Some of the issues I have seen with women in programming are these:
1. Lack of role models. On the average you see very few female programmers who have stuck with it for more than 10 years. Given the small number, it is hard to find mentors/friends you want to hang out with and learn from.
The other important thing is, you want to have everything a great male programmer wants to have, plus what you were raised to aspire to have as a woman. These things are sometimes off on tangents, and that makes it hard to reconcile.
2. Being mentored out of programming. On the average a female programmer is usually better at being social than her male counterparts. This makes them more obvious targets, from a manager's perspective, to be groomed into managers or product managers.
A common problem seems to be that most engineering managers of either gender have no idea how to manage women. So the women who get promoted to manage engineering teams pick up the same skills and tend to behave very much like the managers they had worked with in the past.
3. Not working on personal projects. Never in any of the personal (non-work, non-school) programming projects, have I ever worked with a female programmer. This is a very common thing to do with good male programmers. But very rarely done by women outside of school/work. And is pretty much the best way to improve your skills as a programmer.
4. Negative stereotyping. Let's say you get an intern for the summer. If it's a male programmer, the default assumption always is he is a good programmer and would be fine with setting up his own machine, RAID, whatnot. But a female programmer has to prove she can do each thing, before someone will accept that she can. This probably means, you will not get a "harder" problem to solve at the very beginning of your career.
5. Different motivations. Most of the exceptional male programmers I know are motivated by completely different things than the female programmers I know. Women tend to look at programming as a way to solve a certain problem - if the problem is interesting, they will work to get it done. Men, while being motivated by the problem also seem to enjoy the mechanics of how the program works. They are just as excited about additional L1 cache, a 13% performance/memory improvement or the number of pipelines in the latest graphics processor than women are.
To understand this, look at the most successful startups started by women and the ones started by men.
I have put together and pulled apart every bit of a computer at least a thousand times, at work. But I did not really go and buy parts to put together a PC at home. I bought a Macbook :P
6. Social Pressure. I will probably get yelled out of the forum for saying this. But, being a female programmer does not make you the most attractive thing in the universe. You have to be attractive despite the fact, if you are, at all.
Wealth, social stature, etc., work wonders for a male programmer. If you are not socially accepted in high school, you can work really hard and make it as an ubergeek and the trappings that come along with it will make you attractive. Not really how it works for women.
It is really cool to be hi-5ed for debugging something and being told "You are the man!". But the thrill of that gets old pretty soon.
7. Wanting to fit in with the female population in general. When you spend so much time in places that have less than 10% women, it warps your perspective of the world. Most female programmers have probably been in such a setting since they were in their teens (highschool, college, grad school, jobs etc). You tend to end up having way more male friends, and slowly stop doing things most women enjoy. You are militantly trying to be more ungirly than you are really comfortable with, at least for the first few years as a programmer. (On the flip side, this does make it really amazing to meet other female programmers.)
I must also add:
I got my first computer in 4th grade. Punched in BASIC to get pretty pixels on the screen etc. But that did not get me the kind of high some other people I know seemed to have gotten out of it.
Also, I was raised in a culture where being geeky was not the worst thing in the world. But still, I did not I make up my mind to be a programmer until I was 17 - primarily motivated by Bill Gates, wanting to start a company. CS has the lowest barrier if you want to start your own business, compared to many other fields.
The age of first exposure to programming is not such a big deal. I have met guys who pick up their first programming language at 18 and were doing amazing things with it in a year or two.
To be clear, the internet, has changed everything. The way people learn to program and find friends. So a lot of things would be very different for a young girl starting out right now.
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