Its related to the validity of your "observation", in that, if teaching to code is not a female-dominated activity, your "observation" that she chose a female-dominated activity is false.
> All engineers I know who worth their salt acquired their skills mostly through self-education and lot of practice, and the process was gender-independent
Oh, well, if we are going to do dueling anecdotes, all programmers (even if including that population within engineers is proper, there are a lot of engineers outside of that group, and I'm not talking about them, since this is about teaching coding, not teaching engineering in some general sense) worth their salt I know started by being taught by someone -- usually in school or a similar environment, though sometimes tutoring by a family member with experience in the field played a similar role -- at a fairly young age, and then, after developing an interest there, proceeded to choose further education -- both guided and autodidactic -- and lots of practice.