It is not certain that this choice is OK, though. While the causes of gender disparity are undoubtedly complicated, there seems to be some persistent factor in engineering & technology that results greater disparity than in other fields like medicine and law. It is unlikely that current participation levels are at their natural equilibrium; the gender distribution was more balanced in the past than it is today. The problem is not merely that women may "choose" not to enter (or that they choose to leave and not return) engineering, but that the status quo of the community might be actively driving them away. Engineering & tech have a reputation for allowing behaviors and personalities that would not be tolerated in other fields that are more gender balanced.
Finding the natural gender distribution in tech will require actively changing the culture to make it more inclusive and inviting, not merely removing explicit barriers to entry for women.
Agreed. But the way it tends to work is that if (say) 60% of all engineers are men and the rest are women, then a man more closely fits the idea of an engineer that those people who are in charge of giving the chances have in mind, and so they're more likely to prefer a man to a woman.
You sort of run into this chicken/egg problem though: are women underrepresented in engineering because of what I described above (bad), or do they actually have equal opportunities and simply aren't choosing to become engineers (okay), OR do they actually have equal opportunities and are simply not choosing to be engineers just because the profession currently comprises mostly men and they feel discouraged when they see that, even though they're otherwise interested (bad), or etc. etc.