The most optimistic sentence in Douglas M. Branson’s 23rd book is the title. In “The Future of Tech Is Female: How to Achieve Gender Diversity,” Mr. Branson presents a thorough case that the future of women in information technology is nowhere near as bright as the “monitor tans” on the men driving IT’s rapid growth.

To Mr. Branson, the W. Edward Sell Professor of Business Law at the University of Pittsburgh, IT is the “most backward of major industries” when it comes to hiring and promoting women. Whereas women comprised 37 percent of IT’s workforce in 1995, that number dropped to 24 percent in 2016. In the next decade, women are projected to hold 22 percent of IT jobs.

If these numbers seem bad, Mr. Branson would like to assure you that the culture is worse. Despite conceiving of itself as “the very center of the twenty-first century,” IT remains a bro-centric ecosystem, one “mired in first-generation problems, those of the pinups on the firehouse wall era.”

When it comes to IT’s corporate practices, many of Mr. Branson’s statistics and narratives involving companies like Facebook will leave readers infuriated but unsurprised. His true accomplishment lies in his tenacious examination of IT’s feeder system, i.e., American universities. More specifically, he deserves praise for his interrogation of the 21st century’s favorite educational buzzword: STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

Mr. Branson argues that STEM is less a curriculum or pedagogy than a loose affiliation of disciplines that results in “a scattershot approach in some cases, lip service in others.” When asking for the STEM representative at multiple universities, he is directed to a random assortment of provosts, science departments and university websites. Mr. Branson convincingly portrays STEM as an emperor-has-no-clothes that can barely define itself let alone attract and retain female students.

The numbers more than support his pessimism. Mr. Branson notes that in computing departments across the U.S., 62.9 percent of female students switch their major. In math and science, the transfer rate is a shocking 72.3 percent. As an English instructor, I have always been baffled by departments that relish a weeding-out process — impossible first exams, drop slips brought to the first class — and these transfer rates suggest a trend far more damning than a pedagogical oversight. When a collective’s retention rate equals that of the Trump administration’s, it is fair to wonder whether a bossy if not bullying culture has become entrenched.

Regarding solutions to IT’s gender gap, Mr. Branson is perhaps a better critic than a problem solver. In a chapter that unpacks the popularized “believe in yourself” advice of “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” written by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Mr. Branson positions it as yet “another book that puts the onus on women.”

Hiring quotas and mentor programs have unintended negative side effects. Most Pittsburghers will be familiar with the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which emphasizes interviewing minorities during the hiring process, but 32 equally staffed football teams are more easily regulated than the sprawling IT sector.

The thorniest discussion concerns the H-1B visa program. The average liberal in favor of expanded immigration should be wary of IT’s full-throated support of this program, which helps the tech sector employ a largely male foreign workforce (at 27 percent lower pay) while American women struggle to gain a foothold.

Mr. Branson moves briskly through these and other topics. Quotes and statistics arrive with little context. His seven-page chapter on “Theoretical Feminist Views” is fiber-optic fast. Late in the book he takes large argumentative swings with scant support, such as his chapter on the gaming industry, whose “misogynistic soul is a principal reason for females’ reduced presence in informational technology.”

I’m more than fine with both the pace and the big swings. Mr. Branson notes the decline of academia’s “tome-like treatises” of the 1980s and ‘90s, and he correctly suggests that these study-stuffed, 200,000-word books “have not moved the needle.”

Instead, Mr. Branson’s book fits snugly into an emerging genre: speedier, punchier academic books that privilege readability and argumentation over sentence-choking citation (of which there’s plenty in the back). “The Future of Tech Is Female” belongs alongside Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,” a 150-page wrecking ball from earlier this year that, like Mr. Branson’s text, isn’t interested in “Making Academia Great Again.” These books are designed to move the needle.

In Mr. Branson’s case, the needle is inside the tech sector itself. His goal is no less than to disrupt the self-proclaimed disrupters.

Patrick McGinty teaches in the English Department at Slippery Rock University and is a staff writer for Propeller Magazine. He lives in Morningside.

First Published: November 18, 2018, 2:00 p.m.