On one hand, I think that it will provide a valuable resource for a large group of people, which is good! On the other hand, an online tech community designed solely for men would be met with hate and massive backlash.
If equality is our goal, how will self-segregation help meet that goal?
1. I thought gender-based discrimination was illegal. How is Leap not illegal?
2. One of the main objections of "gentleman's clubs" was that their (male) members had access to important networking contacts, putting women in unequal foot in an unfair way when it came to businesses. Wouldn't Leap be unfair in the same way?
So far discourse has not gone off track. When participants disagree they've been able to discuss their views constructively and assume the best in each other. That's something I'm most excited about. I expect there will be cases where that's not true though, so members who don't contribute in a net positive way will lose access to the community.
I don't know if it's a useful analogy, but I consider it akin to global warming being discussed by climate scientists in a totally public forum. The volume of anti-global warming sentiment and media coverage (both for and against) would completely disrupt such attempts.
Ps. There has already been discussion on Leap about inviting men to the community, and I'm sure it'll continue to be discussed! I don't think anyone wants to draw lines in the sand or create a "Us vs. Them" mentality. I do think everyone wants to have at least one person, one ally, in their corner though.
I've definitely noticed a dynamic at play in male-dominated soft eng spaces online that silences women. It has to do with men's behaviour and shitty comments in those spaces. Not all men, of course, but enough men - and almost exclusively men. It's why I'm no longer on r/programming. I'm tired of having to put up with that and I'm glad you created this space.
I look forward to checking it out.
This assumption completely disregards the measurable advantage men have in the tech community. If you have identical programs, one for a historically disenfranchised group, and one for the group that's been in power for decades, only one of those programs is shitty.
edit: "Advantage" was a poor choice of words, but since it's been quoted in replies I'll leave it. I meant something more like "given the gender disparities in the tech community."
There is obviously an imbalance in the industry, but can you please provide proof that this is due to an advantage that men have?
> If you have identical programs, one for a historically disenfranchised group, and one for the group that's been in power for decades, only one of those programs is shitty.
Why would fighting racism with racism or sexism with sexism be a productive method of correcting imbalances? Wouldn't that just fuel and maintain the disdain between groups?
What is that advantage and how is it measured ?
Is Leap for people who are i) female, ii) identify as a woman, or iii) both?
I ask because I have a few friends who are biologically female, but genderqueer (by which they mean that they don't prescribe to the cultural stuff that is usually attached to gender). Would this be suitable for them?
As a more general note, since this looks to be a community that's about inclusion and addressing discrimination, it might be worth taking care not to conflate "female" and "woman".
However, I do wonder about comments like this:
> "a community where the core culture was set by women, and the software and product decisions were also made by women"
Progressives are currently combatting this same kind of toxic / exclusionary behavior in men that exacerbates the inequality between men and women to this day.
I’m sure if it is “measurable” you can provide some numbers?
Is this the "all lives matter!" response to this project? It's not a crime to point out that some groups are poorly represented in an industry. Are you saying the solution to "hey, women feel isolated in the tech industry" is to say "Well, let's figure out how to include men too"? If women felt like their discussions were being treated fairly in public forums, they'd have stayed in them.
At the end of the day, women say they feel that they feel isolated by an industry that is overwhelmingly male, and that being able to connect with other women and discuss their experiences is a valuable way to stay in a career that they might otherwise bail on. I'm inclined to believe them.
See:
https://blog.100tb.com/the-technology-industry-is-a-mans-wor...
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/08/women-in-tech-gender-...
https://www.witi.com/articles/1165/Men-Dominate-the-Tech-Ind...
https://qz.com/940660/tech-is-overwhelmingly-male-and-men-ar...
Also:
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents
There are piles of data. Seriously, you are one google away from incontrovertible evidence.
Does the fact you apparently require participation in Facebook to register signal that you agree with Facebook's policy of outing trans and gender-non-conforming individuals in the enforcement of its "real name" policy?
(Not to imply that's anywhere near the only problem with Facebook's "real name" policy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_cont... )
It's the most reliable "easy" way I know to determine this info. I remember an app called Lulu which did the same.
This so much. Most men in tech can have a majority male discussion in any open community, due to their numbers. The amount of disparity from men towards leap in this thread is a prime example of why we women in tech seek to have discussions in more closed environments.
