For software I'd be less certain. It is well-known that being your own customer can be a powerful thing. It is not inconceivable that on average men and women may approach computing tasks somewhat differently, different goals, different metaphors, different preferred cognitive frameworks. And while I wouldn't necessarily expect them to be night and day different, as Apple shows getting those last tiny details nailed down can make a huge difference in how a product feels. If men even slightly prefer one thing and women slightly prefer another, an interface tuned for one or another slight difference could manifest as a huge impact on the pleasure of using the software.
Unfortunately, we are reduced to hypothesizing here because I am not aware of any amount of study on the topic. All I can say is that it is certainly conceivable and not necessarily unfair.
I would also suspect that if such differences exist they are likely to be as I said above more in the cognitive domain than in the more stereotypical appearance domain. I don't know per se that women will necessarily respond to a more rounded or pink or whatever stereotypical visual thing you might initially come up with, I suspect it'll be something more like men prefer more spatial organization, say for MP3s, whereas women may prefer more word-based and tagging organization, just to give one example. (And as you can see from that example there's going to be substantial overlap no matter what.) I'm not claiming this difference would even hold true, I offer it merely as an example of a cognitive preference.
The same arguments they used 50 years ago to keep woman out of frontline police work are still being used to keep woman out of combat.
Solution: all female battalions.
1. You can search for "amazon" on this page: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/16/magazine/the-rush-hours.ht...
"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world because they'd never expect it"
Needless to say, this idea has been thought of before, and people tend to look poorly on those who employ it.
But we've never seen 'setting up hundreds of your men to be slaughtered by your enemies' as a ridiculous strategy.
They're both ridiculous strategies, and yet we routinely deploy the one and are horrified at the other.
The 'children' bit is just a strawman, as are the 'buses' to use them as human shields. We're talking about prejudice here, and why just changing sex seems to have an effect over and beyond the competence angle.
Loss of 80% of the male population could be recovered fairly quickly, but loss of 80% of the females would be devastating for generations.
There's intermittent controversy over having women in combat. Countries that have tried it, incidentally, find that it's a liability because men tend to go apeshit protective when female soldiers get hurt.
"But I'll never see that because I think secretly deep down they know, gee, people are different, genders are different, and there's something about gender that just has this shaping force on our interests and talents."
If so, it may be helpful if more women were involved in software, because if women are different from men that probably extends to how they use software, and it would be good if software was better for women.