Tim Bray says:

In the keynote, I griped about the all-male audience. I’m sorry, I’m not going to shut up about this: it is irritating, disturbing, and unacceptable that probably less than 100 of the 1600 attendees were women. It’s probably pretty lame of me to say “unacceptable” when I have exactly zero good ideas about how to fix it. I talked to a random selection of attendees; two women said “thank you for saying that” and a bunch of men said “yeah, it sucks, what can be done?”

Geeks, you know, they’re admittedly obsessive about computers, but once you get past that they’re on average a pretty eclectic, amusing, and warm-hearted bunch. And in recent years I haven’t met a single one who wasn’t upset about the missing gender. If a booming female Voice From On High spoke out, saying, “Do this and we’ll rejoin your profession”, well I bet a lot of us would do whatever it was. But failing that, in the meantime the problem isn’t getting better.

The people who study such things tell us that there is a long chain of influences, from Kindergarten to the first day on the job, that discourage women from working in computing. Like the chain of intermediaries who drive up the price of a latte and drive down the wage of coffee-bean growers, no one step along the chain is the Decisive Step, yet from end to end, something goes wrong.

It's a fact of our culture—our broader culture, not just the profession's—that there is some kind of mismatch between "womanhood" and "computing" (as well as other technical professions).

These professions would be healthier and happier if they were more equitably populated with women; and in principle, it seems wrong there should be a field to which women seem to have almost no "access." But I also wonder whether, in an ideal world, a world free of gender pressures toward or away from a field, women would choose this kind of work. Programming, for example, certainly has its pleasures: the challenges, the elegance of a good solution, the need for creativity and the satisfaction of a working system; on the other hand, it tends to be solitary work, and it can call for a lot of pedantic knowledge—and to some kinds of feminists, these are patriarchal traits, not "women's ways of knowing."

It is likely that the commonly accepted stereotype of women's thinking as emotional, intuitive, and personalized has contributed to the devaluation of women's minds and contributions, partiularly in Western technologically oriented cultures, which value rationalism and objectivity. It is generally assumed that intuitive knowledge is more primitive, therefore less valuable, than so-called objective modes of knowing. . . .

Feminists are beginning to articulate the values of the female world and to
reshape the disciplines to include the woman's voice, while continuing to press
for the right of women to participate as equals in the male world.

—Women's Ways of Knowing, Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, Tarule

I'm interested to know more about how that perspective relates to the idea that women should participate more in computing professions.