But again, this is completely the wrong rabbit hole in the context of this discussion. It has nothing to do with the fact that men and women have equal capacity to do any mental work.
But maybe I read too much into the wording, and regardless I agree it's a rabbithole w.r.t. programming jobs so I acquiesce.
You are the one digging the wrong rabbit hole here.
But if you mean 'innate ability to reach a higher level', then are you implying that women innately are incapable of climbing to the same senior engineering positions as men, and no amount of training or education will change that?
Just trying to understand.
Lets take GPA for example. Do you think 2 people getting a GPA of 3.0 are of the exact same knowledge level ? Is it possible that one has the equivalent score of 3.13 and the other has 2.87 and that they were both normalized to 3 ? Same thing with the jobs. Maybe you see this at your job too. There are going to be people more skilled at what you do and people less skilled at what you do but still pulling the same salary. The salary you earn is an approximate estimate of your skill measure but not an measure of your exact skill.
There are women that are just as good marines as men, and there are women that are just as physically fit as men. However, despite this, it's entirely possible that statistically fewer women pass. You haven't denied this empirical data nor tried to argue that it is purely for cultural reasons that fewer women can pass these physical fitness tests. So it's possible that fewer women end up in a profession for purely biological reasons, you are conceding?
Similarly, it's possible that there are women (many women) who are just as good or better programmers than many men, and enjoy it just as much and are equally capable. But, that when you look at the averages, fewer women prefer it. Then, part of that relative difference could be explained by biological factors.
Again, this is not a complicated argument. There's no evidence to suggest that biological factors account for 100% of the gender gap in developers but there's also not much evidence to suggest that any factor accounts for 100% of the gap. It's likely to be a combination of factors, and we should try to honestly understand how big a role each one plays.
Do any differences ever make a difference in performance? Like a particular tribe of Kenyans utterly dominate distance running events, west Africans utterly dominate sprinting events what accounts for those differences?
What's lost in all this and that I have seen zero evidence presented for is that I am in no way convinced that the population groups that are "under-represented" as software professionals have much interest in being software professionals.
Whatever differences in capacity that may exist among groups the differences in interests are surely just as big or bigger.
Taking your example of say, sprinting - the outcome is to cross the line 100m down the track. I would say pretty much everyone is capable of doing that one way or another. When you apply a performance lense that says you need to do it in X seconds, then you're saying "we only want our definition of the best to do this task".
Bringing it back to the workplace, a lot of jobs in tech (and other sectors too), suffer from trying to apply a one size fits all performance lense over the actual outcomes. "Sure this person did their job, but did they do these metrics that we've decided we value". A large part of diversity is acknowledging that the lense that you view people through is not going to apply to everyone, and accepting that you need to focus on the outcomes.
I agree with yawaramin as well, happy employees are better performing employees, and can speak from experience with working at places that value individuality versus strict top down directing of behaviour, that the companies with that flexibility perform much better, at less cost, with much happier employees.
It's not about lowering expectations, it's about changing how you look at them - look at the outcomes and measure those, not the journey to achieve them. When you start focusing on outcomes as teams, you open the door to diversity, which leads to diversifying your ideas and solutions to problems - ultimately leading to better outcomes.