Hacker School founder here.

You're correct that Hacker School is not for people who have never programmed before. We are not directly working on helping people write their first line of code.

But we do help people, including many women, take the next step (e.g., we've had women come to HS as little as eight weeks after they wrote their first lines of code). Learning to code is a continuum (and something that takes place over many years), not a binary thing, and we help at just about every point except the first month or two.

We've also put a lot of work into fixing the leaky-pipeline problem. For instance, a female Stanford CS grad told us that Hacker School is why she decided to take a job as a programmer (she was planning not to go into programming after her experience at Stanford).

A few ways we've worked to support female programmers:

- We've built an environment that we think is more human-friendly (and therefore also more female-friendly) by having explicit social rules and norms that work to fight impostor syndrome and other fears and insecurities that get in the way of people's education (see: https://www.hackerschool.com/manual#sec-environment).

- We've awarded over $500,000 in grants for female programmers, which were generously funded by numerous companies including GitHub, Etsy, Dropbox, Palantir, Jane Street, Tapad, Tumblr, and others (note that Hacker School is 100% free for all students, so these grants are purely used for living expenses).

- As a result, Hacker School has been 30-45% women for our past five batches.

- We've helped numerous women (and men) move from being very beginner programmers working in other fields to being employed as programmers at excellent companies.

- We've helped experienced female programmers become even more awesome and progress personally and professionally.

Towards this last point, we're working on visibility and gender equality on the higher end. Here's a testimonial from a recent alumna who was already a pretty accomplished programmer when she came to Hacker School:

"Hacker School gave me a lot more confidence in my programming abilities. I wouldn't have even considered proposing a conference talk before Hacker School, but now I've spoken at LambdaJam, Strange Loop, and Strata this year! I had previously believed that contributing to open source was just too hard for me to do (big unfamiliar code base with no help!), but now I don't hesitate to make pull requests when I find minor bugs in software I use. The most important thing to me about attending is that you become part of this network of supportive, technical people. They connect you to interesting opportunities, help you when you ask, and support you when you're stretching to do something new."

I think increasing the number of female role models for women who don't yet code indirectly helps bring more women into the field. And additionally, many of our alumnae volunteer and mentor new female programmers outside of Hacker School, and many of them would not have been in a position to do so without the confidence, experience, and skills they acquired at Hacker School.

(Sorry if my response is all over the place; I'm supposed to be in a meeting now so this is a little rushed.)

Edit: Typos and formatting