I don't think it's a stretch though to call this "need-based aid for women" as Nick does in the post. The term is often used in this way by traditional educatio

I don't think it's a stretch though to call this "need-based aid for women" as Nick does in the post. The term is often used in this way by traditional educational institutions. I felt very fortunate to have the money lying around to take three months off of work to attend Hacker School, and I imagine there is a large pool of entirely qualified candidates who are financially unable to make this work (several of them posted on HN last time around). If we assume happening to have the money socked away and being a passionate hacker are a bit independent, then this need-based aid for women will increase the number of entirely qualified women who are able to attend. This is the right, least-artificial way to "[encourage] the community of women programmers to apply to Hacker School on their own," as is possible for an organization that doesn't happen to run a k-12 educational program or other major institutional social change agent. Although 5k for three months will modify the incentive structure, it's less than the average American income for that period, and your living expenses are going to increase if you're moving to NYC unless you're coming from Paris or similar. The only expected changes in the applicant pool are qualities I don't give a lick about, having to do with educational loans, having a job that can be done remotely for a few days a week, having money saved up, or personal financial conservatism (willingness to spend money on an unknown 3-month commitment). From what I've observed, Nick, Dave and Sonali are 100% about maintaining the excellent quality of people in their program, and I trust they will ensure that financial aid for women in no way undermines that. This hopefully will "artificially inflate" (what wouldn't be artificial? just waiting until the problem is solved by someone else?) the number of women applying, some of whom will be accepted and hopefully become better hackers, contributing in a small way to fixing the problem. Should more drastic steps be taken at a primary / secondary / college education level to attempt to "organically" grow the community of women programmers? Sure, and I'll continue to vote for elected officials who say they'll try to fix this as I always have, but in the meantime the Etsy scholarships are trying to make concrete progress growing that community right now.