No, my solution to a sense of isolation is instead to find ways for women to no longer feel isolated within their field.
A great example with the other sex would be male nurses. Male nurses are definitely the minority in their field, yet they manage to not feel isolated overall. Even if they did, creating a male-nurse-only group wouldn't do a thing to correct the isolation-causing systems in their place of employment, and would only work to further separate male nurses from the majority by isolating them from the wider nursing community.
If women feel isolated, we should try to find out why and correct that instead of just sticking them with other isolated women.
1) If someone put you on the spot and asked you to pigeonhole Leap, would you say it's intended to be a Hacker News for women?
2) Has there been any discussion of a observer/lurker status for men?
3) Do participants primarily shift their time spent on other (open?) tech/social forums towards Leap, or do they increase their total amount of time spent on forums to make space for it?
2. We haven't discussed a view only public mode in any depth. The idea of eventually allowing men to join has come up on Leap. No idea if that will happen though.
3. I don't survey users about that so I can't say with any accuracy. I also expect it depends on the person.
Look, if want to create a female only website then go for it. But you have to own your actions. You can't exclude half the population then claim you care about inclusion. That is rank hypocrisy bordering on the delusional - you are doing the exact opposite of what you claim.
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
Obviously Cadran was talking about making Leap inclusive within the scope of being a forum for women—that's what the question was about. You don't have to agree with any particular view to see that, it just takes basic respect. If you can't or won't abide by the rules here, please stop commenting until you can.
That you feel compelled to apologize reflects the self-preserving power of this male advantage.
Here you cross into making this yet another same-old generic ideological thread, thus guaranteeing repetition and tedium. What more we can do to explain to HNers that this is where discussions become off topic because the light/heat ratio goes to zero? I realize the line isn't obvious when a topic starts out close to it anyhow. But you know, it especially isn't obvious when you aren't consciously looking for it in the first place. Since you have a habit of doing this in HN threads and stand out as a user who's done particular damage this way—unintentionally I'm sure—we need you to do a better job with this.
Perhaps the following heuristic would help. If a comment breaks away from the specific content of the specific story and becomes generically ideological, it's on the wrong side of the line and you probably should not post it.
Note that this doesn't have to do with the ideologies or politics in question, or what view you're arguing for. It has to do with generic discussions being boring in HN's sense of the word.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I would like to offer another point of view; A lot of the males who ended up in that industry are, to be blunt, social rejects. They were not the popular kids in high school, but those guys who were playing magic in the corner. Being a male in IT is a big stigma in the outside world. Nerd and Geek are still insults. There are entire sitcoms (IT Guys, Big Bang Theory) designed to laugh at them. Many dating website have the option to filter out men working in IT. I usually hide the fact that I work in IT and have found it very beneficial.
Now that there's money and power involved, things are changing a bit. But I still feel that a large reason that the IT community is like it is because it was simply excluded from society at large for a long time and still is in a way.
I think that people coming now and turning the table around with such righteousness is a bit insensitive. How would you feel about being excluded from the club you build for yourself after having been excluded from everywhere else ?
No space is being taken away. A new space is being created. This space is to give a voice to a population who reports, as a group, being silenced and undermined in other spaces by the dominant group.
This allows voices to be heard that weren't heard before. That's inclusion. Having those voices stay silent is exclusion.
Honestly, I don't give a shit about "another point of view," and that you think it matters here is a great illustration of why women would run for the hills, whichever hills don't have you on them.
This is not about someone's experience as a "social reject," this isn't about sad boys not being cool in high school because they like comic books. This is about women wanting a place to talk to other women about an experience that they feel isolates them from their male colleagues. That men sometimes feel lonely too has nothing to do with it.
What is wrong with doing something like this until they generally feel less isolated, then moving on to something else?
IE Why is it unreasonable for this to be a step along the path?
Why is this?
There are only two possible causes that I can see - genetic, or cultural. The genetic argument is basically that men are, by nature, better at being programmers and leaders than women - that women are inferior. The cultural argument is that there is a social advantage to being male (and a social disadvantage to being female) - that, all else being equal, things tend to default in favor of men.
Personally, I reject the genetic explanation. Most people do. If you also reject it, then you're stuck with the cultural explanation, or finding something I haven't come up with.
