>I tell young girls that computer science is a great profession for women. In my experience it is absolutely the closest I've seen to gender/race/religion neutral. People really do care more (on the whole) about the quality of your code. Maybe it's because we were ALL social misfits as kids *rbg*! Now that we're cool (heck even Volkswagen is using nerds in commercials), who knows? Maybe we'll get class conscious. I hope not.

One thing which took me away from high-school math lecturing and nailed me to the keyboard is the visibility of the result. While you're teaching, you never know if you've done anything useful, or even caused damage. OTOH, if an app doesn't work, you can't blame its previous teachers, its parents, the stupifying TV etc etc - it's all yours and you can blame yourself only (and M$, of course). And if it works - hey, it works right on and you see it, you don't have to wait five years to meet it on the street and get some "thanks, your classes helped me a lot".

This direct visibility of criteria is a probable cause of that neutrality you mention - you can't "sell fog" (local slang, but meaning should be obvious) for long. Either it works, or it doesn't. Either you solve it, or you don't. It works fast, it works slow. It crashes or it doesn't. These things matter much more than your college degree ... but, then, it's the degree that tweaks your mindset into thinking abstract enough, having the whole system in mind (instead of just the current snippet), inventing incredible shortcuts. One might say, that's intuition. It is, but what feeds it?