money for employers and they'd rather tank the market by making sure the other 50% of sex is able to participate to wreck wages.
Nobody cares that nurses and teachers are majority female dominated fields ripe with discrimination and harassment because they don't make enough money. They're overstressed, understaffed, and underpaid and society needs more of both yet the bar is so low and so biased against men that nobody is even trying to fix it.