There were teachers at your all-boys school whose job it was to prevent the Lord-of-the-Flies scenario and if yours was anything like mine, they expended a lot

There were teachers at your all-boys school whose job it was to prevent the Lord-of-the-Flies scenario and if yours was anything like mine, they expended a lot of energy on that task :-). You're attempting to rationalize the mostly-male situation you find yourself in, but it's pure conjecture. Women are (in general) just as capable as men (in general) at software development. My own belief is that there are a host of poorly understood factors that tend to push women away from software engineering careers. One of them is the fact that it's a "boys' club", but it's mainly a boys' club because it's mostly boys—if there were more women, cheerful misogyny like that exhibited in your "take it like a man" comment would be less acceptable. In other words, we can't fix the problem (and it is a problem) of gender imbalance in software engineering just by not being asses to women, but it's a place to start.