As I read the into, I think the author touched on a lot of the reasons I was starting to think of. A lot of people do boot camps (which are overpriced for-profit garbage btw), community college programming classes, etc. I know people out of this programs that understand bigO notation and do all kinds of fun scaling work and I know CS majors who can only program Java/C# and don't know what a SATA connector is. You get out of your field what you put into it.
As far as women in our field, I hesitate here. I don't really think it's the hostile landscape. I've worked with several female engineers. Some are amazing and good designers. Some are terrible. The ratio to good/bad males, in my limited non-scientific empirical view, seems about even. I also haven't really witnesses women being treated badly either and I've worked in five cities and several jobs over the past two decades. What I have seen are entire groups of people being treated like crap in hostel work environments, not limited or segregated by race or gender.
I feel there are also not that many people in our field (both men and women) because it's...pretty horrible. Seriously, we sit in front of screen for 8 hours a day watching the world tick by, often doing our best to design the best we can to be bolted onto old decaying crap that should have been retired a decade ago. Or we build shiny new products that benefit the few and have tons of crazy requirements that come out of no where that nobody wants. There aren't as many women in engineering because in general women chose jobs that are more rewarding even if they're lower paying. I think we could all take a page from that philosophy, if we didn't live in a world where we were afraid of ending up on the bottom or without enough for essentials.
I can honestly only two about two years at a time in IT these days. I've embraced the Sabbatical (http://penguindreams.org/videos/taking-a-sabbatical/) even though I realize it's probably not sustainable long term, and also realizing my earnings in software give me this unique advantage, that most people simply don't have.
