Sensitive topic. I thought about the issue of 'lack of women in academia' for a while and here a few thoughts...
When I was much more junior, I really disliked the discussions around gender in academia. I wanted to be seen as a researcher, and believed that the best way to ensure gender was irrelevant was to avoid making it salient. Now, I am older and wiser, and having read more of the scientific literature on gender and academia, I think that gender blindness may not be the solution.
Why more gender balance? In my view, the key reason for wanting a more diverse workforce in general and in academia in particular is because it may be beneficial. Academia's main output is ideas and science probably progresses best there is a diversity of ideas, when there are debates, when people bring in insights from different horizons. The economist in me see that it should be productive to increase the supply and diversity of ideas and let the best ones survive. Women are different in many ways (we can debate whether this is nature or nurture, I won't do this here), they tend to specialize in different fields than men, they bring other insights, are sympathetic to different methodologies. Diversity is a great seed for knowledge.
What is currently going wrong? One argument that is often mentioned is that academia is a ruthless jungle, and women dislike the environment. My experience has been mixed in that respect. I think there are a few people who think they are in a jungle, but the vast majority of people I have met across my career has been friendly. One issue I see is that men and women are distributed differently across fields, and most of our core programs in Economics still lean heavily on very male-dominated fields. For example, the first year of our graduate programs in economics is structured entirely around male-dominated fields such as Macro, theory and econometrics. I remember finding the first year of my PhD really challenging because we were just being taught tools and I was really missing courses that would be more centered around ideas...
What should we do? i think it would really help if we would be a bit more open to a broad range of ideas. Should the core of economics really be only about macro, game theory and econometrics? I can't argue that tools are not essential, but I feel the current balance is too much in favour of tools and too little in favour of ideas. This is unfortunate I think as historically economics was first about big ideas. i believe having a more balanced curriculum in the first year would help. I think History of Economic Thought and Economic History should be essential part of a curriculum, not secondary...
Why should you stay in academia if you are a woman? Precisely to bring that change. I am pretty sure you did a PhD because you wanted to make a difference, and this is one you can help making. You can bring new ideas, shape the field, argue for why we should hire more broadly, argue for why we need different approaches. The worst thing I think is to try to "fit in", adjust to the norms you do not understand or do not feel comfortable with and basically try to fare like a man in a male world. We need women who will bring the best they can bring to the academic debate.