I think the desire to to figure out where a level playing field can be built within a neighborhood of aptitudes. And to be fair to a process of refinement for that goal, some problems can't be solved before you have them. Like a business plan, the initial draft is just a guess, and I think we can all agree that it's a heretofore unsolved problem, the gender thing.
Also true for large coding projects. At some point, you have to identify the components that will need to be built and portion them off into approachable tasks. In this case, the first task is agreeing on the 'heretofore unsolved problem' -- that hasn't happened yet.
Discerning invested participants from trolls might help.
