This assumes that the “girls while in high school” weren’t also the “geeks.” On the contrary, my first friend to get a PhD is a girl who I played DnD with as a teenager.

Dungeons and Dragons seems pretty geeky to me. I mean, it’s not as geeky as playing a Werewolf in a pen and paper WoD game. She also played that with us too though.

Additionally, as someone who took AP CS and committed to my first open source project in high school while also being a starting defensive lineman on our football team, I think the tropes you’re mentioning don’t really apply. I also don’t have Aspbergers, and neither do a majority of the CS majors I knew.

We’re not all anti-social geeks. Computer science majors come from all walks of life — men and women, classical geeks and people who look like / were Abercrombie models, etc. Your ability to be a successful programmer is not a function of what you look like or where you come from. It’s a function of your passion and aptitude for mathematics, computer science, and their applications within programming.

As I wrote above, I take stark issue with the (frankly sexist) idea that being a certain gender somehow precludes you from being a good programmer. There’s no scientific evidence of this and women have historically held equal representation in the educational fields that produce professional software engineers.

Side nitpick: this isn’t about IT, this is about software engineering. There’s some issues there too, but that’s another post…