I didn't mean to imply the males I worked with weren't equally good. I was simply pointing out that, in my (anecdotal) experience, I couldn't see any reason non-males couldn't do the job well.

So everyone you haver worked with have always been exceedingly competent and smart?

Obviously not. Every time I've worked with someone incompetent they tend to get fired rather quickly and I don't work with them anymore. As far as female vs. male goes I've worked with way more males than females and I just haven't happened to work with any females that have been fired for incompetence. Perhaps my level of judgement on other's performance is too lax but I tend to focus on my own performance and less on that of others. That's management's job, not mine.

So there were a few incompetent males, no incompetent females - but you believe that it is just a statistical fluke. It might be - but it is still evidence for the bias, just very weak. I noted it because it seemed that you used it as an argument against bias - which it isn't.

This is my anecdotal experience. Obviously, other people have other experiences and the reality of the whole is probably different. The simple fact that there are more males than females in a job is not evidence of a bias perpetuated by sexist men.

Another corollary should immediately follow: If an average woman in the industry is that much better than an average man, where are all the female-only companies?

Does nobody want money in a capitalist society?

How much is 'that much'? The effect is probably small but what is more important it is not about a moved centre of (a Gaussian) distribution - but rather about a higher threshold usually used for women to pass.

This is of course very much dependant on the distribution shapes and I am too lazy to make a thorough analysis - but:

Let's assume that on average females were 10% more efficient programmers - but with the effort to find one female programmer you can find 10 male programmers. How much more effort do you need to find a 10% better programmer - twice as much as for the average one? Even if it was 8 times harder - then still it would make more sense to look for only men than for only women. Of course the optimal way would be to be unbiased and look for any gender.

Sorry for the late reply, I was away from civilization.

I think that depends on how your hiring process looks like in general. You might, for example do a benevolent (from a certain POV) discrimination and simply start filtering applicants with something like a naive 20-line Python script that matches applicant names against female names from a dictionary and pushes them to the top of your applicant stack, so to speak.

And there are less tangible or directly measurable, but nonetheless important benefits to hiring women for a business: You can get free publicity and marketing if you run a successful women-only shop, there is a significant demand in the liberal media for female success stories and you can ride that wave.