The problem with this hypothesis is that it doesn't explain why woman have been so successful in fields like law and medicine, where they not only faced blatant discrimination, harassment, and discouragement from their peers, but also institutional barriers. Yet women fought through all of that and prevailed. So if you think that "discouragement" is the explanation, you need to explain why it only happens in tech.
Perhaps because law & medicine are centuries old fields and there has been ample time for this to have happened, whereas "tech" is fairly young still.
Islam is petrified of people who think, because thinking people will see it for the racist, facist, evil, misogynistic, hateful, backward pile of war-mongering nastiness that it truly is.
When you make it about one religion, you pretend that it is the only religion with nutbag extremists. It's not. You could replace "Islam" with "Christianity" or a handful of other religions and the rest of your sentence would remain true. Just bear in mind that there are plenty of people in each of those religions who are not afraid of people who think, and are fully committed to being peaceful, productive members of a modern society.
Christians & Muslims get judged a lot by their religion because many people of those religions judge others a lot. Turn-about is fair play.
it's one thing to have a woman shaving your nether regions in preparation for a surgery or giving you an enema (or similar), but some dude doing it to you introduces a bit of mental discomfort in guys
I can't say I've had to have something like this yet, but it seems to me that this situation would have plenty of mental discomfort regardless of the gender of the technician. When you had your last physical, was the physician the same gender as you or the opposite? Did you care? Why would the gender difference not matter for the doctor, but would for the nurse?
What the gods would destroy they first submit to an IEEE standards committee.