Why is this your opinion?
Have you spoken to a lot of women? Have you conducted any kind of surveys or polls? Or are you just making up whatever fits your biases?
> It's like James mentions in his memo, from a logical perspective it's completely arbitrary to want to move women into software because it's mostly men
The naivete of HN never fails.
It's perfectly rational for any business to want more women. Or minorities. Or even more children. Every business in the world wants the deepest and biggest talent pool possible.
And of course, this is the real issue. Once programming is demystified and women do enter the field in force it'll be pretty hard for deeply mediocre javascript monkeys to command six figure salaries, won't it?
All the fuss, all the whining -- it's completely self-serving. The idea that women can thrive in law, medicine and hard sciences but they can't master CSS is laughable.
But here's the thing: it's not mastermind feminists who are driving this. It's capitalism. People can whine about feminism and uppity women taking their jerbs -- this is absolutely nothing new. Still, despite pervasive discrimination, the market is going to produce that talent. There was a time when people thought programming was difficult. Only eleet hackers could thrive in Sillicon Valley. Now middle schoolers build Android Apps in a couple of days.
In the end businesses are going to search endlessly for more and better talent, people will gravitate to the jobs that produce the most stable income streams, and everybody is going to strive to keep the market open and fair. You can fight this or whine about fantasy feminist schemes or you can embrace a future where the field has been dramatically opened to all comers.