I really want to take your argument as a reason why it's 100% ok to phrase it exclusionary, but then I get a response like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34376163 and am reminded how that general tone will keep women away from our industry rather than attract them.

> that general tone will keep women away from our industry rather than attract them.

I don't "tones" have anything to do with it; in the 80s, Law, Accounting and Medicine[1] was absolutely dominated by men. If you think that introverted nerds are sexist, they have nothing on how doctors, lawyers and accountants were, nor how sexist the purchasers of those services were (often assuming that the men would be more competent).

And yet, today those professions have as many (if not more) females than males.

It's a stretch to think that general tone of an industry was responsible for females leaving the profession filled with introverted IT nerds and moving to high-powered and high-status executive professions.

[1] Other than nurses, in which men are still only a rounding error.

A long time ago this industry was built on women, the first programmers were women. It was a female dominated field. So what happened? The women stopped giving a fuck and the men took over.

The industry has plenty of attractive qualities for any sex: Good money, good jobs. These far outweigh the occasional toxic male who is easily put down these days. If women aren’t signing up, then maybe they just don’t care about computers as badly as people want them to.