How come other professions like Law and Medicine were able to make huge progress overcoming similar problems while tech continues to lag behind?

This is not an intractable problem.

I think top-tier law is still overwhelmingly male. Read up on the double bell-curve for the legal industry, which is quickly becoming a problem for tech as well. Though for the legal industry, there's gatekeeping in the form of school pedigree.

For medicine, it's easier to balance the ratios when you can fully control the pipeline, and also control the total number of new practitioners entering the workforce regardless of demand.

If you only have 28,000 residency slots a year, institutions can pick whoever they want, and get the diversity numbers that they want. They decide who eventually gets to work in the field. Employers and customers don't have any real choice. They're going to get whatever the schools provide, and if they don't like it, they can go without doctors.

Modern tech is nothing like that, but it could be someday. Imagine if schools decided who could be professionally employed as a software engineer.

One thing I read is that the biggest difference between men and women has been found to be interest in things vs interest in people.

If true this could explain the differences in attraction of various fields.

Yes, every evolutionary psychologist talks about it. And you can see it in the outcomes - one of them being men commit most violent crime (>80%) and usually on one another.

I don’t buy it.

It applies to newborns, and newborn monkeys.

> How come other professions like Law and Medicine were able to make huge progress overcoming similar problems while tech continues to lag behind?

There were class action lawsuits that required law firms, law schools, medical schools, and hospitals to accept women doctors and lawyers.

Technology didn't have these interventions so it's unsurprising that sexism is more of an issue than in other fields.