It’s the sexism, honestly. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been passed over, talked over, belittled, and mocked for being a woman in tech. I have a lot of support from half of the industry, but from the other… well. I’ve been told to make sure I stay behind the man because he should always be walking into a room first. I’ve been ignored by coworkers. I’ve been screamed at by my boss in a way he only ever did to women. I’ve been seated in a boss’s office for him to leer at me whilst lecturing me over nothing because he wanted to stare.
That, and then the pay gap… It’s unsurprising. There’s so much sexism in the industry and there’s even more for someone young trying to get into it - both with the social pressure, as you mentioned, to do something else, and the general rude bollocks of ‘girls can’t code’. I’m so proud of all the young female devs I see starting to get into tech.
Copyright should exist or artists and writers can’t avoid having their work stolen by much larger companies.
I think it’s worth defining a hard limit for non-person entities to own copyright. That’d mean post a certain limit, game code, artwork, music etc would be free to use. Human-owned copyright should probably be life with a minimum period of average life expectancy, with maybe provisions to allow it to cover your children too? Prevents corporations from waiting until your mum dies in an accident and immediately taking her life’s work and using it everywhere.