I don't disagree at all with making programming welcoming to newbies, but if Magic the Gathering were something you were really interested in picking up, wouldn

I don't disagree at all with making programming welcoming to newbies, but if Magic the Gathering were something you were really interested in picking up, wouldn't you look around for a newbie-friendly group to join instead of just giving up on the game altogether? How many of us started tinkering with programming at a young age out of pure curiosity or interest in how cool it is, without any regards for how viable of a career path it is later in life? It seems most of us who did just that were boys. At some point you have to consider that there's perhaps an innate aggregate imbalance in how interested each gender is in programming, or in how much each gender responds to financial incentives -- which would explaian both why countries that are more gender equal and more prosperous tend to have a greater degree of gender imbalance in STEM.