Really, I'm mostly trying to avoid answering these until this afternoon, but this seems straightforward. And I mostly agree with your analysis, though I think the cultural assumption that women are worse than men is true in many cases but not a necessary component. Women are conditioned to believe that they want emotional connection (and not sex) and men the reverse, and yet that's usually not reflective of what we actually want over the long term. This is often confusing for everyone involved. (I may have read more Heinlein at an impressionable age than was healthy - and yo, he was kind of all over the map about women - but compared to the cultural norms I feel like I came off lucky.)

* "Like" in this case is more "revert to when tired" - I'm getting over a cold, and should have gone to bed earlier than I did last night.
* I have been a programmer, though when I worked in software, I tended to prefer jobs that weren't straight coding as I get antsy sitting in an office writing code all day. (Performance analyst, program manager, lots of weird resilience work in there.)
* These days I'm a neurobiologist, (via computational biochem), but about half my work is on the computational modelling side. In theory, the rest is bench work, in practice the rest is managing a coterie of students who do my bench work.
* ...and my father was a computer science professor, from far enough back that he was a founding member of his department, and I've been coding since I was, like, five. So, early enough that it counts as first language acquisition (FORTRAN, ulp) which has probably left me scarred for life.

You're taking a cultural preference - which has some serious downsides - and extrapolating rather ridiculously. I mean, seriously, waiting to be asking, never getting to choose who does the asking (or if anyone does) and merely getting to say yes or no? That sucks. When that really held sway, we had an awful lot of spinsters.

A lot of women aren't getting asked. (And it's more complicated than just attractiveness. I get a lot more attention than a number of friends who are frankly far hotter, probably from being the right kind of outspoken bitch.) A cultural expectation that you're supposed to wait is hardly a privilege in that case, yes? Women are socialized that asking is pushy and forward and unattractive, and reflects badly on them. ...and yet, more and more women are all "Fuck that, I'm not playing this game."

Which, after all, is exactly the same choice you have. The idea that you have no choice but to initiate - really? Have you thought this through? Or maybe it's that you don't like the idea of sitting around waiting for someone to maybe pick you someday? Maybe that's not such an empowered position after all?

I am, indeed, female. (And bi, so I have experience flirting with both men and women. Though, y'know, not straight women, though a femme-y bi woman isn't necessarily going to have social removed from a similarly femme-y straight woman.)

I think it's more complicated that simple fearing of rejection. Women are strongly socialized not to initiate (you will be seen as fast! and too pushy, and forward, and generally undesirable!) and to be leery of the advances of men. (And, frankly, to be afraid of men. And not for no reason, though women are not uniquely vulnerable. Men, of course, are suppose to never admit to being either afraid or having been hurt.) Meanwhile - and probably partly as a buffer against their fear of rejection - men often ritually objectify women amongst themselves* and focus on the more trivial sexual aspects of the relationship. I mean, don't get me wrong, sex is great, but you don't expose yourself, emotionally, as a man, by saying you're looking for sex.**

Really, I think many parts of this are pretty ridiculous, and not just on one side or the other, but it's useful to understand where it comes from. It's a lot less useful to get stuck there. And, of course, especially as the gender roles of days past fade, we have more and more evidence that guess what? Men and women both crave emotional connection. And men and women both crave sex. (Sadly, none of that guarantees we'll be on the same schedule for any of our cravings.)

Now, that I'm generally pretty willing to make the first move doesn't men that I'm that interested in getting random nonsense from strangers online. Especially of the "Hur, hur, suck my dick. No? Well, you were ugly anyway," variety. Back in my hometown (Seattle) I could even handle being on sites like OKCupid, because folks were generally polite, but in Ohio it was just ridiculous and I disabled my account. (I also really didn't tend to find folks I had much in common with, and the more polite folks who contacted me mostly seemed to hope that I'd make their lives more interesting and I've tried that and it ends badly.)

* Or in groups with small numbers of women where they feel comfortable, I've been present for enough of that, and I suspect at that they were holding back.
** And, of course, there's all the social stigma around women liking sex. Which is ridiculous, at least in these days of decent birth control, but there are still strong cultural currents. (It's kind of ridiculous how many times I've invited a guy into my bed, he made sure I meant for no strings sex, I cheerfully agreed... and then in the morning he decided we should be in a relationship. Um, what?)

Woman: "I'd like to do this thing..."
Men*: "Actually, you don't, because that'd be a violation of the natural order."
Women: "Um, no, really, I'm sure. I want do to this thing."
Men: "No you don't."
Women: "You mean you don't want me to, right?"

Not that plenty of women aren't happy to be lazy if circumstance allows, but the socialization against making the first move is pretty harsh. I say, as a woman who mostly ignored it, and usually made the first move. But I also missed large parts of that socialization, kind of the way I missed the bits about not walking alone at night. Really, I find making the first move to be pretty advantageous - I mean, sit around and wait, and then pick among the pool of those who asked me? I can filter far more effectively on my own, and I suck as sitting around next to the phone.

* not all men

Strange, I've never been unable to handle this...

