A Female Opinion (Score 1)

What keeps women from CS/IT are the higher ed institutions that still treat a CS degree like a mathematics degree. You will find far more women in CS/IT at two-year institutions where programming is taught without the math minor and stems from the business department, not the math department. When was the last time you used all those semesters of Calculus in writing your latest program? Yeah, thought so.

What also keeps women from CS/IT are the atrocious hours. Instead of hiring an appropriate number of people, companies cut back, ask their salaried IT to work more overtime, overburden the on-call rotation and generally demand more and offer less. I believe women are less willing to put up with that kind of abuse when we can find something else that employs our critical thinking and problem-solving skills but does not sap or consume our entire existence.

Add to this that society still pins the primary responsibility for childcare on women and you can see why 80 hours a week + pager is entirely unacceptable to a lot of women of child-bearing age.