That's great that you won't lower the bar for female applicants. Does that mean you will remove gender-identifying information from applications before evaluation/processing? that could be a cool way to do things and a great experiment...
I think it is a positive thing to discuss the structure of the scholarships, whether one agrees with it or not. Let's have an open discussion of it.
I would love to see alternative methods to involve women more in coding rather than just paying them.
The current method just 'feels wrong' to me.
I've also seen programming competitions with a 'top female programmer' award but no 'top male programmer' award, which also feels wrong, even if the intent comes from a very positive place.
I've spoken w/ several female developers/engineers and they were not excited about that kind of structure.
Yes; as a female programmer I find both of these kinds of things offputting, not encouraging.
Of course, if I were a female programmer who needed $5k and a kick in the pants to level up (e.g. if this had been around 2 years ago) I would probably jump at the chance, it's all a matter of perspective.
One of the issues is simply lack of good alternatives. How else would we encourage other female programmers to come out of the woodwork? Strong female leadership of the program would be a great start in my opinion. Women Who Code in San Francisco has a great, active, healthy Ruby study group going on which is arguably a mini-Hacker School. It's run by and for women, and there's been (as far as I know) zero issues getting enough people together for lively discussion. Plus, some of the newbies have explicitly said they preferred this all-women environment as they could ask the sort of questions they may self-censor elsewhere. Although that's hardly realistic of the real software engineering world - any full-time programmer has probably got to get used to working with men as well as women. :)
I object to a 'top female programmer' award not because of the lack of symmetry, but because it reeks of condescension.
These scholarships don't give an artificial pat-in-the-back to anyone. Women are helped in aspects unrelated to those in which applicants are evaluated.
In any event, I'm interested in hearing about the alternatives you, and the females you've spoken with, propose.
