>I agree that it seems more boys than girls do things like write mods for games.
That was a bad example on my part. I wasn't trying to suggest that "most boys mod games" or anything like that, but rather that more "normal" boys than girls are interested in and capable of basic internet/computer-related things like installing a torrent client and grabbing some stuff off of The Pirate Bay, or following a "how 2 jailbreak your iPhone" tutorial.
I'll trust your experience, I'm probably overestimating the competence of the average middle-class twentysomething. To be clear, however, I had even younger kids in mind, early 20s at the latest, that you may not have ever worked with before (being ambiguous about my age is a habit I picked up as a kid pretending to be an adult on the internet, sorry about that). If you consider that PCs and the internet really took off in the middle class in the late 90s/early 2000s, then it's much more likely that someone around 20 now would have had an internet-connected personal computer all to their lonesome since elementary school, while those from in their later 20s probably would not have had one until high school or even college. Likewise, I didn't have a feature phone, let alone a smartphone, until I was in high school, so I just don't really give much of a damn about them, whereas they mean the world to kids that have had them since elementary school.
It's interesting you brought up gaming in your earlier post, as I was just talking about this with my brother.
Most of my programming friends and I (many of whom are women, by the way) first learned to use the command line for PC games. Same reason I first took apart a computer and put it back together. Most kids, then and now, don't play pc games. Back then, most kids didn't play video games at all. If they did, it was a console. That hasn't changed.
You can have an internet connected computer your whole life and never open it up. I'd say the vast majority of people fall into this category. Things work, and when they break, you take them to someone that can fix them for you. The people that aren't like that are usually in my experience people that want to boost performance on their machine, whether it's a car or a computer.
Script kiddies aren't hackers. What you've just described, using a jailbroken phone, downloading tons of apps - that's using a product another person developed.
That was a bad example on my part. I wasn't trying to suggest that "most boys mod games" or anything like that, but rather that more "normal" boys than girls are interested in and capable of basic internet/computer-related things like installing a torrent client and grabbing some stuff off of The Pirate Bay, or following a "how 2 jailbreak your iPhone" tutorial.
I'll trust your experience, I'm probably overestimating the competence of the average middle-class twentysomething. To be clear, however, I had even younger kids in mind, early 20s at the latest, that you may not have ever worked with before (being ambiguous about my age is a habit I picked up as a kid pretending to be an adult on the internet, sorry about that). If you consider that PCs and the internet really took off in the middle class in the late 90s/early 2000s, then it's much more likely that someone around 20 now would have had an internet-connected personal computer all to their lonesome since elementary school, while those from in their later 20s probably would not have had one until high school or even college. Likewise, I didn't have a feature phone, let alone a smartphone, until I was in high school, so I just don't really give much of a damn about them, whereas they mean the world to kids that have had them since elementary school.