Sorry I wasn't clear. I'm not saying anything permanent and immutable about either men/women or high/low level languages. Rather I'm thinking about the path by which people learn, and claiming that the way we teach has, by historical accident, favored a very narrow subset of personality types with specific initial cognitive strengths. The others might well have become just as good or better programmers in the end, but they drop out very close to step 1, because of a format ill-suited to them, before they have a chance to find out. When we say someone is a more visual or linguistic learner we aren't claiming they can't understand pictures or that their verbal GRE score is doomed to be low. We're just saying that they lean on one side/lobe of their brain more heavily than the others at the most initial stages of learning. I was speculating in similar vein.