Careful, this could be similar to saying that it's not advantageous to have mathematics be a field where people who prove non-trivial theorems in high school do better in university courses.
Some people have prior background or a special talent and that's not a bad thing. It's just important that this is also not required to succeed in the given field.
I personally couldn't disagree more, but luckily in this case there is no need to speculate since we have an almost perfect natural experiment available. Virtually all of the other branches of engineering - including the ones which you're presumably basing this idea on - have exactly the same gender imbalance issues as software engineering.
Sample from one institution: http://web.archive.org/web/20080611075012/http://www.eng.uwa.... Class sizes are around 80-100 except for environmental and geological which are half to third of that.
I spent 10 years as a land surveyor and GIS cartographer, and during that entire time I met one (!) woman surveyor. CE is notorious for this.
So after getting your degree you can only be a CEng by working for an existing CEng in a company that certifies CEngs.
Sounds like a perfect way of weeding out all those women who do pick a CS degree. Unless all traditional big-iron firms are looking to hire more women, and all 60-something male senior engineers are really clamoring for more women to certify ?
It would be rare for a new engineering grad to work under a 60-year-old engineer, typically the supervisors are much younger.
Perhaps women are attracted to public sector-type jobs, for some values of "public sector type", rather than a specific engineering discipline. How will that change the gender ratios question?
I think that it is important to make software engineering a codified, professional field.
It is not an advantage to have programming be a field where the bragging rights go to those who put together a D&D weather generator in a true Mini-computer in Middle School.
Rather, it is much better to have software engineering be something you can enter in college if you a good mastery of abstract thinking.
I would further mention that it helps programming as a professional if a good programmer is a generalist who knows how to get any required details. The process of becoming a generalist is entirely possible if you enter the software engineering field in college. Essentially, the point is for a person learn good process and let the rest take of itself.
Oppositely, if programmers are merely hackers, geeks or idiot-savants, who accumulate massive amounts of details concerning systems, languages and libraries in a near-autistic fashion, then not only will programming remain a ghetto but it will be a poorly paid, miserably ghetto.