Warning! Long comment ahead.

Haven't read the comments here and I'm a bit scared to, because last time I brought this up on my own blog, I got a few of the men's rights activist crowd descending on me (which itself is part of the answer to that question). Of course, as soon as I started throwing statistics and sources out there as well as anecdotal experience, they went suspiciously silent. Anyway.

There's a saying among groups that promote equal representation of women and minorities in media: If she can see it, she can be it. When young girls are not exposed to people who look like them pursuing certain fields, and that is repeated over and over again during their formative years, it sends a subconscious message that pursuing that line of work is not feminine and something that girls just shouldn't do because boys won't like you. Furthermore, just look on Reddit, 4Chan, or even certain corners of Steemit, and you'll see that there is a lot of hostility toward women who are seen as "invading" traditionally male spaces. There's still a lot of deeply embedded sexism in which men look at women as just being good for sex (or even obligated to give sex--look at the incel movement, it's awful). On the internet, it's a thousand times worse because people feel free to show their ugliest sides that are the least acceptable to show in public, with little negative feedback, because they find like-minded insular communities of people who share those beliefs. Last time I looked on Alexa, Steemit was about 80% male. The corners of this site that I hang out in tend to be much closer to 50/50, but the bigger crypto-related communities are certainly predominantly male.

Speaking anecdotally, when I was a kid in the mid-90s, I was really into computers. I stayed home and took apart and put computers back together during the weekends. I was the first of my friends to have the internet, and that was during the wild west when websites were just starting to become dynamic. I taught myself how to program in C++ and PHP early in high school. I suffered a lot of sexual and verbal harassment as a small child, before I even knew what many of those words meant, because I was almost always the only girl in chat rooms, and because I had a female voice playing video games. It was really bad, and it wore me down. Over time I just gave up the hobby, and ended up doing something totally different in college. Maybe if I was born 20 years later and I saw other women around that I could have looked to as role models, I would have been more inclined to stick with it. Can't say either way.