The fundamental upstream question here is whether men and women should show the exact same patterns of ability and interest given their measurably different organs, hormones, chromosomes, lifespans, physiology, and so on. Much of the rest of the body differs systematically, visibly, and predictably between genders; it is unlikely a priori that the brain would remain invariant. Here's the late Doreen Kimura of McGill and Simon Fraser on the topic:

http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/class/behavior/sexdif1.htm

  Men and women display patterns of behavioral and cognitive 
  differences that reflect varying hormonal influences on 
  brain development

  By Doreen Kimura (May 13, 2002)

  Men and women differ not only in their physical attributes 
  and reproductive function but also in many other 
  characteristics, including the way they solve intellectual 
  problems. For the past few decades, it has been 
  ideologically fashionable to insist that these behavioral 
  differences are minimal and are the consequence of 
  variations in experience during development before and 
  after adolescence. Evidence accumulated more recently, 
  however, suggests that the effects of sex hormones on brain 
  organization occur so early in life that from the start the 
  environment is acting on differently wired brains in boys 
  and girls. Such effects make evaluating the role of 
  experience, independent of physiological predisposition, a 
  difficult if not dubious task. The biological bases of sex 
  differences in brain and behavior have become much better 
  known through increasing numbers of behavioral, 
  neurological and endocrinological studies.

  Sex differences in problem solving have been systematically 
  studied in adults in laboratory situations. On average, men 
  perform better than women at certain spatial tasks. In 
  particular, men seem to have an advantage in tests that 
  require the subject to imagine rotating an object or 
  manipulating it in some other way. They also outperform 
  women in mathematical reasoning tests and in navigating 
  their way through a route. Further, men exhibit more 
  accuracy in tests of target-directed motor skills--that is, 
  in guiding or intercepting projectiles.

  Women, on average, excel on tests that measure recall of 
  words and on tests that challenge the person to find words 
  that begin with a specific letter or fulfill some other 
  constraint. They also tend to be better than men at rapidly 
  identifying matching items and performing certain precision 
  manual tasks, such as placing pegs in designated holes on a 
  board.

A graphic accompanies the full article:

http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/images/00018E9D-879D-1D06-8E49...

Here is Louann Brizendine of UCSF:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine/dp/...

  Review 1: Louann Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist at the 
  University of California, San Francisco, explores 
  groundbreaking issues in brain science...Brizendine 
  graduated from the Yale University School of Medicine and 
  draws on research done at the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood 
  and Hormone Clinic, which she founded at UCSF in 1994.

  Review 2 :This comprehensive new look at the hormonal 
  roller coaster  that rules women's lives down to the 
  cellular level, "a user's guide to new research about the 
  female brain and the neurobehavioral systems that make us 
  women," offers a trove of information, as well as some 
  stunning insights. Though referenced like a work of 
  research, Brizedine's writing style is fully accessible. 
  Brizendine provides a fascinating look at the life cycle of 
  the female brain from birth ("baby girls will connect 
  emotionally in ways that baby boys don't") to birthing 
  ("Motherhood changes you because it literally alters a 
  woman's brain-structurally, functionally, and in many ways, 
  irreversibly") to menopause (when "the female brain is   
  nowhere near ready to retire") and beyond.

There are tens of thousands of papers in this general area on Pubmed.

This is utterly devastating and long overdue. Sandberg makes $845 million in a year (at a company she didn't found), lives a charmed life, and is promoted aggressively by men...yet has managed to convince herself that the world is/was biased against women.

But even Greenspan is prevented by polite convention from making the obvious point: women and men have different chromosomal structures, lifespans, organs, and hormone levels. There's also substantial evidence[1,2] that they differ in average levels of spatial, verbal, and mathematical reasoning ability (with women generally having an advantage in verbal and men in visuospatial/mathematical). We should not expect them to have the same outcomes on average.

Women also can only have at most 10-20 children over their lifespan, whereas men like Genghis Khan[3] can have a virtually unbounded number. This is why males have a greater evolutionary payoff for high-risk, high-reward behavior: intrinsically higher reproductive variance.

