I've seen a mailing list discussion between female engineers on this topic. One intriguing idea they put forward is that in developing countries, in the last f

I've seen a mailing list discussion between female engineers on this topic. One intriguing idea they put forward is that in developing countries, in the last few decades, kids did not have access to home computers or console devices. You only got significant amounts of time with a computer once you had reached university. So everybody in a CS program, male and female, was starting from zero, as near-adults. So the Asian universities did not have any toxically geeky culture, and they also had to get really good at teaching complete newbies. In this atmosphere women did as well as men. It was suggested that Western CS departments are dominated by people from the gamer scene, who are almost all male. They are very familiar with the technology already, and skew the academic culture in such a way that interested newcomers are less welcome, and less able to keep up.