Sewer cleaning crews are almost entirely male. Is that evidence of sexism? Should we rebalance these crews to make sure 50% are female?

How about the mostly male homeless population that live on the streets?

Yes and that's a fallacy.

If females don't want to go into programming then don't make them.

There are really good female programmers, but males tend to be more frequent.

We all have different traits that make us good at different things, that's the beautiful thing about humans.

Sure, 50/50 is probably not where a lot of professions should be. But it's pretty unrealistic to assume the percentage we are at is exactly where it should be. Especially considering how many women in professions like programming have so many stories about how difficult it is to get in and stay in the field.

I'm sure there's a lot of anecdotes from male programmers about how difficult it is to get in and stay in the field, it's difficult.

But if there is something to address, address the pain points specifically and directly.

Don't try to guess a "correct" ratio and work backwards with affirmative action (denying one race to boost up another).

For all you know the current ratio is the realistic ratio and where we should be.

Stories about how difficult it is to get into the field and actually having difficulty getting into the field are two very different things. 2 out of the 3 employers I've worked for had explicitly discriminatory policies favoring women. And they weren't subtle, we straight up reserved slots for women despite this being blatantly illegal.

In reality, the proportion of women in STEM directly matches the proportion of women in STEM majors, which directly matches proportion of women who say they're interested in STEM.