I can’t speak for women at large, but if I know my mother, I know that she for one would have to restrain herself from busting you in the face if you brought this apologism into her house. I think a previous commenter, Caitlin, summarizes your fallacy best:

“I don’t think it’s true to say that the pay gap doesn’t matter unless there is a happiness gap. It’s also about justice.”

Justice. A concept I learned from my mother (I wonder how much it cost — through “distraction” — to teach me that).

Most video game advertisements are still aimed at young men. Advertisements featuring women are generally disparaged as inaccurate (which I’m willing to concede as I personally don’t know any stick-thin and gorgeous models that enjoy zoning out to Mario Cart.) Online play among women might be picking up, but I’d be curious to see numbers on console games. The climate there is generally quite anti-female participation.

One last story; this is a good one. A friend of mine in her mid-30s was telling about how she was helping a lower level character on WoW. It quickly became evident that this was a young teenage male. My friend was amused by this and told him that she was old enough to be his mother. The kid was quiet for a few minutes and then exploded with a tirade about how she shouldn’t be wasting all her time on video games and was failing her family. Upon informing the kid that she doesn’t have children, he responded that she needs to hurry up and find a man. >.

Have you seen this about women bloggers and anonymous threats? Personal safety is huge limiting factor for women, whether its walking down dark streets or developing a internet persona. Even legitmate threats aside, people post anonymous responses to women that they wouldn’t say to a man in a million years.

* * * * *  *

Yes, this is a big issue now. Kathy Sierra was receiving extraordinarily bad threats. (For a more typical example of mysogenist comments online, see the comments my column receives at Yahoo.)However most women, bloggers or not, have been dealing with gender-based threats their whole life. When a grown man whistles at an eleven-year-old girl, it is threatening, and it goes on from there, to when men are sexually harassing women at work. Women have not let this hold them back in education and business, so I am sure women will figure out how to deal with in onlne, as well.

It’s not so much a gender difference as it is I believe an age difference. I know it’s not web 1.0 or 2.0, but Microsoft still holds ‘morale events’ that involve some sci-fi movie and then eating steak, even though what would have raised my morale was an afternoon off and a new pair of shoes. You knew the company’s culture has not caught up with its employees when a departmental event goes for barbeque - but half of its team are from the Indian Subcontinent and are strict vegetarian.

How many women leave because the culture rewards the hero and they have to leave in time to pick up the kid from daycare? That doesn’t even go into the problem that every daycare, quality or not, within any kind of reasonable range of MSFT has a waiting list six months long. This makes fathers leave too, but less so - and when they have to leave early when the kid is sick, they’re considered to be exemplary fathers. When women do it, the whispering is that they’re letting the teeam down.

I guess this rambling is to try to point out that the cutting edge tech culture is still perceived to be populated by single guys in their early 20s, because the ones who have families find somewhere else to work. and women eventually leave entirely.