Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

This isn't completely representative of the industry, because it's measuring academic behavior, not professional behavior. So the problem is occurring not in the "industry", but rather in high school and early college, when students are being directed toward majors. How do we address it there? How do we convince girls going into college and African-American students to pursue programming as a profession?

This is all the more maddening to me because I think computing as a profession and as a community is far less hostile in terms of race and gender than most career paths. The meritocracy, while hardly the libertarian paradise its beneficiaries like to imagine it is, is still quite real. It's very easy to create a situation where you are truly measured by the quality of your work.

So rather than asking why the programming profession is hostile to women and minorities, you should be asking why society is hostile to women and minorities entering the profession in the first place.

Those pages talk about self-segregation, which is not something you can realistically blame on any group. Every group does this.

Frankly I find this pretty weak. If you want offensive pieces of known science relating to race, why not go with Darwin's "island species", which basically says that there are 2 ways evolution can go:

1) there are barriers (artificial or not) between races. At this point races slowly evolve into species (at which point they fully diverge). Racism is theorized to be one such barrier.

You might think the above is a bad situation ... until you think about the only alternative.

2) There are no barriers between races. At this point races are a temporary phenomenon : all but one race will die out. Now you might think that if you put 2 races of animal together the surviving group will be a mixed form, however that appears not to be the case. The result of mixing 2 races, is that one only a single race survives.

The reason is simple. Take "most blacks" genetic makeup in the united states. There was a period where people preferentially had kids with white people. This has resulted in that the large majority of african americans have a number of generations which were mixed-black + white person in their ancestry, increasing the ratio of white:african genes. The problem is what happens in a couple where a mixed + white marriage is in both parents' ancestry. When 2 second-generation mixed black marry, the odds are very good that the child will have more indo-european genes and less african ones than either of their parents. This is already plainly visible on the street in the US, if you've been to Africa. Most african americans lack several typical black characteristics (large lips, large color change between front and back of the hand, and the individual hairs on the skin are much thicker, but there are less of them) and in more internal characteristics (for instance there is barely any difference between african americans and whites in lactose intolerance anymore, whereas in Africa it's easy to find regions with 80%+ of people lactose intolerant). It is no longer unheard of for 2 african-american parents to have a child that is white (in phenotype), and it's about to become the norm.

Now while it's true that the advantage of one set of genes was generated somewhat artificially for this group, the theory says that there will always be some reason that one group's offspring will outnumber the other group (same argument as for natural selection, really), and this will always happen. Whether it be because of social preferences or some other property doesn't really matter.

ficticious hierarchy[0]*

[0]: http://www.genderratic.com/p/1140/patriarchy-1-0-and-the-ape...