Another possibility is that the tech industry is currently a desirable place to work. People generally don't care if you exclude them from jobs that they wouldn't want anyway, but if other people are having a lot of fun, changing the world, and getting paid for it, it really sucks if you're excluded from that because you lack a Y chromosome. Hence when stories appear about "software eating the world" or Google engineers getting paid $300K/year with $6M retention bonuses or startups getting sold for $19B after 4 years of work, everybody wants a piece of that, and any hint that it may not be a perfect meritocracy is problematic.