[bencollier49]

You know, as regards young female hackers - and reflecting on what sustained me as a boy - there is some element of self-reinforcement going on. If we work on the basis that it's more common for boys to show an early interest (for whatever reason), then their overwhelmingly same-sex friends are more likely to be showing an interest, and that's more likely to lead to an obsession of the type which turns one into a "hacker".

But equally, having tutored programming in my late teens, the boys were self-starters whose parents recognised that they had no friends who were interested, so perhaps this argument is not quite right. They seemed like they were on the spectrum a bit.