No this is nonsense. All you have to do is look at the ratios of men and women pursuing programs like computer science at CMU or MIT or whatever. You have perhaps an equal number of potentially qualified men and women, but the number of men going to the training to make them qualified far exceeds the number of women.

First, the current gender ratio for MIT course 6 is about 40% women and 60% men; if you're getting significantly more men than that, you're getting less qualified men from somewhere. (If you want to set your target ratio to be the MIT or CMU enrollment ratio instead of 50/50, I'd also support that, but those ratios are much closer to 50/50 than most companies are.)

Second, I went to MIT for computer science. I TA'd a bunch of classes. There were quite a few students who were barely scraping by, and they were mostly men. This might be politically incorrect to say, but it's true. The fact that you see 60/40 enrollment ratios at MIT doesn't mean that MIT has 1.5 times as many qualified men as women in course 6.

This doesn't tell you how many women are employed as programmers because its one school its one course and further it doesn't account for people that choose not to stay in the profession or whom started out in a practical manner rather than in school.

The National Girls Collaborative Project said that woman received 57% of all bachelors degrees but only 18% of computer science degrees http://ngcproject.org/statistics further some sources say the ultimate percentage of female software developers is even lower, as low as 8%.

Women are succeeding at school but they aren't going into computer science and a greater percentage of them are leaving.

Your belief that there are just as many female developers as men is utterly unfounded and without merit.

The fact that you interact with a lot of female developers doesn't change the actual numbers and the plural of anecdote isn't data.

We have one side complaining that we need to erase the gender gap in computer science, another scoffing and saying girls just don't like computers. It probably doesn't help either case to pretend that there is no gap.

No not necessarily. I threw those schools out as examples, but we'd have to actually go and analyze pretty much every computer science graduate at every school over the last 30 years, plus self-taught, and look at how they perform against some really good metric that we've devised.

If you're looking at current ratios only, then you're ignoring the past ratios over the last, say, 20-30 years which would have been significantly more male-dominated.

I don't think there is any evidence supporting the assertion that more male applicants = more unqualified applicants.