I asked my girlfriend this, and she said a few things:

1) It looked tedious and frustrating to learn.

2) It's filled with a bunch of dudes, which makes her uncomfortable.

3) It doesn't come "naturally" to her so she thinks it'd be frustrating in the long run as well.

So basically, she didn't want to do it for a variety of reasons, and freely decided not to.

How was anyone wronged here?

Depends if you think anyone is wronged by the gender pay gap, and whether (2) is one of the foundations of the gender pay gap.

Our supposedly free choices are mediated by circumstance. Even in this apology (and really, am I supposed to be impressed with hearsay from a single woman?) one of the reasons is "I didn't want to enter a discipline that was overwhelmingly male."

Thanks for your rigorous research.

> What "historic wrongs" are keeping women or minorities out of the technology field? Honestly curious.

Hundreds of years of systemic and societal oppression. Really how do people not get this?

I think people are unconvinced that applying affirmative action to tech hiring addresses or chips away at that much broader problem.

Especially when they're not the ones oppressing anyone. And double-especially if we're hiring people who are unqualified and uninterested in tech just to pad the diversity stats. I'm here to do stuff. I care about broader social issues too, but I go to work to code.

Not trying to strawman or misrepresent you -- just saying that the connection from tech hiring to things that happened before the invention of the transistor isn't necessarily self-evident to everyone.

I asked a very specific question... your progressive buzzwords aren't answers.

Well, the implications are unpleasant for a lot of us