> Oh. Well this is weird. They seem like awfully indirect measurements of relevant skills and perspective
It might be indirect, but if the empirical evidence says they are under represented, then there is a reason for that. Asking for their perspectives is a sensible way to investigate what the reason may be.
Let's be clear, I don't think it's necessarily within the Rust communities power to change these reasons. If mothers tell their daughters that programming is for boys [1], and discourage them from spending all their time at the computer, then that would be expected, somewhere far down the road, to lead to an under representation of women. That's hard to fix, and it's not something the Rust community can do much about, given that none of the mothers involved would have ever heard of Rust to begin with.
But maybe there will also be some ways to be more welcoming, and I'd expect that to overlap somewhat with the latter points (that you approved off) that have a more clear cut causal hypothesis associated to them. If you were discouraged from playing around with programming as a kid, you'll likely have ended up learning programming later in life. If you were socialized to avoid conflict, then a high conflict environment will be a turn off. Asking what makes it better for people with a different background has the potential to make it better for people who might not share the background, but the handicaps it confers.
[1] http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~abaron/downloads/Croft_Schmader_Bl...