Well, one thing that could be done to change this would be to stop complaining about how one of the most meritocratic groups of people in the history of mankind is hostile, and get forking.
The code is thataway:
Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?
11–20 of 66 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?
#12Because many African languages, like Zulu, lack many linguistic distinctions sufficient to produce abstract concepts regarding Time (Past/Present) and Rules (Obligation/Promise). So descendents of Africans and people who are closer in proximity to practical use of those languages are seen as lacking subtlety, lacking conceptual grace, less capable of exploratory thought and critical intellectual maneuvering — notwith…
I was about to reply to the original post but thank-you for editing and clarifying a bit.
I have to say, though, even if your first paragraph is true, do you have any empirical evidence that native African language speakers have a harder time with computer science than native speakers of other non-English languages?
Secondly, when looking at those of African descent who were not specifically born and raised speaking an African language as their native language, there's no excuse besides both an ingrained societal disadvantage and perhaps a specific repulsion of black people by hacker culture.
As an example, in the USA 13.6% of Americans are African American (born in America and of African descent): (http://www.cdc.gov/minorityhealth/populations/REMP/black.htm...)
While the Computing Research Association reported that only 6.9% of the population of computer workers in the USA are black. (http://cra.org/resources/crn-archive-view-detail/expanding_t...)
Why is this group so under-represented? Existing societal disadvantages exist, but why are they so drastic for computer science - and what can we do to change that? That's what I'm asking.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for providing an example of what a bigot pretending to be smart sounds like. Now we all know what to look out for and combat.
Do you actually have an argument ? Do you actually have a contribution to make to the discussion ? Can you not see the claims being made here ? Can you actually argue one way or another, or is this discussion simply off-limits because anyone has any opinion whatsoever? Is it essential that I add "I read this from some place" ? I deal with this issue on a personal level; the least you can acknowledge is that it hurts…
relax, calm down down. Yes, so magically you managed to provoke a troll out of his slumber. Ignore him. Don't feed the troll.
That said, I am actually confused why someone would doubt your intellectual brilliance based on your mother-tongue :/
Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?
#14Seriously stop make these accusations without any proof. Where is the hostility? Just because there are a lot of white males™ doesn't mean there is hostility against other people.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?
#15http://learncodethehardway.org/ http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html There. That should do it--for our part, we'll try to be friendly. What more do you want? EDIT: http://railsgirls.com/ is actually pretty great to be fair.
Honestly, trying to be "friendly" isn't enough. I know nobody told you that it's your job to include others different than yourself, but personally, I feel it's a moral obligation, one that in the end increases productive output of the whole group.
I'll take a guess here and say that it's easier for a white males to find those resources you posted above. More whites have computers. Males are encouraged to explore more-so than women. I could go on and on.. it's not enough to just post something online and assume anyone with the gusto and the self-will can find it. We don't live in a utopia, less than 35% of the worlds population are active internet users.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?
#16Well, one thing that could be done to change this would be to stop complaining about how one of the most meritocratic groups of people in the history of mankind is hostile, and get forking. The code is thataway: https://github.com/
Your attitude is childish and short-sighted. When certain groups are -by default- disadvantaged compared to a dominant group, just saying "go do work like I did" - is meaningless.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?
#17http://learncodethehardway.org/ http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html There. That should do it--for our part, we'll try to be friendly. What more do you want? EDIT: http://railsgirls.com/ is actually pretty great to be fair.
Honestly, trying to be "friendly" isn't enough. I know nobody told you that it's your job to include others different than yourself, but personally, I feel it's a moral obligation, one that in the end increases productive output of the whole group. I'll take a guess here and say that it's easier for a white males to find those resources you posted above. More whites have computers. Males are encouraged to explore mor…
"easier for white males to find those resources you posted above"
Yes, the Google really cares what sex, gender, or race I am when I enter "learn programming".
There is a good point that you have to have access to machines in order to program them--then again, we'll ignore that most real computer science didn't have those machines when it was being developed. Even at that point, though, we need to be arguing "Hey, economic status should not be a barrier to entry for programming!" instead of "Hey, why don't you (male, white) folks open the clubhouse to everyone??"
There are enough traditional interests trying to bring those bigoted politics into our field that I'd rather we just focus on embracing and educating everyone, and let the inclusion issues sort themselves out.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?
