Between this and the issues black CEOs face [1] the industry isn't biased in favor of minorities. As an aside, when we see articles like these and people jumping in to say 'if I were a woman, things would be easier' the implicit argument at play here is that she didn't get to where she's at because of her own ability, she got to there because she's a woman.
And you go too far in your last sentence. Saying that there is an existence of bias is not saying that people's achievements are the product of their identity rather than their ability. Just that their identity played a factor in having that opportunity. E.g. one of my past employers gave women and URM 2 chances to pass the phone screen and move to the onsite instead of one. This is definitely a bias. But the people that got hired still had to demonstrate the same level of ability in the onsite interviews. Bias just let more of them have that chance. It didn't result in unqualified candidates getting hired, it reduced the false negative rate for a certain segment of candidates.
Not necessarily.
Males and females are different, our hormones are different and it's reasonable to think that our minds and interests are different. In fact, practically all scientific evidence shows that personality trait differences between male and women are statistically significant.
I don't know if things (overall) are easier for women. Some people are prejudiced against women, some others are prejudiced against men. The first group used to be much bigger, but at this point I'm not sure which one has a bigger influence.
No, because the base population is not uniformly distributed to begin with. I've participated in interview rounds for software engineer positions where the volume of candidates was already showing a gender ratio of around 20-to-1 male/female ratio, where half the male candidates never had a single CS lesson in their whole life. If in the end you get only 1 female-led startup for each 20 male-led startups that doesn't mean the VC world is biased.
If you had any interest in having an intelligent discussion on the gender ratio in IT you would have asked relevant questions such as "why are entry-level IT jobs seeing a gender ratio of 20-to-1", or "why are women deciding not to work in IT".
But no.