“an entire industry struggling to explain why women are underrepresented in key engineering ranks and are often underpaid when compared with their male peers.”
Having done a major amount of programming in C and Java, I believe the answer is obvious. Women suck at the self abusive act of software writing. How many nights have I spent with a Snickers and Pepsi at 3am trying to debug some sorry piece of code or hardware? You have to have ADHD to do this kind of crap work. Not women’s thing.
You raise an interesting point. People with disabilities like Asperger's may not be able to negotiate the best salaries and can be taken advantage of, but write code like crazy..