Eh in my experience it's a highly paid job but there's 0 prestige in it.

I tend to agree with that. Lawyers have more "prestige", I think. Of course, a huge majority of people studying law are female. However, despite what the general public thinks, lawyers are not highly paid. (I'm talking about the UK. Some lawyers are highly paid, of course, but lawyers are not highly paid on average, particularly if you divide their pay by the hours worked because the famous law firms that offer reasonably high salaries also expect a lot of unpaid overtime.)

CEOs and politicians are even higher-prestige jobs dominated by men, but the sense of moral urgency around achieving gender balance in those jobs seems significantly lower.

Police officers have a lot of power in society & are mostly male. I think there's a strong case to be made that bringing women into the force would be very beneficial, in terms of improved handling of sexual assault cases and reduced police violence. However, I haven't seen a peep about the need to make policing gender-balanced.

That's not true, at least in the UK the gender and racial balance of the police force comes up a lot in the media.

It's often mentioned about UK politicians too, ie the gender balance of cabinet positions.

Perhaps your view of the apparent moral urgency is because you're in the tech industry and therefore closer to it?

>That's not true, at least in the UK the gender and racial balance of the police force comes up a lot in the media.

Fair enough, I've never seen discussion of police gender balance here in the US.

>Perhaps your view of the apparent moral urgency is because you're in the tech industry and therefore closer to it?

I doubt that's it. I feel like I've seen a lot more coverage of "Women in Tech" in mainstream news sources than any other "Gender in Career" pairing.

I've thought about this and I think I agree with you about the amount of noise around tech rather than other careers. But what I don't want to do is jump to a conclusion about it, it seems like a nuanced question.

My mother made a left field comment a couple of years ago that I've thought about a lot. She was a programmer starting in the 70s through to the late 00s. I mentioned the lack of women in tech thing and she said "Oh. I've never noticed. I always considered it completely equal and never felt treated differently."