Of course like everything else, there are trade offs, especially when this community is female only... While as a male I was aware of the existence of gender discrimination and harassment, I did not realize how ignorant I was of the subject and how terrible the situation was, until I read Susan Fowler's account at Uber. It was a paradigm change for me. How will Leap mitigate from potentially becoming a closed echo chamber? i.e. will this limit needed but hard discussions between the sexes? How does Leap prevent that?
That's not to say that there's necessarily anything wrong with exclusion -- it is a fact of life in many ways, and can be fruitful. I am a member of some exclusive clubs and I find them to be highly rewarding.
Perhaps "hypocrisy" and "delusion" are inflammatory words, and should not have been chosen. I think a better way to characterize cbcowans' comment is "doublespeak," as the inherent nature of Leap is quite the opposite of her description.
Still, in regard to that particular HN site guideline, sievebrain's point applies to even the strongest possible interpretation of cbcowans' comment. There is necessarily a logical inconsistency between establishing an exclusive organization and then describing it as "an inclusive community."
In this case the context is the question. Q: are all who identify as women welcome to join? A: yes, we want to be inclusive of all who identify as women. It's clear what "inclusive" means there, the same way it's clear that "join" doesn't mean sticking things together with carpenter's glue.
It does take a little work to remember that the same word can have two different scopes in the same discussion. Similarly, one might not use the same variable name to mean two different things in the same function. Nevertheless the meaning was reasonably clear and certainly plausible.
The problem is that when a word carries an emotional charge and the topic carries an emotional charge, outer-cortex nuances get flooded by deeper defensive reactions. This happens to all of us. It's one reason why discussions like this need moderation and the moderators need a lot of practice—and a lot of support—in order not to get flooded themselves. I'm dangling by the same thread much of the time, so I have empathy for it, but it's not ok for commenters to let themselves become disrespectful.
From my observation, women are frequently proclaimed to be superior to men in numerous ways. My entire life I've heard that women mature faster than men. Women are proclaimed to be more nurturing. Women have higher 'emotional intelligence.' You'll see it almost universally proclaimed that if women ran the world, conflicts (eg war) would be far less common, this is a constant refrain in the US across all media.
There are very well understood differences between men and women when it comes to things like vision, physical strength, hand-eye coordination, spatial awareness, physical aggression, and so on. We also have many different health risks due to our genetic differences. All of these things add up to women universally living longer from one culture to the next, and women commiting drastically fewer acts of violence (and thus making up a far smaller percentage of the prison population).
If any of that is actually true, why can't men be superior at various tasks due to genetic differences? Why not programming? What I'm asking is: what's the scientific argument to say that men are not superior at programming, how can that be proven either direction? Just saying such is the case (either direction), is not enough.
The problem with tech in particular is that we're often viewed as an inclusive and progressive industry. But when you run the numbers, we're no better than the law firms.
But what we don't always realize is that the internet isn't terribly inclusive in the first place. There's a prevailing atmosphere in well-populated tech spaces - Reddit, HN - that tends to shut down women's voices, especially if they're talking about an experience that men on the internet can't relate to.
I'm all for this project, hope it works out.
There are other hypotheses as well that have nothing to do with social advantages--maybe biology or culture has women preferring to elect into other career fields? We also know that (for whatever reason) women prefer flexible careers that let them spend time with kids, and that women are more likely than men to take time off to start a family and that they take more time off than men to start the family. Perhaps men and women are equal in their desire to spend time with family, but society expects men to sacrifice time with family to provide for the family? In this case, the disparity is the result of a social disadvantage to being male.
These are just a few hypotheses that I could come up with in a few moments. Some of these I think are probable and others improbable, but the point is that we have more hypotheses besides misogyny and patriarchy. We shouldn't feel the need to buy into the patriarchy explanation simply to avoid the misogyny explanation (especially because the people who favor the patriarchy explanation also tend to propose some scary reforms, like restricting due process rights for one gender).
This may seem pedantic, but what do you consider ideological? I said what I said because I saw it as a fundamental flaw of the community. I don't believe fighting discrimination with discrimination is productive, and I believe a woman-only community is discriminatory. Would it have avoided the genericism if I had tied it directly to the thread by saying "I believe this community is wrong because you can't fight discrimination with discrimination?" Or would mentioning discrimination genericize the conversation as well?
Nobody is trying to exclude you from these larger spaces. Though if we want to get rid of the stigma of tech, we can start by making them more welcoming and inclusive.