Well, let's see. I volunteered in a computational biochemistry / bioengineering lab, a mycology lab (though rather casually), and a genetics lab (though I was a registered student for the whole time I was in the genetics lab). Those were all at my previous institution. I currently am getting my PhD in neurobiology, and we have volunteers, some of whom are not students (I just sent a really wonderful high school student off to Northwestern for her first year of college, and had another who was hoping to get research experience before applying to medical school). I know the biologically inspired robotics lab here is open to volunteers - there's been some talk of my nephew spending a summer there. Really, it's quite common. Some institutions have age restrictions, and often there is some kind of required safety training (depending on what work you're doing) - and here it's a complete pain for someone who isn't student staff or faculty to get key access, though they can come and work as long as there's someone else to let them in.

"What distinguishes modern science from other forms of knowledge such as philosophy is that it explicitly forsakes abstract reasoning about the ultimate causes of things and instead tests empirical theories through controlled investigation."

This is utter drivel. (Unless, perhaps, ones narrows the definitions of ultimate causes in a ridiculous way.) Scientists reason about ultimate causes, and proximate causes, and causes that just happened to be wandering down the street at that time all the time. This is a major part of hypothesis generation. Science isn't about randomly going around doing a bunch of experiments - well, okay, it's somewhat about that too, if you count high throughput techniques as random, but even then its random inside of controlled parameters. It's about taking all the understanding you think you've gleaned from your observation and your high minded reasoning and what you talked about at the pub and that thing that occurred to you in the shower - all of it - and turning it into a testable hypothesis. Y'know, one that can actually be wrong.

And then testing it.

It's not about foresaking abstract reasoning in the least. It's just about checking in with reality from time to time, as well.

There is definitely a lack of people who are a serious about their computer science as they are their science area of interest. (I will spare you the rants, other than to mention that my doctoral work is evenly split between experimental and computational work.) "Programmer" is a bit of a gloss. I mean, technically, yeah, I'm a decent programmer, but I'm a much better designer, auditor and analyst - perhaps "engineer"? I build things and make things work. As a matter of preference, I don't actually like to spend much than a third to a half at the outside of my working time on code, and I actually enjoy managing small teams. And I left my original lab for a number of reasons*, as much as I loved it, but partially because I really wanted to be in a situation where I could be doing bench work. (And I really had to fight to do bench work, because most PIs really wanted to chain me to a computer. Though by the time I was applying to grad school I'd gotten decent bench skills.**) Or at least have research students working for me who were doing bench work. A lot of my current research is possible because of surgical techniques I developed early on this lab.

Relatively little of what I've done in research has directly used my skills from tech. It's much more been a generally confidence that I can jump into a situation, and learn about it, and be smart and stubborn at it and beat my head against it until it works. I don't think that's about having a particular job title***, or skill set per se. Which isn't to say that I think it's easy for everyone.

* Partially because I didn't want to have people asking me to support the dratted database for the rest of my life.
** Though, word to the wise, never work in two labs at the same time. Especially if you are trying to get a paper out at the same time. Particularly if you value your car.
*** Admittedly, I go way out of my way to encourage my research students to learn to code, and to do so in a practical fashion that helps them with their research.

A lot of it is going to depend on the particular project and what skills and qualities the individual can bring to the table. I did have a background in high performance distributed network computing*, and a lot of general systems design work, but nothing beyond that to suggest that I could walk into a computational biochemistry lab and be managing a major project in under a year. I had no biology, very little chemistry, no biochem, certainly not enough physics, and there I am doing MD protein dynamics work (and a lot of multidimensional database work, but that part almost makes sense). (Yes, I also took quite a few classes.) I'm certainly bright, and I couldn't have pulled it off otherwise. And certainly my interests have always been pretty broad, and my background wasn't "IT" per se in the first place - but then, I figure anyone who has the gumption to be interested in research while having a career in IT probably knows more than the minimum required for their job. Seriously, though, a lot of it was having the guts to start asking around. I was surprised how many PIs offered me positions on the programming background alone.

* Though for that matter, I pretty much talked and worked my way into that, too - I was a Chinese major, though my father was a CS prof and I was programming from an early age.

I have, as I mentioned above. (Software to computational biochemistry to neurobiology. Of course I did Chinese and political economics as an undergrad...) Currently finishing a doctorate.

It's unlikely you can make the transition to working in the field without some really major sacrifices. (And if you do, it will probably be more on the computational side.) But if you love it for it's own sake I'd suggest talking to local labs and seeing if you can get involved in any projects - especially projects where you can work remotely at least part of the time, since your time is limited. And as a volunteer, you often get to avoid some of the more tedious bits that people who are being paid have to work on. My experience is that people with solid computer skills are needed, and people who will work are needed, and there's way more cool work to be done than there are money and people to do it.

And, of course, if there are any opportunities for you to work in a paid capacity, you'll be in the perfect position to hear about them.

I made the transition from tech to computational biochemistry to neurobio - but I had a lot of stock options, and I've been willing to become a grad student, and live mostly like a grad student, which is hard to do when you have a family. And while biomed funding has been cut, there's a lot more of it out there to begin with.

(I'm not generically saying that people should work for free, BTW. I know for me, research turned out to be what I wanted to be doing when I wasn't worrying about money. Though, um, then there were a couple of stock market crashes...)

IIRC, the sweeteners in stevia are glycosides, which is to say that they're a sugar bound up to an alglycon. While eventually they're broken down and one of the by products is sugar, it's far enough down the digestive tract that it's not absorbed. So... it's only kind of a sugar.