>if men are being promoted more often at the same experience/education level

Instead of shifting the goal post, form a hypothesis that men are promoted more even when you control for factors such as education, experience, and work life balance, and then see if that is the case.

Or it means that another study has to be written demonstrating that promotion is sexist? It's critical to understand these issues in depth if you want to fix them. Writing it off as invalid because it doesn't align with your worldview is the worst way to ensure that we never properly fix things.

It doesn't make it invalid. It just points to where the real issues lie. Something you need to know if you intend to actually fix anything.

This is what a witch hunt looks like - conclusions first, then we go find the facts that support it.

If.

That may be happening, if those doing the promoting are biased. (Which means, in some places, it probably is happening that way.)

Systematically, though? Industry-wide? Is this really happening?

> Systematically, though? Industry-wide? Is this really happening?

Probably?

The issue as best I see it is that there isn't any one cause here. So when you look at the roster of Silicon Valley CEOs and see row after row of white, male faces you could say that it's because tech is racist/sexist and prevents women/people of color from ascending to management positions in companies. Then someone might counter and say, no, it's because there are far fewer women/people of colour entering the industry at the entry level, so it's understandable that there would be a lack of representation at that level.

In reality, both of those things can be true without contradicting the other. There is both a pipeline problem going all the way back to elementary schools that presumes which career a person is going to pursue, and there are incidents of sexism and racism within the tech industry, but it's next to impossible to attribute exactly what cause and what effect go together.

>The issue as best I see it is that there isn't any one cause here. So when you look at the roster of Silicon Valley CEOs and see row after row of white, male faces you could say that it's because tech is racist/sexist and prevents women/people of color from ascending to management positions in companies.

Or it could be that CEOs are likely to result from certain factors that were only open to white men historically, but whose factors have been fixed. Even if we waved a magic wand and fixed every discrimination problem ever tonight, tomorrow you'll still see the effects of past discrimination that would have to work their way out of society. So the question would then be, do we engage in further discrimination to try to counter act the effects of past discrimination?

> So when you look at the roster of Silicon Valley CEOs and see row after row of white, male faces

I'd question your visual acuity: it's white, asian and indian male faces, not white male faces.