Silicon Valley recruiters say, “It’s a pipeline problem,” meaning that there are not enough women graduating from college with the necessary technical skills. If they had more qualified women to choose from, hiring managers will tell you, they would hire more of them. And many of them mean it. Missing from this explanation is that the tech industry itself created the pipeline, which is very narrow and built on fanciful assumptions about what it takes to participate. Also missing is any acknowledgment that from its earliest days the industry has self-selected for men: first, antisocial nerds,
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