You're right, it's a multi-part problem. I don't quite agree with "society primes girls not to go into technology" part; although it does have some truth to it,

You're right, it's a multi-part problem. I don't quite agree with "society primes girls not to go into technology" part; although it does have some truth to it, I don't think all the gender gap in the filed can be attributed to societal factors. I can give two arguments: (i) Not all technical fields have the gender gap, e.g. in biological and agricultural studies 51% of PhDs were awarded to women in 2009, whereas it was 22% in engineering and 27% in math and computer science (so engineering is worse but people usually don't tackle, say, the gender gap in civil or electrical engineering) (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/14/doctorates http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/14/doctorates); (ii) It's a widely popularized finding that, when adjusted for gender equality in the country, the gender gap in sciences, e.g. math, disappears (http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/32949/title/Math_Trek__Gender_equality_closes_math_gap http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/32949/title/Math_...). This fits in with your society influence theory. Yet, AFAIK (the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo aside) the hacker cultures for those top (generally Scandinavian) countries are still dominated by males (can't point to a study, anecdotal evidence, will be happy to retract if given convincing evidence to teh contrary).