Mistakes we've made (opens in new tab)

It would be even better if this was about more than gender. I am not one of the gender inequity deniers in this industry and I don't see anything wrong with valuing a better gender balance in the industry, in fact I think it's a good thing.

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?

That doesn't imply that "love" is a gendered word, it implies that males use the word more.

I know women, programmers, who are in love with programming. Hell they're more in love with programming even maybe than I am. We have wonderful arguments about SOLID, and CQRS and event-sourcing and queues, and pipes, and job servers.

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.

The original post is using "gendered" in a non-linguistic sense (with a meaning something like '[disproportionately] associated with a particular gender'). There are definitely adjectives and nouns that have such a strong gender connotation that they're used almost exclusively to refer to people of one gender, even though gender isn't necessarily part of their definition. (Common examples in English are "feisty", "perky", "bitchy", and "voluptuous", although there are others.) It seems quite possible to imagine verbs entering this category, so that they'd be used in practice almost exclusively with subjects of one gender, though I don't know of an example in English.

I think the original post's use of "gendered" is actually weaker than this phenomenon because it says that "love (one's activity or profession)" is used much more by men than by women, not necessarily that it's acquired a connotation for listeners that the subject is male. (So the Hacker School administrators' concern is that women tend not to describe themselves as "loving programming", not that a listener hearing that "X loves programming" will assume that X is a man.) I guess I just mean to suggest that it's quite possible to imagine a verb also acquiring such a connotation for listeners, even if this one hasn't in this case.

Getting back to the linguistic question of whether verbs can have gender, I think that duco in the sense of 'take (a wife)' in Latin can only be applied to a man's act of marrying a woman, and not to a woman's act of marrying a man, but that might be more a matter of ancient Roman legal understanding of marriage and so could be closer to your example of "impregnate" than to the original post's sense, which is meant to refer more to connotations than to grammatical possibility or impossibility.

There actually are languages that have genders for verbs, where gender is a feature for which verbs are inflected and where verbs must agree with their subject in gender as well as, say, number. For instance, in Hebrew if a male subject loves something, the verb form is אוֹהֵב ohev, whereas when a female subject loves something, the verb form is אוֹהֵבֵת ohevet. Arabic also has gender-marked verb forms that agree with the grammatical gender of the subject. This has no connection to the way the original post uses the term, though!

Sorry for the late reply, I was temperately banned after my comment got downvoted twice.

> Also, while most people who come to Hacker School understand our use of hacker, many of their families and friends don't. And that's caused Hacker Schoolers a surprising amount of annoyance ("What do you mean you're quitting your job and moving to New York for Hacker School?!")

That's a really great point, I hadn't though of that. I'm still glad you chose that name though, if you hadn't I probably wouldn't have been interested enough to read through your website and ultimately decide to apply in the future.

If you were to re-make Hacker School with the knowledge you have now, what would you name it?

Thanks for link. It would be great to add that to future emails so people understand the use of a generic email.

Impressed as always!