A litmus test for Silicon Valley on women's rights

Today is International Women's Day, and here in Silicon Valley I have been besieged by virtue signalling around it: red ribbons (wasn't that the AIDS symbol? won't they be pissed at the appropriation?), men wearing red shirts with the logo "#supporter" and so on.

"We gave up on actual equality and we virtue-signalled. Right Bon?"
"Oh yes. That's right Stu, we virtue-signalled hard.

Of course, talk is cheap; let's talk about revealed preferences.

A primary complaint expressed during International Women's Day is that women are underpaid compared to men. Tech companies are heavy users of H1-B visas which draw relatively highly paid jobs in technology. How many men hold H1-B visas compared to women? It's hard to tell for some reason, but:

While the Obama administration came under fire at the hearing for not revealing how many men and women hold H-1B visas, the nation’s centerpiece program for highly skilled workers, the data requested by the Bay Area News Group provided the scope of the imbalance: The U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics recorded 347,087 male H-1B visa holders entered the country during the 2011 fiscal year compared to 137,522 women.

So women made up approximately 28% of H1-B visas in 2011, which was the most recent year in which I could find any reference to gender split. I wonder why the USCIS is so coy about this data?

Here's a proposal for Silicon Valley firms to back:

• Deploring the wage gap between women and men where women only earn 77% of the salary that men do^[1];
• Understanding that the H1-B visa is intended to bring highly skilled immigrants into the United States;
• Accepting that Silicon Valley is a disproportionate beneficiary of the H1-B program;
• Recognizing that it is incumbent on Silicon Valley firms to back their words on gender pay equality with words;
• [CompanyName] resolves to keep its annual H1-B visa hires within 5% of a 50:50 male:female ratio.

Otherwise, all this talk of "support" for International Women's Day is just low-cost wanking, and surely that can't be the case?

[1] - yes, yes, I know, but let's pretend that Silicon Valley firms believe the propaganda that they propagate.