(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?