Is this sexism or is it just generalization? The vast majority of (white) women I've spoken to from tech companies are recruiters. And generalizations are very useful, in general. I doubt everyone thinks about how much coding knowledge a recruiter would have. At what point is it "sexist" (and, presumably, bad) to assume something given past experiences?
If ability is normally distributed for a given sex (and the mean of the ability of the same), then it is true that there would be more above-average male programmers than female programmers - just as there are more male programmers than female programmers at any skill level. If you are provided a skilled programmer, they are most likely male. And if you are provided any programmer, they are most likely male. However, If you pick a random male programmer and a random female programmer, the woman is just as likely to be a good coder as the man.
This means that if you are talking to an anonymous person online and they are a good coder, you should assume they are male (if you're going to assume anything). This does not work backwards - if you are talking to a female programmer and you do not know their coding ability, it would not be particularly likely that they are a poor coder.
You should not assume anything. Given any random coder, yes, the chance that they're male is larger than the chance that they are female, but the chance that they are female is still present, and if you jump to the wrong assumption too early, you end up effectively denying their existence, which is a big part of the problem.
Consider it from the point of view of the female coder: in every discussion, people will always start out assuming either that she is male or that she can't code. And it's up to her to either correct that (with all the crap that often comes with it) or not, and let people believe there are no female coders. Constantly running into people assuming you don't exist, can be very demotivating, and may lead her to look for a more welcoming job. Let's not do that anymore, okay?
I don't know if you meant for your argument to be applicable to Gayle, but if so... well, it is not applicable. People only knew her gender and assumed she was not skilled because of it.
They knew her gender and that she'd been talking code for an hour, and still assumed she was not skilled because of it. Some people are unbelievably dense.
The overly ambitious aren't expected to succeed, and the frivolous aren't seen as amounting to anything. What they both have in common is that - when they work - they come as surprises, and surprises means you've probably discovered something new.
Middle-of-the-ground companies are more predictable in a sense, less likely to stumble upon something new, and thus less likely to have a big impact.
You keep describing all aspects of this situation as hilarious. It's condescending and not adding anything to your argument. If you're trying to be persuasive, this isn't how you do it.
I don't think it's very impressive that 42% identified it as virtual currency - it does have "coin" in the name, and none of the other options had any relation to coins.
