In addition to the criticisms you address in your addendum (women's perspective is important, and "works or not" is too simplistic) consider this: by creating and perpetuating environment that is unfriendly to women, we are reducing the talent pool from which we draw programmers by sightly more than 50%. Even if there was no such thing as "a woman's perspective" (depends on the woman/man in question, I suppose), it is highly inefficient to limit your pool this way. In my opinion this is NOT, in fact, self-selection, not to the degree this imbalance is getting to. I've seen multiple times in the universities I've attended the difference between how things get explained to women and men -- many instructors and TAs, for example, will quickly and subconsciously drop into condescension and use things like cooking analogies when talking to female students. I've heard programmers of all talent levels apply gender-based value judgments to women attempting to enter the field. The worst are "women are bad at logic" -- and there are many who really believe that -- but "you are a woman so you will do the UI as you must be good at visual stuff" is also sexist.
Well, by creating and perpetuating an environment that is friendly to geeks, we are also increasing the talent pool from which we draw programmers among geeks.
Think for a second. If we're talking about adjusting the decor to market to a culture, what culture does it make sense for CS to target? Women? Athletes? Norwegians? Black Guys? It seems to me the alliance between geeks and programmers is quite natural.
You could redecorate the lounge in pink and put plushies everywhere. You might get a few more women who think, "Okay, I guess I could fit in here." You'll get a lot fewer geeks who think, "Thank God, I've finally come home."
Is that a positive tradeoff? Color me skeptical. Go found a Hacker Girls group, dominate the industry, prove me wrong. Until then, don't be engineering the culture.
What, there's no neutral environment that can be maintained? It's Star Trek and cans of Monster, or pink wallpaper and plushies? Come on. With any [insert subculture here]-friendly environment, there's a chance of alienation. We're not asking to adjust the decor to market to a culture, just the recognition that one that plays heavily into the "typical geek" stereotype can be off-putting to _any_ who don't fit.
If the decor puts one off, I suspect the culture will, too. If we change it to attract some specific group, we should be careful that we are not attracting people who will not be happy here.
"CS is mature field and as such will do better if it projects a professional, neutral image" is a hypothesis, nothing more. Prove it with a successful venture -- but I don't think you will. This is still a place where passion trumps professionalism, and an enforced culturally neutral environment isn't the best incubator for passion.
Personally, I think we'll do best by simply being ourselves. And letting the demographic chips fall where they may.
When a field is young and small, it needs to draw the best people from a small pool. "Geeks" worked for this in CS. As it ages, it needs a larger pool, but it can settle for people who are just good, not necessarily the best.
