There is an important wrinkle, which is that law and medical programs tend to admit students based on objective measures, and employers in those fields hire based on grades and test scores. Women tend to do better than men in terms of grades, and perform competitively with men in the relevant range of logical/mathematical tests. E.g. even in the 98-99th percentile range of the SAT Math, the representation is 40% women. Tech employers, however, hire based on measures that have a large social component. If you give a big bump to those who were programming computers as a teenager or fit well with the "culture" of your company (staffed mostly by 20-something men), then it becomes much harder to find "qualified" women.
This is true of most graduate and professional programs. I had a friend in college whose undergraduate degree was in Rhetoric and Communication, who then went into a Physics Ph.D. program.
> If you want to be a CS major, however, you need to commit freshman year.
Whether that's true or not depends on the school, and its not necessarily generally particularly true of CS, though it may be more true of CS at particular institutions. OTOH, unlike law or medicine, where a particular professional degree is essentially mandatory [1], technology has no particular degree requirement (while a CS degree is helpful, particularly for the best jobs, its not a legal requirement to enter the field and plenty of people in the field don't have a CS degree.)
Anyhow, I'm not sure any of that is relevant -- why is the requirement for a particular degree, or a requirement to commit early for a degree, a barrier for women entering the field? Are you arguing that women are inherently less likely to commit early?
[1] in some states, its still possible to meet the requirements to practice law through what amounts to a private apprenticeship rather than professional degree.
When discussing women in tech, people bring up how the candidate pool mirrors the pipeline. See the recent discussion on Google. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7813310
Are you arguing that women are inherently less likely to commit early?
Guys are more likely to start coding in high school or earlier, so they're the ones starting freshman year. For example, the number of women who take the AP CS test is ~18%, which is close to the % of CS degree grads who are women.
http://www.exploringcs.org/resources/cs-statistics
If you want to graduate in 4 years, you have to start your CS program freshman year. You can switch later, but you're going to have to pay for more semesters, or work harder and cram in more units. And yes, you can start coding after 22, but it's an uphill battle.
"Getting an undergraduate degree other than CS" isn't the same thing as "start programming after graduating".