Different demographics have different interests, experiences, and knowledge. It's trivially obvious that getting a broader subset of society to contribute will also broaden the content.
With less than 10% of editors being women, for example, content is guaranteed to be somewhat skewed, even assuming absolutely no ill will by anybody.
Among the famous examples are a scientist's entry being deleted as "not notable" just weeks before she won the Nobel Prize. Or, if you prefer quantitative data, that articles about women tend to emphasise their relationships and children (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1501.06307v2.pdf).
Wikipedia wants to be an encyclopedia though, not a bag of personal anecdotes and life experiences.
They want to provide well-sourced information, present the major thoughts where no consensus is visible and do it in a way that every reader can go to the sources and check it. If you want more representation of $group on Wikipedia, you'll do much better by publishing more work of $group's members so that it can be cited and quoted on Wikipedia. Just having them on Wikipedia doesn't/shouldn't work, it's not a news paper where somebody may set the topics/angles to be covered.
And, of course, remember that the article isn't about "knitting", it's about "knitting patterns", so you'd need sources that concern themselves with knitting patterns _as a subject_ and not with individual knitting patterns.
There are very detailed articles about knitting, there's an article about common knitting abbreviations (which I don't believe fits into an encyclopedia, but whatever), there's plenty of other stuff about knitting.
What did you want to see on an article about knitting patterns? And, as a follow-up, why haven't you added that to the article about knitting patterns?
Then argue again that the difference in effort is adequately described by lack of sources rather than people like you actively discouraging effort being put into expanding a topic.
As to your final question, I don't really care about knitting, why should I do it in place of all the people that do?
That says literally nothing about why you should have a long article about the meta of "knitting patterns". The different types of forks don't even have their own article. Shame! Rage! I'm offended!
> Then argue again that the difference in effort is adequately described by lack of sources rather than people like you actively discouraging effort being put into expanding a topic.
Literally nobody discourages any effort. Your assumption seems to be "just add some women, they will naturally flock to articles about knitting. If the articles about knitting patterns isn't as long as the article about programming patterns, that's proof of discrimination". It's obviously wrong.
> As to your final question, I don't really care about knitting, why should I do it in place of all the people that do?
That's the real reason. Nobody cares about expanding the knitting pattern article. But most people don't have a need to be perpetually enraged, so they notice that there's an article about knitting patterns, see that there's an spin-off article about common knitting pattern abbreviations, read a thing or two and then move on with their life.
They don't construct elaborate conspiracy theories about people trying to discourage efforts to expand the knitting pattern article because of reasons. No wonder people are wary of vague CoCs. They're afraid of people like you, who don't care about the project, who don't contribute, but who need to feel powerful by injecting themselves, making silly demands and then going off about how everybody else is discouraging the noble efforts they don't care about.