>Given the gender skew amongst high-school programmers, this is almost equivalent to saying "women should not be starting a CS degree".
Somewhat related to your point, letting novice programmers get CS degrees doesn't fix the problem because there is still a performance gap which results in a hiring gap. If there is problem with demographics having unequal experiences, while colleges can be tweaked to keep the inequality from growing, it is far better to fix it where it comes from.
It's far simpler to say than do, but our society needs to find why the gender skew in high school programmers happens and stop it.
Somewhat related to your point, letting novice programmers get CS degrees doesn't fix the problem because there is still a performance gap which results in a hiring gap. If there is problem with demographics having unequal experiences, while colleges can be tweaked to keep the inequality from growing, it is far better to fix it where it comes from.
It's far simpler to say than do, but our society needs to find why the gender skew in high school programmers happens and stop it.