The obvious one, right? The one that doesn't require me to make arguments (not that you made one) like "well programming means arguing with a compiler and mathematics means arguing with other mathematicians which is a more humane activity".
I tend towards explanations of things that don't involve software developers being a unique, distinct species of cognitive entity, probably because (like you, I assume) I've spent a long career being a software developer and interacting with software developers.
I thought this thread was dead, and the topic is cursed besides that, but since this comment is obliquely referencing mine, I’ll post this: the two most prestigious white-collar fields are medicine and law, which both used to be more male-centric than programming ever was, and in those fields we see a steady upward trend of participation by women over the past few decades.
I've only talked to 0.001% of programmers. But of them, in my experience, they tend to not look into your eyes when they talk to you. I’m a programmer, and I got a lot worse about eye contact around the same time I really got into programming. If the software developers you work with all make good eye contact, I'm sure I won't convince you that devs are any different, except to say --
All professions affect the body differently! My dad is a chef. He's got the rounded shoulders and the chubby fingers of a chef. Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, Gordon Ramsay -- they have all got the same "look," because they spent so much time hovering over a cutting board. My dad makes fun of my "skinny little fingers." What I'm saying is that programmers get the same kind of thing, but on their minds.
I don’t have any axe to grind. I’m as certain that women and men are equally as smart, as I am that programmers aren’t any smarter than any other white-collar profession. But something is making undergraduate women drop CS 101, but that didn't also make them drop pre-law in the 90s, or pre-med in the 80s, even in the face of CS compensation approximately doubling in the mid-late 2010s.
Medicine and law both actively and aggressively intervened to increase participation of women. Describing the distinctive things those fields did to address their gender biases used to be one of Rayiner Hashem's beats on this site; if you search his comments, you'll find he can explain what happened here better than I can.
So, no, I don't think this works as an explanation any more than the idea that mathematics is somehow more subjective than computer science.
