Most all the sexism issues in the industry start in elementary school and persist until anyone, male or female, enters the work force. Teachers and parents (male or female) all participate in fostering and perpetuation the issues encountered in industry.
To claim its an "industry thing" is naïve. Open-source isn't an industry and almost every single open-source community begins and matures absent any industry involvement at all. By the time business opportunities arise in a community, the culture is already mature and well-formed.
NodeJS for example is a viable part of the tech industry now, but 4-5 years ago it was a bunch of hobbyists. There was no industry to speak of. I imagine that most of the members of that community back then were men, just as it is today. This suggests that the entire NodeJS like almost every other tech community has formed its identity well before every being an "industry".
Want to solve this issue? Find out how to make sure future new tech communities are more egalitarian and inclusive from day one. Trying to bolt that on afterwards may mitigate the harms, but it certainly isn't going to fix them. Path dependency has presents problems, but you can't just ignore the role of path dependency in getting us to where we are now.
This is a great point. Open source communities are ones in which you are very unlikely to see any sexism, as most people in these communities neither see each other, nor have a very clear way of identifying gender, and generally hold egalitarian political beliefs to boot.
So its clear that the idea of gender roles starts much earlier. Now whether you think that gender roles are a bad thing, or you think they are a reasonable evolutionary strategy that has contributed to our success (we are certainly not the only mammals who adopt gender roles), that's a separate question.
There are also certain biological reasons that may lead to more men being attracted to these fields - Robert and Chevrier found boys performed significantly better in spatial tasks than girls, but girls performed better at language tasks. So maybe as programming moves from lower-level languages (more spatially oriented) to higher level languages, we'll see more women get into the field.
I personally have worked with some excellent women in the tech world, and think the presence of at least some women on the team changes the dynamic for the better, but if we want to do it correctly, we cannot pretend that biology doesn't play a role. We'll have to make the strengths of the different genders work together.
