Does that mean 'do the same thing to everyone'? 'Equal' treatment can easily result in very unequal effects. For instance, if you put a staircase at the door to the classroom, everyone is being treated equally if they are all expected to go up the same staircase, even though that means some people can go in and others (people with crutches/wheelchairs/etc) can't. For another example, lets say public schools started charging every student the exact same fee of $10,000 per year: that would be equal treatment with a clearly unequal outcome, because some students started out in families that can afford the fee, and some didn't.
Also, advocacy is not 'restricted to women' - but there are a lot of people who feel it is valuable to spend their time and effort on programs for women. There are also programs for black teenage boys, for inner city kids, probably for Africans (and African-Americans), that get less attention. If you feel that you can see some disadvantaged group you'd like to advocate for, go ahead. If you feel that you don't want to advocate for anyone, also go ahead. But it doesn't make sense to say that because you don't want to advocate for a group/any group, or think the effort is not worth it for you, then everyone else has to agree not to do it either. (And besides, in many cases obstacles for one group affect other groups, so it doesn't have to be duplication of effort but shared effort that can be applied more widely - eg: increasing awareness that not everybody is likely to have a USA traditional-geek-boy-in-highschool background helps interviewers learn to avoid questions that rely on an assumption of that shared background, which helps everyone with non-mainstream backgrounds like women, homeschooled kids, and foreigners).
From an economic perspective, having any group not participate in a valuable activity is a waste.
Is that correct?
You can theoretically have a distribution in which natural aptitude is equal, the distribution is skewed (more men than women) and it's not horribly inefficient, but I think if you spell out the assumptions of such a distribution, it's not especially realistic.
[1] https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7DMQCP3v6SZQUw1MnNWbXBUV3M/...
[2] http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-hug...
I think it's more of a class thing than a sex thing.
I'm Middle-Eastern (probably a smaller minority in the North-American tech scene compared to women), and while I (like most people) would certainly like to be surrounded by more of my brethren, it's not something I'd be comfortable spending resources on because the return on investment is so nebulous; diversity of views isn't automatically beneficial as is commonly assumed (an extreme example: you wouldn't expect a conservative big-corporation suit-wearing type to benefit a two-founder startup team).
It also seems a bit arrogant to tell people 'you should stop pursuing X and learn coding instead'. I wonder what would have happened had someone convinced Marie Curie, Jane Austen, or Hillary Clinton to go into programming instead of their respective fields (yes, I realise computers weren't invented in the case of the former two, but I hope you understand my point).
Finally, why is all this restricted to women only? Should I start advocating for Arabs? Africans? Inuit? It very quickly turns into a lot of duplicated effort. What's wrong with treating everyone equally? Not to mention that special-casing also reinforces the idea of 'us' and 'them', which I don't feel is productive either.
(throwaway because I don't want to be burned at the stake for publicly asking such questions)