> companies like Google are doing exactly that by promoting policies to bring in and retain women

The problem is that they do it in the extreme. They want to achieve 50% of male and 50% and currently that distribution is not real, there are much more men that women in technology. So they have a positive discrimination for women to get a position even when there is a man that fits better, so they can achieve the 50/50.

If you want the best people and the pool of candidates is 70/30 you cannot have the best candidates with 50/50. You should have like 70/30 that is something proportional to the pool of candidates.

This leads to the question why there are less women than men in technology. Is it discrimination, oppression, a free choice?

Second, those differences wouldn't "justify" anything, they would only explain that a disparity would exist in a perfectly just world.

Mainly though, you say "of course there are gender differences" when that's literally not an acceptable thing to say publicly right now. Especially as a corporation. And the evidence showing irrational sexism and racism in tech is even better than the evidence around sex differences.

The question is how to tell how much each factor contributes, because one we want to correct and the other is just a part of the human condition. Since we can't ask the question right now, that's probably step one.

As to just letting the market sort it out ... I find it completely unconvincing that that would ever work. I think that's a naive view of how culture, human social organization and human rationality work. Not even mentioning the fact that serfdom and slavery are very efficient structures from the market point of view.