Pretty sure that's only asked because they offer need-based scholarships to women. If you don't need the scholarship, you could probably leave that unchecked if

Pretty sure that's only asked because they offer need-based scholarships to women. If you don't need the scholarship, you could probably leave that unchecked if it makes you feel more comfortable. The blog post announcing the scholarships states explicitly that there's no other special treatment: "We're not going to lower the bar for female applicants. ... Women will be judged on the exact same scale as men. We think to do otherwise would be insulting and counterproductive. We care a lot about getting more women into Hacker School, but we won't do it at the expense of the quality of the batch." - from https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/1-summer-2012-applications-open https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/1-summer-2012-applications... I'm in the current Hacker School batch (which is awesome), and can vouch that the above seems 100% true. On the whole, as a group, the women are every bit as smart, as experienced, and doing as cool things as the guys are. As a result, no one has to think much about gender - we just hack. I hope your concerns don't hold you back from applying.