I agree with others that the author's experience may not be as significant to the wider discussion of female programmers as she thinks it is. I'm a developer n

I agree with others that the author's experience may not be as significant to the wider discussion of female programmers as she thinks it is. I'm a developer now; I could not have made it through a Computer Science major in college. I'd always been drawn to technology and my dad highly encouraged me to pursue IT, but I just didn't find CS itself interesting to me. I was highly, highly averse to the idea of "lone work on exercises that seemed to have little application to the real world, the expectation that coursework required coding and debugging for hours after school threatened my ability to excel in other classes or in varsity sports". Maybe it is in fact a particularly "male" engineer thing to want to focus only on excelling at one's trade while neglecting everything else in one's life. I was not like that. So I studied Neuroscience and Psychology because they felt more applicable and "hands-on". I dissected cadavers, ran behavioral tests on rats, crunched data. Then later I discovered that I really did enjoy programming itself; I realized I loved building things. Now I feel like I could sit through dry lectures on fundamental and complex CS topics that my younger self would find boring. It sounds like the author liked building things too. Maybe if her program had been focused on that instead of other things, she would have felt more motivated. To me, this seems like a classic case of someone deciding that they're simply not good at math because they were taught it the wrong way or weren't shown why it was relevant.