In other words: if seeing something like Leap makes you viscerally mad, focus on fixing the reason it needs to exist in the first place.
In some states, AFAIK the "women-only gym" is allowed, but in others it isn't. The point, if I remember correctly, is "exercise requires such compromising clothes and positions, that the right to personal privacy trumps the right to not be discriminated based on gender". And even then, this is not a 100% clear case. Toilets and physical activity follow a similar (although less polemic) pattern.
Having said that, and as far as I understand, you need to show that discriminating based on gender is so important for your activity that it can't be done in any other way. My gut feeling is that, should anyone sue Leap, clearing that barrier would not be trivial.
I would appreciate a lawyer's point of view, and was hoping that Leap had already talked to one that could give a properly researched answer.
Edit: I found a very interesting article[1] about the law when it comes to all-female health clubs. As expected, the conclusion seems to be "it's complicated".
[1] http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
You can cut this cake a different way, too... race. White people are overrepresented (or non-whites are underrepresented) in IT, and in high-status jobs. And the male/female representation ratios are different, as well.
Consider historic example, as well. Right now, women are significantly underrepresented as CEOs and senators. But a century ago, there were no women CEOs or senators. Are women less genetically inclined to their "proper" path as homemakers now than they were a century ago?
At a certain point, I start cutting the cake with Occam's Razor.
Do you intend to have admin/moderator actions visible in some way to the users? If posts are edited or removed (by users or mods) does that get indicated in any way?
Different approaches to these issues can significantly affect how a community grows, and I'm always very interested to hear how new sites choose to approach the problem.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2015/03/16/th...
They don't have to be. Only the majority, and I have a hard time believing that the majority of software engineers and leaders are of average capability or worse. I'm open to data to the contrary, however.
> You can cut this cake a different way, too... race. White people are overrepresented (or non-whites are underrepresented) in IT, and in high-status jobs.
Not sure what your point is here. Are you implying that because there are racial disparities as well, then both gender and racial disparities must have a common cause? That's obviously fallacious, but I don't know what else to make of this.
> Right now, women are significantly underrepresented as CEOs and senators. But a century ago, there were no women CEOs or senators. Are women less genetically inclined to their "proper" path as homemakers now than they were a century ago?
No. I made no claims about the cause of disparities a century ago.
> At a certain point, I start cutting the cake with Occam's Razor.
Good. Then let's hold off on the elaborate conspiracy theories until we can invalidate the simpler explanations, eh?
It also may give a clue to other women as to how exactly may the Leap community be beneficial for them, or what’s the culture like, before they decide if they need to join.
As for my point, it's that systematic bias against people by race looks remarkably similar to systematic bias against people by gender. That suggests a common cause, especially when one group (white men) is the beneficiary of both. Hence Occam's Razor. A single dominant group shutting out everyone who doesn't match the dominant traits is a simpler explanation than coming up with two entirely separate causes for the same observation.
As for historical disparaties... I know you didn't make claims about disparities a century ago. The historic example was an argument against the case you made that somehow, women are genetically predisposed to avoid certain career paths.
-Pay Gap: https://www.aauw.org/research/the-simple-truth-about-the-gen...
-Employment Gap: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinawallace/2016/10/20/gir...
-Leadership Gap: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-02/why-so-fe...
-Visibility Gap: https://hbr.org/2016/09/to-succeed-in-tech-women-need-more-v...
-Sexism/Hostile Workplaces: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/why-is-...
-Hiring Discrimination: https://www.aauw.org/2015/06/11/john-or-jennifer/
-General Discrimination: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/the-tech-indus...
And just in case you missed it the last time: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_incidents
If you identify as female, you should obviously be allowed.
On its face, your explanation is simpler, but there is a whole bunch of evidence that forces the theory of sexism/racism to become more complex. Here are a few that pop into my head (in no particular order):
* Asians are kicking too much ass; a more complex theory is needed to explain why whites aren't holding Asians back when they're apparently happy to hold back blacks (and Hispanics, to a lesser degree).
* Women approached parity in medicine and law in the '80s and '90s when overt misogyny was the norm--long before million dollar diversity budgets; do we really believe that tech is more misogynistic than medicine and law in the '80s?
* Overt discrimination is on the decline, so we resort to increasingly improbable theories of microagressions and unconscious bias, however...