#18Because many African languages, like Zulu, lack many linguistic distinctions sufficient to produce abstract concepts regarding Time (Past/Present) and Rules (Obligation/Promise). So descendents of Africans and people who are closer in proximity to practical use of those languages are seen as lacking subtlety, lacking conceptual grace, less capable of exploratory thought and critical intellectual maneuvering — notwith…
I was about to reply to the original post but thank-you for editing and clarifying a bit. I have to say, though, even if your first paragraph is true, do you have any empirical evidence that native African language speakers have a harder time with computer science than native speakers of other non-English languages? Secondly, when looking at those of African descent who were not specifically born and raised speaking…
> I have to say, though, even if your first paragraph is true, do you have any empirical evidence that native African language speakers have a harder time with computer science than native speakers of other non-English languages?
I'm largely speaking from Gedaliah Braun's "Racism, Guilt and Self-Deceit"[0] which speaks to the lack of "abstract entities" like the Future, the Past, and things like Obligations. It would be problematic to compare horizontally across languages (Spanish, French, English, Zulu) strictly in terms of their actual evolutionary maturity. But "English" as the Mother language of programming does introduce a vertical stricture; however, evolutionarily this stricture might be negligible since English's dominance is a societal pressure.
But it must be stated that even authors/researchers like George Lakoff to Pinker and onto Physicalists believe in things like "Language Centers" of the brain, or "mentalese". I am trying my best to speak in line with racialism while still acknowledging that all humans alive today exist with roughly the same Human Potential. Environment is important; and so, socioeconomic structures are important.
My assumption is Wittgensteinian, or let's just say Constructivist-about-Cognition: If your native language lacks linguistic world building capabilities (even a world of abstractions), programming will be tougher to grok. That said, those who have mastered the conventions of the Computational World (think Mathematical Objectivities) will be less welcoming to those who have not.
> Secondly, when looking at those of African descent who were not specifically born and raised speaking an African language as their native language, there's no excuse besides both an ingrained societal disadvantage and perhaps a specific repulsion of black people by hacker culture.
Yes, structural oppression is a real thing. I want to reiterate my point about MLK's biggest contribution to this debate: There's no equality until Blacks are able to fail at the same rate as Whites. Generalizing from this: There's no equality until all members of the species are able to fail at the same rate. This would be a true homeostatic structure of social norms.
> Why is this group so under-represented? Existing societal disadvantages exist, but why are they so drastic for computer science - and what can we do to change that? That's what I'm asking.
My immediate naive response? Computers are less economically viable in our country. Surely Blacks could roll and build their own. But where are the parts? Re-sale shops, pawn shops, etc. — and can there be an explicit aesthetic and obvious need to engage in hardware hacking of this sort when considering the aforementioned structural oppression?
[0]: http://www.amazon.com/Racism-Guilt-Self-Deceit-Gedaliah-Brau...
Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?
#19I'm commenting here as a response to a few posts that highlight my use of the word "hostile" - a somewhat inflammatory word but my time in the journalism world taught me to bait clicks.... c:
I wouldn't say -hostile- in the sense that there's an active conscious attempt to bar women and people of color from computer science, what I mean is that in the computer science world there's an underlying structure which is rapidly ejecting (as one example) women. A structure which is reducing the number of women in computer science every year. Let's look at reports from the Computing Research Association:
"In the United States, the number of women represented in undergraduate computer science education and the white-collar information technology workforce peaked in the mid-1980s, and has declined ever since. In 1984, 37.1% of Computer Science degrees were awarded to women; the percentage dropped to 29.9% in 1989-1990, and 26.7% in 1997-1998.[2] Figures from the Computing Research Association Taulbee Survey indicate that less than 12% of Computer Science bachelor's degrees were awarded to women at US PhD-granting institutions in 2010-11.[3]"
that's a quote from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing
which separately sources that paragraph to this study: http://www.cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_De...
Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?
#20Because many African languages, like Zulu, lack many linguistic distinctions sufficient to produce abstract concepts regarding Time (Past/Present) and Rules (Obligation/Promise). So descendents of Africans and people who are closer in proximity to practical use of those languages are seen as lacking subtlety, lacking conceptual grace, less capable of exploratory thought and critical intellectual maneuvering — notwith…
I was about to reply to the original post but thank-you for editing and clarifying a bit. I have to say, though, even if your first paragraph is true, do you have any empirical evidence that native African language speakers have a harder time with computer science than native speakers of other non-English languages? Secondly, when looking at those of African descent who were not specifically born and raised speaking…
Stop worrying about computer science specifically -- it's no different in engineering fields, and worse in the sciences. The reasons are not specific to CS.