I'll start by saying that I agree that determination can overcome a late start, but familial and society pressures can be really difficult to overcome. My wife comes from a small southern town and wanted to be a writer and college professor, but was constantly ridiculed and chastized by teachers and family because she is a woman, so they said she should just be a nurse, or get married and be a housewife. Her family refused to help with her college education, and her dad and mom would tell her that she should quit her masters program to cook and clean while I was at work. She didn't listen to them, but a lot of her female cousins do, and just get stuck in shitty marriages and deadend jobs, never doing what they want.

Progamming is also manufactured to be a "male" profession. It used to be that researchers were males, and programming was considered womans work, like doing data entry. When companies like IBM discovered that the best programmers tended to be anti-social males, and that females tended to leave careers earlier to start a family, big tech companies focused all their recruitment on males until progamming became a "male" job. It's similar to how light beer used to be considered a womans drink, but beer companies started running ads showing football players and other masculine figures drinking it, and now it's acceptable for anyone to drink.