If programmers were 95% women, we wouldn’t value coding nearly at much.
We wouldn’t insist that “everyone needs to be a programmer.”
We wouldn’t declare start-up founders who program to be geniuses from the empyrean heights, who are not mortals at all but rather gods dispensing their infallible and timeless wisdom to the rest of us. (I’m looking at you, Mark Zuckerberg.)
We wouldn’t insist that design, support, marketing and HR are worthless while programming is where the rubber meets the road, baby.
If the vast majority of programmers were women, we’d see it as “silly playing with computers” while men do “the real work of recruiting and getting customers – what really matters.”
For some proof of this, watch what happens and has happened historically when other fields are “feminized.” Accounting and HR are good examples of this. I don’t feel like getting all expository on that here, though. Do your own research if you like.
But if you want to see this phenomenon in real time, watch as doctors become less societally valued over time as women come to dominate that field. It’s already happening. When MDs go over 65% or so, the field will lose prestige rapidly.
As Justin Wilson used to say, I guarantee.