As Cecil says, this is obviously not one of his areas of expertise. Women are not excluded from monasteries because the monks hate or fear females. Rather, quite the opposite. Being a monk is all about deprivation and punishing oneself in an attempt to partially make up for one’s own sins. Hence the hair shirts, flagellations, nailing oneself to crosses, vows of silence, and chaining themselves up in tiny stone cells at night. All of these elements can be found in both male and female monastic orders. Life as a monk (or as a nun) is, in view of some orders, supposed to be miserable and hard so that nothing pleasurable distracts you from your devotion to God.
One of the most obvious ways of punishing or testing yourself is to deprive yourself of the company of the opposite sex. It isn’t that the monks hate women. It is that they hate themselves, their bodies, and their appetites and passions which they regard as corrupt and something to be suppressed. None of this, of course, has any Biblical basis except for vague references to hating yourself and loving God. Rather, the origins of such beliefs are found in Greek anti-materialist philosophies such as Stoicism. The idea is that God, being immaterial, is perfect. Therefore anything that gratifies the material body is evidence of imperfection.
Of course, the idea that God is immaterial arose from Stoicism as well – if being material is imperfect, then God must be immaterial, a concept not found in the Bible. The God of the Bible is quite material, giving rise to convoluted arguments that what the ancient prophets saw, touched, or heard could not have been a material body because God is immaterial. The argument is completely circular, but it has nothing to do with a hatred or distrust of women.
LINK TO COLUMN: Has anyone ever been killed by a falling piano or anvil? - The Straight Dope