The page belongs to an author five years dead and records the remarks made at a closed conference eight years ago. Some things you just have to take without hypertext.

It's also a mistake to contradict generalities with cherry-picked statistics. Your link is to "the forgotten female programmers who created modern tech" - the argument isn't that women are incapable of anything men are capable of, the argument is that broad trends highlight a handful of women in a sea of dudes. Programming actually highlights the point: I don't know if you've ever tried knitting or weaving, but it's a highly mathematical, numerically intensive process involving manual dexterity and memory. Anyone who can knit kicks ass at arithmetic, bare minimum, and definitely has the necessary skills for coding. Yet the leap from weaving to computing? From a dude.

Just to be clear: Neither Baumeister nor myself are arguing that women can't code, that a woman couldn't have invented the Jacquard loom. The argument is that given a loom, men will have an easier time getting rich off of it.

Certainly today anybody of any gender can start a business, and if anything there are some set-asides and advantages to help women do so. There are no hidden obstacles or blocks, and that’s shown by the fact that women start more businesses than men. But the women are content to stay small, such as operating a part-time business out of the spare bedroom, making a little extra money for the family. They don’t seem driven to build these up into giant corporations. There are some exceptions, of course, but there is a big difference on average.

So let's talk about the section that bothers you the most.

There's nothing genius about forceps. I reckon any midwife with access to a forge could have come up with forceps. A woman who invented forceps would likely have made herself a pair and used them to save the lives of the mothers under her care.

Peter Chamberlin, on the other hand, fled Paris under threat of death by the Medicis, went to medical school and was such a wild card that he went to prison, then got himself released under royal decree to be the Queens obstetrician. All because he invented a gadget his family leveraged in secret for 200 years before Elizabeth Blackwell was even born. Yay Semmelweis, boo Victorian England, but the period you're talking about women weren't allowed to vote or own property, let alone contribute to medical science. And the whole point of the discussion is not that women don't contribute, it's that the overwhelming course of history is deeply oppressive to women and either all men are evil dicks or there's a biological, evolutionary reason for the exclusion of females from the structures of society. Say what you will about patriarchy - it's universal among cultures that have invented, say, writing.

You can find outliers in any statistical study. The argument of the author is that the women who have succeeded are even greater outliers than the men who have succeeded because numerically, the female gender produces fewer outliers.