Well, the topic's been discussed at large on the WWW quite a bit. Our friend and fellow programmer Elizabeth, as a matter of fact, is a founding member of PHPWomen. She's often busy with that sort of thing these days, and probably doesn't write as much code as she used to. And, truth be told, we kind of miss her around here. 
Now, for the sake of discussion I'll be a little politically incorrect and point out that Mark Gungor says that men's brains are full of distinct, unconnected boxes and that some men are able to get into a box, let's say a "programmer box", and stay there for a big part of their day, most days, for years or a lifetime until they become "great" --- and women are wired differently and have all kinds of interconnections between their boxes, and many of them will probably not, even with a lifetime of effort, get as close to greatness as some of those men.
I tend to think he's right, for the most part; there's an extremely small percentage of men who will really do great things, and a much smaller percentage of women who do the same ... you've pointed out a few, and here's a longer list. Outside of that, generally speaking, most women are better than most men at doing "life"; whether or not they make better programmers in general and en masse is a matter that we will only discover if at some time in the future a large number of them decide they really WANT to do that and give less focus and energy to whatever other things they may have wanted to do.
