In addition to the criticisms you address in your addendum (women's perspective is important, and "works or not" is too simplistic) consider this: by creating and perpetuating environment that is unfriendly to women, we are reducing the talent pool from which we draw programmers by sightly more than 50%. Even if there was no such thing as "a woman's perspective" (depends on the woman/man in question, I suppose), it is highly inefficient to limit your pool this way. In my opinion this is NOT, in fact, self-selection, not to the degree this imbalance is getting to. I've seen multiple times in the universities I've attended the difference between how things get explained to women and men -- many instructors and TAs, for example, will quickly and subconsciously drop into condescension and use things like cooking analogies when talking to female students. I've heard programmers of all talent levels apply gender-based value judgments to women attempting to enter the field. The worst are "women are bad at logic" -- and there are many who really believe that -- but "you are a woman so you will do the UI as you must be good at visual stuff" is also sexist.