But hey. That's evolution, and even though it provides a consilient explanation for a variety of allied phenomena, everyone knows that doesn't and couldn't apply to human beings (we all well know what happens to people who propose that a behavior has genetic influences). It is instead easier to pretend that humans aren't biological creatures with hard biological constraints.

Yet if your premises are wrong, one is simply practicing fashionable creationism. And that is where we are today, presented with the spectacle of a privileged billionairess who lashes out at phantasms rather than wrestling with the realities of molecular biology. Why not lean in to a publication on behavioral neuroendocrinology, for a change?

[1]: http://www2.nau.edu/~bio372-c/class/behavior/sexdif1.htm

[2]: http://www.amazon.com/Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine/dp/0767...

[3]: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0214_030214_...

[4]: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-diff...

Let's start with some facts.

FACT: Men and women have significant, measurable neurological differences[1].

FACT: These differences are measurable before birth[2].

FACT: Men and women show large, reproducible differences on average in tests of visuospatial ability, differences that can be mapped back to the brain[3]

  Men consistently outperform women on spatial tasks, 
  including mental rotation, which is the ability to 
  identify how a 3-D object would appear if rotated in 
  space. Now, a University of Iowa study shows a connection 
  between this sex-linked ability and the structure of the 
  parietal lobe, the brain region that controls this type of 
  skill.

  The parietal lobe was already known to differ between men 
  and women, with women's parietal lobes having 
  proportionally thicker cortexes or "grey matter." But this 
  difference was never linked back to actual performance 
  differences on the mental rotation test.

  ...

  "Differences in parietal lobe activation have been seen in 
  other studies. This study represents the first time we 
  have related specific structural differences in the 
  parietal lobe to sex-linked performances on a mental 
  rotation test," said Tim Koscik, the study's lead author 
  and a graduate student in the University of Iowa 
  Neuroscience Graduate Program. "It's important to note 
  that it isn't that women cannot do the mental rotation 
  tasks, but they appear to do them slower, and neither men 
  nor women perform the tasks perfectly."

There are literally thousands more studies of the deep rooted genetic, neurological, and endocrinological differences between the genders on pubmed.org. These differences manifest before birth. And this research is what your tax dollars pay for. It is just young earth creationism to postulate that evolution did not happen, or that biological gender differences do not exist or are somehow disconnected from their real world consequences.

One of the consequences is that in any niche which requires cognitive or physical activity, we should not expect an exactly 50/50 distribution of males and females. Interests differ. Abilities differ.

The religious outcry against stating these basic evolutionary facts got Larry Summers ousted as the President of Harvard in 2005. You simply cannot state these facts and retain your job. And the irony of all ironies is that those who drove the President of Harvard from power will insist that they are actually the oppressed, rather than the powerful.

That's the root of the matter here. The ostensible evil of the term "brogrammer" rests upon the tacit desirability of having a 50/50 distribution of women in programming, which in turn rests upon the presumption that it is even possible to achieve this equality given biological constraints, constraints that are obvious upon a cursory skim of the relevant literature. We are just not blank slates to be blasted clean and remade by ideology.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine-M-D/dp/...

[2] http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/uu-spb102309....

[3] http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-12/uoi-sdo121708...

Yeah, OK, maybe.. But so what? The article, the studies and the supposed solutions seem to ignore the most brutal obstacle. The reason that there are so very few female coders is because working alone is not natural for a woman. Many adult woman who enter the fields mentioned in the article quit high paying jobs later on in life for this reason. And untold millions quit earlier or never start. The irony is that women would be great in these fields if the environment was more conducive. This book will shed some light on it.

http://www.amazon.com/Female-Brain-Louann-Brizendine/dp/0767...

A more effective solution would be to create a more nurturing CS/engineering environment to draw young women in. For instance; female only programs so girls can be girls at the same time that they are learning how to code. They could be encouraged to gossip or talk on the phone or whatever young girls do.. Also, these girls should remain clustered together when not in these classes because the streagnth of the group would overcome the conflict of the deeply singular task of coding and the female brain. I'm not really explaining it clearly but if anybody is interested in this it would be helpful for you if you read the book.