People may think that career choice is something special and magical when it is not.
Let's say you have become a successful developer. Now you want to work on a side project. There are so many choices and possibilities. Most of them are equally good. You choose something. Then you get stuck, bored or the rest of your life gets in the way. You scrap the old thing and do something new. Rinse and repeat. After 5 unfinished side projects you feel like you have accomplished nothing.
The reality is that you didn't actually care about any of the side projects. If you cared about them you would have stuck with them until completion. Making a choice and staying with it is difficult at any stage in your life. Unless... it is extremely obvious and necessary. Suddenly there is no question about it. You you know very little about electronics but think you absolutely need to design a custom PCB for this important project and you're not going to compromise on this at all. You read up on electronics theory for 3 whole weeks without even thinking a single thought about your final design, pick some components and feel lost reading the datasheet. Start up your EDA suite get mad and feel like everything is hopeless the first few days. Two weeks later you have finally designed a good enough schematic and then suddenly everything is easy in hindsight.
You didn't have the qualifications to finish this project but did so anyway, all you needed was a little motivation and dedication.
If there is a need, it will be met. If you think someone should do X, then give them a reason to do X. This applies to "software engineers" and all other professions equally.
The overlap between talented and motivated students exists for a reason. Talent is just motivation in disguise.
The first step toward positive change is to change the way people think about these roles, and remove the automatic mental picture of a hetero male when people say "software engineer". That feeds back into the hiring loop and worsens the problem.
I have no intention to start a fuss, but I just think that it would be a nice gesture to make sure our language is as inclusive as possible, and so made a suggestion on a small change that would do that.
(Also, I'm surprised at all the downvotes, I thought HN was a better crowd of people than that. I mean if you don't want to upvote it that's fine, but I'm really surprised that many people actively downvoted my comment. How would it hurt you for the language to be more inclusive? By downvoting it, did you want to maintain that we only mention "girlfriends"? By downvoting, you are part of the problem in tech today.)