People tend to overlook the extent to which certain extreme activities — coding is an extreme activity — are hormonally driven. A combination of competitiveness and effectiveness — making things happen as opposed to preventing things from happening — rides on the Y chromosome. That’s not a bias; it’s a fact of life. (Or, at least, it could be, and a fair inquiry into the subject should not rule it out.)

I call it the Seabiscuit effect, the powerful urge not to be passed. Despite all the hoopla, horse racing is just each horse knowing that if there are no horses ahead of it in a pack, some other horse is going to be the mountain lion’s lunch. You see it on the road sometimes — slow drivers who speed up when you try to pass them. Something inside says “you’re going too slow for your own good.” These motivations are not overt, but they are deep.

Once we move out of coding into things that can be done in a mere sixty-hour week, women can compete. It’s not clear why they would want to whitewash that particular fence, but feminists have suffered from greener-grass syndrome since the 1970’s. Be that as it may, crypto coding is macho-nerdism at its purest, so it would be passing strange if it were not indulged in mostly by macho nerds.