This is reflected in the bell curves - women have less variation than men. This is why more boys are born than girls - more boys die because they tend to take chances growing up.
Birth rates are generally pretty close with less than a
What biological expense of child birth? Women live longer than men. If women incur a 'biological expense' death rates certainly don't support your argument.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1827162,00.html
Please provide data confirming that women are risk adverse more so than men. Your bell curve argument is hack science and you argument(s) over all are weak. Your 'business requires the ability to take risk and so men are better at it' is long bow to draw as well. Australians richest woman (and one of the richest people in the world) is a woman, same for the PM, same for an ex New Zealand PM and the list goes on.
"I am only interested in general purpose work, utilities"
They (all reasonably mainstream languages) are all fine for this. You can even get the free version of visual studio and do C# / VB.Net and by learning the libraries of one pretty much know everything you need for the other. C# is a lot like Java and flicking from one to the other is easy as is stepping down to C++ or over to Javascript. I'd say Java / C#. Both free, both compliment the other and MSDN is huge, seriously HUGE in depth and breadth. C# will also lead into powershell which may be better suited to what you want to do potentially.
I'm not saying it's how things should be. I'm just telling you it's how they are.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn