Not every brain is wired well for programming (can we please stop calling it "coding") - male or female, but there's some advantage men get due to being generally better at abstract thinking. Some believe this is due to cultural differences (http://phys.org/news/2011-08-disputes-notion-men-spatial-wom...), but I personally believe it's all due to hormonal differences. For example, estrogen affects cognitive function, testosterone definitely boosts competitiveness, and so on. I know some will rush to downvote me as a sexist, but this will be far from the truth. On the contrary - this is a good defense on the discrepancies in the statistics and suggests this to be a software rather a hardware problem. I personally don't need third-party statistics - I have nearly 30 years of programming experience and less than 10% of my colleagues have been female and this ratio hasn't improved over time.