Well, I think it is to do with the genders' innate abilities for different things.
I'm at college at the moment in an "all boys" school (not secterian or anything weird though) but we have an "all girls" counterpart down the road so we still get to know each other and stuff. Most of the girls I know from the girls' school are the ones who are very academic and ambitious. The one who is top of the class in her school (in maths), achieves only the same sort marks as a fairly good male student at our school, in things like maths and chemistry. But, as expected by most people, more of the girls beat us in history, english literature, biology, French (non of these are my choices). Women, in general, find the more abstract subjects more interesting. Therefore, computer science and programming are definitely not areas most women would want to get into (I know some of you will say that programming needs imagination and creativity and abstract thought, but it doesn't really seem that way to most people, does it?).
Certainly, everytime I try to teach my best friend's girlfriend ("Headgirl" at their school) how to count in binary on her fingers, she loses interest pretty quickly until we get to number 4
