Mistakes we've made

I wouldn't call the word itself gendered. The problem is it appeals disproportionately to men (for a variety of cultural reasons described in the study).

It's not in Hacker School's interest to skew their appeal toward certain groups of people for no reason.

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!

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?

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.

Following up on something I said further down in this thread, I think the OP meant to use "gendered" in a gender studies sense and not in a linguistic sense. I don't fully understand the meaning of "gendered" in the gender studies sense, but I think the OP meant something like "systematically associated with gender in some way".

I think the intended meaning is basically that there are cultural differences around whether people tend to express their enthusiasm for programming as "love" or not, and so Hacker School now doubts this term is the best indicator of whether a prospective participant has the kind of enthusiasm they're looking for.

It's true that "gendered word" has a totally separate meaning in linguistics, where it refers to the phenomenon where a noun attracts or requires agreement according to a class that the noun is in. In many languages these words need not refer to animate beings' gender at all, and in some languages the noun classes are totally abstract and unrelated to masculinity or femininity, although there's some disagreement about this terminology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_classes#Noun_classes_vers...

Anyway, I suggest reading the OP as saying "cultural differences, often along gender lines, in whether people commonly describe their relationship with programming as love".