You weren't downvoted for making the tautological observation that men and women aren't the same but for attempting to use science as a cloak for shoddy reasoning:
There's no question that things like hormone levels are likely to have some sort of effect but your response begs huge questions such as how low-level differences affect incredibly complex higher-level processes like cognition, how much a skill like programming depends on such specific cognitive abilities, and even how important a single area of expertise like programming is to overall success in such a wide field which requires a range of different individual skills as well as complex social behaviour on multiple levels.
There is still plenty of Nobel-level groundbreaking research yet to be done for each of those questions but instead you simply chose to ignore all of that hard thinking and simply assert that simple biological determinism explains the gender distribution across an entire profession.
Maybe you should educate yourself in general evolution, and evolution of sex in particular, and then figure out the obvious: men and women gravitate toward different things. Women are (generally) not discriminated in tech, they just don't gravitate towards it. They are not discriminated on HN, or in Trekkie conventions, they are practically not present there. They don't play computer games, they do social networking.
And when in evolution, we say "they", we don't mean any individual members, we mean proportions. So women in general don't do some things that interest men.
Now, if you guys want society to spend effort and probably money to push women in some roles that don't interest them (or vice versa for men), so be it. My opinion is that doing this will not make women/men any happier or even will not be good for society...
Your ignorance of science is matched only by your willingness to flaunt your ignorance of what women do or do not want to do (try listening more). I'm just glad gender is known to be such a small component of intelligence — otherwise we'd have to worry about your posts reflecting on men in general.
There's no question that things like hormone levels are likely to have some sort of effect but your response begs huge questions such as how low-level differences affect incredibly complex higher-level processes like cognition, how much a skill like programming depends on such specific cognitive abilities, and even how important a single area of expertise like programming is to overall success in such a wide field which requires a range of different individual skills as well as complex social behaviour on multiple levels.
There is still plenty of Nobel-level groundbreaking research yet to be done for each of those questions but instead you simply chose to ignore all of that hard thinking and simply assert that simple biological determinism explains the gender distribution across an entire profession.