* Even progressive universities, industries, and companies aren't moving the needle on tech diversity despite million dollar diversity budgets and bias response teams
* Even the critical theorists can't pin it on sexism/patriarchy without calling into question math, reason, and objectivity
Also, what similarities are there between racial and gender disparities that constitute damning evidence in a common cause? What do these disparities have in common that (for example) the workplace fatality gap or the longevity gap lack? This seems much too loose to support your claim that sexism/racism is a simpler explanation than the dual explanations of "different gender preferences" and "artifacts of history including historical racism".
Again, my point isn't that the cause can't be a conspiracy theory; only that it has to be a very, very elaborate one. And it seems more probable to me that some combination of cultural and biological reasons drive women to make different career choices. I don't imagine you'll agree, but hopefully you can at least appreciate why I'm skeptical about the sexism/patriarchy explanation.
> Gender is a protected class
Which means that businesses doing public accommodation are restricted from discriminating, but 'private clubs' (such as the Boy Scouts), who have a narrowly tailored interest that is benefitted by discrimination against a protected class is generally allowed (subject to variances within state law).
For example, a group for men who have been sexually molested by men would likely be considered presumptively lawful, but a group for men who also happen to be car salesmen would likely not be.
There are a number of details that need to be considered as well, as (loosely) prescribed by _Rotary Club of Duarte[1]_, such as exclusivity (it can't be publicly available to be overheard), and purpose (already covered), but if neither conditions are met, and a state law prohibits such discrimination, then it meets (at least) a rational basis standard.
This is possible. I do not know.
> What is wrong with doing something like this until they generally feel less isolated, then moving on to something else?
What I'm afraid will happen by taking this route(though I do not know that this will happen) is that this will divert energy that would have gone into converting work cultures to improve the interaction between men and women and shift that energy into an external forum that doesn't affect their real employment conditions in the slightest.
I'm also afraid of the optics of a double standard. If women can have women-only groups while men can't socially get away with having men-only groups at the same time that the number of women grows in the field, then that may make seemingly displaced men very angry.
I could be wrong. If you see a reason why this doesn't make sense, please let me know.
Any man taking such an action in 2018 would likely lose their career over it.
You may have noble intentions, but refusing nearly half the population simply on the basis of their anatomy is not inclusive.
Well- how do you explain the fact that "they're just not interested"? Why is cultural bias not an explanation of this lack of interest? And if it isn't, then what is?
You can't just stop the ball rolling wherever you like. At some point we have to figure out why girls are not into technology as much as boys are and it's very lazy to just dismiss it as "not a girl thing".
I presented the OP with a objective, data-based argument and limited myself to quoting only the article (of which there are many, many, many more I could have chosen from) exactly to avoid a subjective response like yours. I am not interested in ideological discussions about purely subjective arguments (Read: flamewars). You can ignore the data all you like, but please don't try to drag me into an argument with that.
[0]: https://flowingdata.com/2017/09/11/most-female-and-male-occu...
First, all of it is predictable. Each time something gets repeated, its potential to gratify curiosity diminishes. In the case of ideological squabbles, the repetition is so entrenched that there's no curiosity potential left at all. What is has instead is strong conflict potential, meaning that such discussions not only add no value here, they burn up and destroy what does have value.
Second, it's all generic. The larger a question is, the harder it is to say meaningful things about it. Signal/noise ratio goes down as topics get more generic.
I don't doubt that it's possible for people to find new, meaningful things to say about large generic questions. But internet comments are not the right genre for expressing them. Someone who truly has such ideas would write a book or an essay, for the same reason one wouldn't excavate the foundation for a house with a thimble.
lobste.rs has a invite system where a person who invites someone may potentially be kicked if the person they invite is a problem. See https://lobste.rs/about#invitations
Organize a booth or representative at women-focused tech events like FFC or GHC, or have events/meetups for Leap members to meet face-to-face where prospective members are also invited. The invite system would make this easier to implement.
By analogy, it's like answering the question "why do cows eat grass?" with "because cows are herbivores", which is really just restating the question. An actual explanation would require understanding how cows have evolved to become herbivores in the first place, and not meat-eaters, like, say, wolves. Without such an explanation, there is no way to understand why cows are herbivores and wolves are not.
