Cynical, or wrong? There's a clear history of women in software engineering when it was considered a low-class low-skill job. The first "programmers" in the modern sense of the word were women at NASA. The lead software developer for Apollo 11 was a woman. There's so much evidence to suggest that there is far more at play here than simply "engineering is laborious and dry [so women must not want to do the work]" that I'm willing to state it falls under wikipedia's citing rules for globally known knowledge: I don't need to cite that the capital of France is Paris any more than I need to cite this.

This is the same line of already-refuted reasoning behind the "I'm just asking questions" in the infamous Google Memo.

To answer my original, rhetorical, question: It's not cynical. It's wrong.