I just don't understand. Here is my background.
Mom was a schizophrenic, my dad an alcoholic. We moved every year or so till I was 13. At that point we were stuck in a crummy motel in central California. This is in the early 80s. So when I was 16 I would walk into K-Mart and local appliance stores, and play around on the Commodore VIC 20's and later Commodore 64s. The local community college had a Commodore PET computer.
I had no money, no one to show me the ropes, not the best nor most stable education, parents that could not take care of themselves, so I had to watch over them and my 3 younger siblings. I taught myself Commodore Basic, then how to program in assembly. This consisted of writing a program on paper, looking up the opcodes, converting them from hex to decimal and then writing a loader that would POKE those values into memory and then do a SYS call to run the machine language program. From there I moved on to learn FORTH.
I will admit I am a male. But I had SO many disadvantages and yet I had a desire to learn how to program. Lets not forget wanting to learn how to do this classified me as a geek and meant I had to deal with lots of kids and peer pressure telling me there was something wrong with me on a fundamental level for engaging in such activities.
Exactly what is holding back any boy or girl in any halfway modern country from learning to program? "Boo Hoo, I would have to buck social norms to learn to program." Well it is not much of a dream or desire if that would stop you. "Boo Hoo, no one will teach me." There are thousands of hours of video on youtube, You can google out books on any programming language you want. If you don't like the teaching style of some video or book, try a different one.
The world in inherently "I don't give a damn". If you are a former heroin addict and you want to work in pharmacology, well you are going to have some hurdles to overcome. I can't tell you why any particular girl in junior high would decide they don't even want to know about computers. I can't tell you why a girl would decide against a career in programming. What I can tell you from pulling myself up in a world filled with welfare recipients who are just wanting a check is this. If you have to coddle and beg to get people into a program, and work hard at removing every barrier to their success, it hurts the drive and motivation for most people. Without it having some personal cost it has little value to them. Why work hard? If they don't do well, someone will step in and help them. If other things seem more important at the moment, walk away, the program will always welcome them back later with open arms.
TL;DR - If you are not willing to fight to become something because you want it, what outside program is really going to make a difference.