By analogy, without any understanding of why women are not interested in technology jobs, there is no way to understand the gender disparity in technology.
>> You can ignore the data all you like, but please don't try to drag me into an argument with that.
This is very unpleasant. First you assume I'm "ignoring the data" when I actually discussed what the data means. Then you assign a motive to me, that I'm "trying to drag you into an argument". Please don't do that.
The same goes for the sentence "how do you explain the fact". For example, if I asked the question "how do you invert a binary tree", I wouldn't be asking how a specific interlocutor would do it personally, rather, I'd want to know how it is generally done.
A more accurate way of stating the question would be "how does one invert..." etc. But that is a bit of an archaic turn of phrase that tends to make one look a bit of a twit, so one tends to avoid it. I do.
Not when you look at it subjectively and only focus on the specific subset that supports your argument. I believe that's called 'selection bias'.
> without any understanding of why women are not interested in technology jobs, there is no way to understand the gender disparity in technology.
The scientific understanding is there. It's just not the answer you want it to be and hence you ignore it.
> This is very unpleasant. First you assume I'm "ignoring the data" when I actually discussed what the data means. Then you assign a motive to me, that I'm "trying to drag you into an argument". Please don't do that.
>> that is a very intellectually dishonest passage.
>> You can't just stop the ball rolling wherever you like.
Of course it's okay if you do it. To a quoted article, no less, not even my own words. But when I point out what you did then I'm the bad person. This is why I had no desire to get dragged into this kind of discussion.
For the sake of the argument, I presume you are a woman (personally I don't care if you are male, female, a tree, or whatever else). You think that, just because you are interested in tech, every other woman must also be. That is false. The fact alone that you are a woman in tech means you are part of a minority. It doesn't matter how vocal that minority is, it still is just a minority that does not represent the interests of the majority. Just because you chose a career in tech, while most other females did not, does not inherently mean that there is a problem and that that problem needs fixing. Vegans aren't "sick" just because they chose to eat no meat. Salafists aren't bad people just because of their choice of religion. Cat owners don't hate birds just because they have cats. Most women just have no interest in a technical career. Be that (software) engineers, mechanics or truck drivers. It is a choice they made based on their interests (you can prove that yourself by just asking random women on the street) and it is on you to accept that you are part of a minority and that isn't going to change.
I myself am part of a minority too, being autistic. Unlike you, I have to deal with it no matter what I do and where I go. Would it be nice not to have to live in a world tailored to neuro-typicals and not having to face (extreme) prejudice everywhere I go? Hell yeah. But that is wishful thinking and not reality. Just like gender equality in tech is wishful thinking, but not more. The sooner you accept reality instead of chasing a dream based on wishful thinking, the sooner you can start making a difference for the women that made the same choice you did.
Now have a nice day. I have nothing further to add and won't answer you again.
You keep assigning motives and thoughts to me, even though I made it clear that I find it unpleasant and asked you to stop it. I clarified that my original comment was not addressing criticism to you personally and that the use of word "you" did not mean you personally, either. I don't see what I did to justify your confrontational tone, other than disagree with your interpretation of some data.
As to the rest of your comment:
>> Most women just have no interest in a technical career. Be that (software) engineers, mechanics or truck drivers. It is a choice they made based on their interests (you can prove that yourself by just asking random women on the street) and it is on you to accept that you are part of a minority and that isn't going to change.
I'm not as uncommon as you think. I'm originally from Greece, where it is quite common for women to follow careers in technology and the sciences. It is not common in the UK where I live, but that suggests some sort of cultural bias. Additionally, I've worked with several female developers from India over the years and they also don't think it's uncommon, or that it's a job that's not suited for women- quite the contrary; they see it as "office work" which is definitely better for women than manual work.
But let's stick to women in the US and the UK, which I'm guessing you're more familiar with. The point remains that observing that "women are not interested in technology" does not explain why they are not interested in technology. Which means it doesn't explain why women are not pursuing careers in technology, either.
This has nothing to do with subjective or objective analysis. Data alone does not explain anything. It does not have exegetic power, one would say. So the observation that "women are not interested in technology" does not explain anything not because I don't want it to, but because it can't.
Theories do have exegetic power. But observations alone do not constitute a theory.
I think you could argue that Leap is somewhat similar to that. It's a support network for a group of people who face a particular challenge and need a safe place to talk.