At this exact moment, I disagree with you. But this may be only because I'm feeling something of a pinch in my brain parts over social media feeding frenzies that keep popping up about booth babes and gender bias and blah blah blah... Every time I read a vitriolic blog post or some -ist group rocking the boat, it feels like a setback, for me, personally.

Every thought Shelly expresses here has gone through my mind countless times, only in far less kind phrases laced with many a shocking expletive. She says, "Excuses amplify problems." I see this. I also see it making problems where none may exist. I see it as making problems for me, too, in that loudly expressed excuses put many people on guard for criticism and generally result in creating a hostile political environment. That fixes nothing and helps no one.

The approaches that men and women have to solving problems (in the most general logical scope possible) may be completely due to cultural nurture. Women talk out loud about their problems. Men internalise them. Then when we have to sort stuff out, of course we look at each other through the filter of our own bias and flatten/marginalize other players for the sake of convenient argument. This also fixes nothing.

"Work harder than anyone else," is equivalent to "rise above." As with any experiment, it's not engineering when design refactoring stops at the first hurdle. And boy howdy is "there aren't enough women in $INDUSTRY" ever a hurdle.