Melinda Gates Has a New Mission: Women in Tech

>Currently, boys are more culturally inclined to have had previous exposure to technology and programming than girls.

I guess I would ask for your basis for this comment. Unless I'm completely off-base on current teenage culture, kids who sit at their computer to program all day are pretty much universally shunned in high school whether a girl or boy. At least at my high school, the advanced math classes were pretty much 50/50 split between boys and girls and I'd argue passing AP calc in high school is 90% of the battle. If you can tackle that the basics of programming are nothing.

>This relative lack of experience is often misinterpreted as a relative lack of ability or aptitude by the students with less experience, even if their potential is equal if not better than their more experienced peers.

I guess I don't get where you're going with this. The teachers will expect you to complete homework and tests. If you're saying professors are somehow making girls feel bad if they go in and ask for help on problems, you should be reporting that to the university. I appreciate the opinion but it feels like a huge reach. CS101 is literally as basic as it gets. If you've passed advanced mathematics and are lost in basic programming, CS probably isn't the best profession. I REALLY am struggling to believe the next Diane Greene missed the boat because they couldn't make it through intro to programming.

I cannot for the life of me grasp this insistence that we have equal representation across all professions from both genders. It turns out males and females literally have difference chemical make-ups and gravitate towards different professions naturally.

If there are women truly being discriminated against, as insinuated above, by something like a professor not giving them the help they need - let's absolutely address it. Fire the professor, sanction the school, throw the book at them. If the issue is "there's way more boys than girls applying for X degrees" - who cares? If they aren't being actively discriminated against, stop trying to force the issue. Let people pursue the professions they enjoy and stop being so caught up in the breakdown of what they naturally drift towards.

You appear to have already made up your mind about the issue. It's going to be rather hard for you to see why there may be a problem when it depends on some assumptions you've already rejected:

> If you've passed advanced mathematics and are lost in basic programming, CS probably isn't the best profession.

I think you're vastly underestimating the benefit of preparation, especially an advanced form of thereof. CS may also require more preparation than other fields do due to its inherent unintuitiveness. The gap between those who dabbled enough to get the basics and those who have never seen it before is rather large.

CS 101 is not basic. Even a high school CS class is not basic. Especially at some places. You're lacking perspective here.

> I cannot for the life of me grasp this insistence that we have equal representation across all professions from both genders. It turns out males and females literally have difference chemical make-ups and gravitate towards different professions naturally.

Many people are not ready to simply accept the latter conclusion because of recent history. Most of those people are similar to the same people who have found that kind of conclusion to be false previously.

The main question for me is whether people accept there are basic biological and neurological differences between men and women?

Women consistently score higher in empathy and lower in spatial recognition tasks than men. Maybe that's something you shouldn't fight against?

> I had literally 0 CS prior to college. I am not a programmer and have no desire to ever be one and I would likely be a mediocre programmer at best if forced to do so for a living - CS101 was literally the easiest class I had in college.

What exactly does 0 CS mean? If you've never picked up a programming book that doesn't mean you had 0 CS exposure, 0 CS exposure is if you've never seen a computer and never reasoned about a logical system. Extremely rare among programmers yet actually not at all uncommon among many people I grew up around.

If CS is so basic, why are there so many people who can't understand for loops? How often do we kick a person to the curb if they can't immediately understand simple algebra or don't instantly figure out how to read? Is simple algebra basic? Is reading basic? How long do those take? How hard it is to teach reading to a person who has never read? Among those who have never read, are there going to be a few who'll pick it up quickly anyway?

It seems you consider it simple because it was simple for you. Maybe you got the one 101 CS class that was actually reasonable? "CS 101" isn't a monolith, there are many of them across colleges and programs, and some programs have improved on the matter.

> I have NEVER met a person who failed out of CS101 and had any place trying to become a professional programmer.

Well, that's kind of a self-biasing conclusion, isn't it? And it's not going to be very encouraging to any kind of person to fail a 101 class in a field.

I don't trust any one person to decide who has a place to become a professional programmer so I don't see that as any sort of evidence or an argument. People not being able to see potential in other people is old news.

In every CS class I've been in there was a huge disparity between those who have coded before and those who haven't, and it was only greater in the earlier classes. That disparity was not replicated in other classes. Those who have coded before could effectively do nothing and pass the class with flying colors while the rest barely scraped by. I have taken multiple high school CS classes due to school jumping and every single CS class had this effect. No, not hard evidence, but something you don't seem to be mentioning at all, and I've heard similar reports from lots of people.

> You've got scientific evidence proving the chemical make-up of men and women are identical?

We're not discussing whether or not they're identical and never where. We're discussing whether or not they completely and utterly explain the current gender disparity. That we do not know and will not truly know for a very long time.

Assigning various things to gender differences has a very bad track record in history, which is why many of us will be skeptical of that easily available conclusion for quite some time, because there are other forces and motivations at play.

I don't need to prove that something isn't true. The onus is on you to prove that it is true.

You're generally not arguing in good faith, which, unfortunately, casts doubt on the sources of your convictions.