Cynical-C has done a few of these, where he posts one star reviews of commonly accepted "greats". His list includes not only books, but also movies like Jaws, and albums like Revolver. Amusing stuff.

It's a combination of many reasons (some covered here already), and recently there were studies released that showed a few.

The first is from a month or so ago, and found that while both boys and girls are lacking in math compared to the rest of the world, girls are much harder hit.

In elementary school, girls do as well as or better in math than boys. In middle school, Mertz and her colleagues suggest, girls with an inclination for math begin to lose interest and fall behind, mostly due to peer pressure and societal expectations. Throughout middle and high school, social stigma and lack of appropriately challenging educational opportunities for the mathematically precocious becomes a hard reality in most American schools. Consequently, gifted girls, even more so than boys, often camouflage their mathematical talent to fit in well with their peers.

It falls back on the whole societal stereotype that math, and by extension science, isn't cool and certainly not cool if a girl does it.

As for women leaving, The Athena Factor is a study to read. They researchers found that hostility of the workplace culture is the most important factor driving women out, with "63% of women in science, engineering and technology have experienced sexual harassment." The whole thing is worth a read, and can give some insight into why women don't stick around in IT or any science career.

I'm lucky in that I've worked in the public sector for most of my IT career, and I've not seen as much as what the study found.

The Digital Archive Project is still going strong.