You're still just cherry-picking. It's more sophisticated cherry-picking but what you are not doing is taking a balanced cross-section of people with a varying array of personality and cognitive traits and then tracing them through life/career decisions to see where they end up and why.
Software development is a great career. But it's just a career. It's not a prize. It's not some kind of gift handed out to a privileged elite. We need to stop treating it that way.