Basically, students who were previously exposed to CS education in high school excel in the introductory courses and often downplay the difficulty of the concepts. This is a very male-oriented perspective to take.
That's why programs like Girls Who Code try to address the gap earlier in the pipeline, since it's hard to fundamentally change the attitudes experienced individuals have in early CS courses. Other approaches some schools have tried include separating intro CS courses by prior experience.
Interestingly, studies have shown that women who stick with the CS curriculum perform as well their male counterparts in higher-level CS courses regardless of their initial exposure to CS, though women often think more poorly of their own abilities [2].
[1]: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cracking-the-code:-why-are... [2]: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3017771
I tend towards explanations of things that don't involve software developers being a unique, distinct species of cognitive entity, probably because (like you, I assume) I've spent a long career being a software developer and interacting with software developers.
I've only talked to 0.001% of programmers. But of them, in my experience, they tend to not look into your eyes when they talk to you. I’m a programmer, and I got a lot worse about eye contact around the same time I really got into programming. If the software developers you work with all make good eye contact, I'm sure I won't convince you that devs are any different, except to say --
All professions affect the body differently! My dad is a chef. He's got the rounded shoulders and the chubby fingers of a chef. Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, Gordon Ramsay -- they have all got the same "look," because they spent so much time hovering over a cutting board. My dad makes fun of my "skinny little fingers." What I'm saying is that programmers get the same kind of thing, but on their minds.
I don’t have any axe to grind. I’m as certain that women and men are equally as smart, as I am that programmers aren’t any smarter than any other white-collar profession. But something is making undergraduate women drop CS 101, but that didn't also make them drop pre-law in the 90s, or pre-med in the 80s, even in the face of CS compensation approximately doubling in the mid-late 2010s.
So, no, I don't think this works as an explanation any more than the idea that mathematics is somehow more subjective than computer science.