The page belongs to an author five years dead and records the remarks made at a closed conference eight years ago. Some things you just have to take without hypertext.

Noted. I don't like accepting arguments where I don't have the sources, but it's still food for thought.

I think what bothers me about his argument though is that he takes a somewhat old observation (see: old analogy of keys and locks) and tries to apply it to situations where it could follow, but it just as well could not. Minorities weren't the ones dominating programming, and in the early days, women were highly discouraged from the sort of creative thinking involved in computer design. Does that point to differences in ability? Or access / motivation?

Yet in spite of that, women invented the first programming language and compiler, operated the first general computer, and invented / co-invented many of the broadcast and networking protocols available today. Were they dominant the whole way? No. But at a time when the relative accessibility of these technologies was highly limited for women, it seems erroneous to me to point to there being fewer achievements by one gender and immediately claim an explanation based on an evolutionary and not a social argument.

Peter Chamberlen

I honestly don't know the full story here, but from what I looked up... this was an invention from before germ theory could even explain why forceps would be useful and he kept them a secret for most of his life. That's not a fitting example here since he neither used them to get rich or benefit humanity at large, and his male offspring, too, failed to sell them when they tried.

But again, I think this is a circular argument: saying that society's are better when women are assigned their place and arguing that from evidence of men's superiority during times when women were oppressed. It doesn't really hold up when you look at modern times when those constraints have been relaxed, nor in non-Euro/American cultures where women were not as deeply oppressed.