I can see how someone might take offense, but at the same time accurate statements aren't always palatable.
I'm not sure your comparison is completely fair - you make it purely about deep technical problems vs 'easy' technical problems. My experience when I was a CS grad student was that the women there were interested in very difficult, important problems (particularly UX, for example), but weren't generally fascinated by, say, fundamental data structures research. Obviously there's notable counterexamples, and I am speaking in generalisations.
The reason I distance myself from the comment that sparked this discussion is not that I think it's wrong with respect to what men/women are, on average, interested in (it's hard to argue with basic statistics), but because I have no idea whether that's purely because of cultural influences or it's something more fundamental as well.
I'm not sure your comparison is completely fair - you make it purely about deep technical problems vs 'easy' technical problems. My experience when I was a CS grad student was that the women there were interested in very difficult, important problems (particularly UX, for example), but weren't generally fascinated by, say, fundamental data structures research. Obviously there's notable counterexamples, and I am speaking in generalisations.
The reason I distance myself from the comment that sparked this discussion is not that I think it's wrong with respect to what men/women are, on average, interested in (it's hard to argue with basic statistics), but because I have no idea whether that's purely because of cultural influences or it's something more fundamental as well.