>women are more or less not allowed, etc.

Companies are tripping over each other trying to hire women. My wife is blindly offered jobs entirely because she is a woman. Not secretly or anything, they literally say "we are looking for women for our team".

>If it would be considered shockingly newsworthy that a company hires old female programmers in India for the same pay as young white guys in SV, that in itself seems evidence there is no shortage at all

No it isn't. There is no reason to believe old Indian women are as qualified as young white men. There's actually huge reasons to believe they are not. And why are you so fixated on white men? Considering the demographics of the USA, white men are under-represented in US tech jobs, Asian and Indian men are over-represented.

Why everything un PC is downvoted? People put eniugh pressure on companies that many actually do hire exactly as outlined above.

Observation: Many tech professionals are comfortable with active discrimination because it aligns with their political and social beliefs (ie "women have been underrepresented in the past, so we should weigh them more heavily in the future when considering them as candidates, or actively seek women out for roles").

It also might indicate that outside of FANG companies have not cornered huge markets and became monopolies.