(That's obviously greatly simplified, but that's the gist of it.)
But love is such a loaded, unclear term. Why is it not good enough for someone to enjoy programming and have an intellectual curiosity about programming? To me that sounds like perfectly reasonable criteria to identify people who are a good fit for 3 months focused on programming. But you're basically saying that if it weren't for this gender inequity it would be totally reasonable to continue searching for a love of programming. It's hard enough for me to say I love my family and yet it was thought of as a good requirement to expect people to love programming to be qualified to participate in 3 months of programming in a community environment?
In fact, the alum we quote as an example of the trouble with the word love is male:
We used to say applicants must "love" programming, but we've learned that was a mistake. While it sounds good, it doesn't actually describe what we care about, and it was dissuading qualified people from applying.
In fact, many of our best students have said they almost didn't apply because they worried they didn't love programming enough. Hacker School alum David Peter expressed this fear perfectly:
One of the questions in the interview was, "Do you love programming?"
I said yes, because I loved it more than most people I knew.
But was it love? I enjoyed writing and drawing equally, if not more.
After Hacker School, I'm revisiting these hobbies. Programming wasn't my first love."*For me, it's not so much programming, but the power it gives me. The capabilities that programming gives me. I can sure talk about static vs dynamic typing, but I'm going back again to things like power.
Programming the same thing over and over again sounds kind of boring, but making something new sounds grand!
Interestingly, I'd never thought about that previously but as soon as I saw a reference to it I realized that I'd much less frequently seen women use the term in that context (with regard to vocational activities) compared to men, so, while I don't know that different word usage by gender is really the issue, I see that it certainly could be, and that it makes sense to avoid that usage in the context Hacker School was using it.
Hacking is a culture, not a job description, and in my experience, singleminded dedication to programming is not an indicator of ability. So I guess the real problem with "Hacker School" is that it's a programming school not a hacker school. A hacker (programming) school could never say anything like "you don't have to love programming" because being a hacker is pretty much defined by loving it.
It's not in Hacker School's interest to skew their appeal toward certain groups of people for no reason.
Unfortunately, the lead time for solving the root cause is at least 1 generation. We will have to use stopgap solutions until then.
I think the intended meaning is basically that there are cultural differences around whether people tend to express their enthusiasm for programming as "love" or not, and so Hacker School now doubts this term is the best indicator of whether a prospective participant has the kind of enthusiasm they're looking for.
It's true that "gendered word" has a totally separate meaning in linguistics, where it refers to the phenomenon where a noun attracts or requires agreement according to a class that the noun is in. In many languages these words need not refer to animate beings' gender at all, and in some languages the noun classes are totally abstract and unrelated to masculinity or femininity, although there's some disagreement about this terminology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_classes#Noun_classes_vers...
Anyway, I suggest reading the OP as saying "cultural differences, often along gender lines, in whether people commonly describe their relationship with programming as love".
Loving your job isn't exclusive to men.
Anti-sexism is reaching a different type of extreme, where certainly we should be hiring women who don't love their job, just so we're not sexist?
I know where to draw the line. And I'm drawing it before that.
Two things: 1) "I know people" is anecdote, it doesn't say anything about broad social trend. 2) The issue isn't whether women are as likely to share the feeling men call "love" toward programming, its whether women who have that feeling are as likely to call it "love".