(non-CS) engineer friends ... upon hitting that edit
button,
basically went "Gak! No way!"
Wikitext is simpler than what phototypesetter operators in the
1960s-1990s had to deal with, and they had a much better gender
balance.
Wikitext resitricts editing to pretty much only
"computer science
professionals, highly computer-literate professionals (which excludes
most of Academia -- have you ever done IT support for a university?),
and westerners with enough leisure time to learn it the hard way".
There are abundant counter-examples.
... selects strongly against women.
Where is the evidence that women have more difficulty understanding
wikitext than men?