Reelya:
Ah, there we go. I'm terribly sorry--I think I've conflated you with somebody else. I really, honestly feel bad about it.
Why I'd buck my social-pervasive "girl" social programming? In my family, things were very different. First of all, my family is matriarchal. Second of all, my mother refused that Disney be in the house. I didn't grow up with the typical female roles in fiction--I mostly grew up on Pippi Longstocking, Encyclopedia Brown, Animorphs, and The Wizard of Oz, all of which were full of girls that had adventures; what this means is that pretty much all sexism was imported from other children, which meant that I was subjected to a lot less of it in my younger years than most people. In my family, how you look isn't anywhere near as important as how deeply you can see; my extended family is cemented together by group culture and puts a high value on witty humor, storytelling, artistic talent, and a refusal of consumerism. Also personal, enduring toughness, combined with a refusal of violence.
Almost no one wears any makeup. No one reads fashion magazines or celebrity news, and we mostly don't watch all that much TV. The women wear their hair long for a large period of their lives (mine was down to my calves until 19) with ankle-length skirts, leather boots (or barefoot) and blouses buttoned up past the collarbone. In this get-up they haul cement, build houses and fencing, and repair cars. Compared to mom, my dad is a wuss. Our family mottos are "Get mad and get the job done" and "Who promised you a rose garden?" The house my mother and uncles built is called "Contra Viento," which means "against the wind."
So when I decided I was going to do things like walk 10 miles barefoot over volcanic rock at the age of seven, my parents just said "carry your shoes" and we set off. When my father was out of the country and we were evicted, my mother and I moved the entire house ourselves. Helping out with "guy stuff" physical labor is just the way it is. I spent my childhood helping to dig gardens and climbing mountains.
Why did no one else program? Because within this culture, why do it with a computer when you can do it with pencil and paper? What's so great about making a computer do something you already know how to do? I only ended up doing computer stuff at all because I recognized it was something I didn't know anything about (and a source of neat problems to solve), and I really, really like games. The rest of the family isn't quite as addicted to problem-solving as I am.