[jlees]

Yes; as a female programmer I find both of these kinds of things offputting, not encouraging.

Of course, if I were a female programmer who needed $5k and a kick in the pants to level up (e.g. if this had been around 2 years ago) I would probably jump at the chance, it's all a matter of perspective.

One of the issues is simply lack of good alternatives. How else would we encourage other female programmers to come out of the woodwork? Strong female leadership of the program would be a great start in my opinion. Women Who Code in San Francisco has a great, active, healthy Ruby study group going on which is arguably a mini-Hacker School. It's run by and for women, and there's been (as far as I know) zero issues getting enough people together for lively discussion. Plus, some of the newbies have explicitly said they preferred this all-women environment as they could ask the sort of questions they may self-censor elsewhere. Although that's hardly realistic of the real software engineering world - any full-time programmer has probably got to get used to working with men as well as women. :)