> "Is that really what differentiates programming from fields with more social interaction (like sales) or fields with more of a human aspect (like health care and medicine)?"

If you're implying that programming just isn't work that most women are interested in, you'll have to more-precisely indicate what it is about programming that puts them off, given that accounting has no such problems.

Every accounting department I've ever seen is at least half female and many have a female majority.

Surely there are different skills involved, but many overlap in type [1] and it's a bit of a stretch to imply accounting is any closer to stereotypical female-dominated fields like social work, sales or health-care.

[1] Technical, precise, largely impersonal -- there's even database, script and simple application work