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Melinda Gates Has a New Mission: Women in Tech

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Re: Melinda Gates Has a New Mission: Women in Tech

#71

Post by geebee »

tw04 wrote: post #53
hkmurakami wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently, boys are more culturally inclined to have had previous exposure to technology and programming than girls. This leads to an uneven starting point when they arrive in college. Now this is fine in a vacuum, but when you put students with different experiences into one room, the ones with prior experience will naturally tend to do better. This relative lack of experience is often misinterpreted as a relative l…

>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…

"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."

As a math major who took on programming later in life than most, I feel a lot of ambivalence about this statement. Data structures and algorithms, and even basic control flow, is more complex than I think you're making it out to be.

Zed Shaw made an excellent point about this when he wrote about the "pipe" for boolean OR. He pointed out that you aren't just teaching people about boolean logic. While they're trying to understand the concepts, they are also wondering what you mean when you say to use the "pipe". In fact, you can't even say use the | character, because very intelligent people may have never used this to the point that they weren't aware that there was a | character, yet these people could make exceptional programmers given a bit more time and the right intro material.

This isn't just a nitpick, I always cringe when I people downplay the rigor of programming, even basic programming. It isn't easy at all, it takes hard work. My own experience as a math major who took on programming a bit late in life is that there is a pretty tough hurdle at the beginning (one that I felt Zed identified very well through his "pipe" example).

I also think that people should take more pride in learning to program - while we could quibble over what the "basics" are, I'd put it up there with my more rigorous math and engineering coursework.

Re: Melinda Gates Has a New Mission: Women in Tech

#72

Post by dragonwriter »

tw04 wrote: post #53
hkmurakami wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently, boys are more culturally inclined to have had previous exposure to technology and programming than girls. This leads to an uneven starting point when they arrive in college. Now this is fine in a vacuum, but when you put students with different experiences into one room, the ones with prior experience will naturally tend to do better. This relative lack of experience is often misinterpreted as a relative l…

>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…

> 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.

As someone who was programming long before I took AP Calculus, I don't think there's a whole lot of relationship between the two. Certainly, the scope of AP Calculus includes material which is necessary preparation either fairly directly or through other math that builds on it for some of what is covered in a normal CS curriculum, but its certainly not a prerequisite for either basic programming or introductory computer science (which aren't really the same thing.)

Re: Melinda Gates Has a New Mission: Women in Tech

#73

Post by matthewowen »

zakk wrote: post #61
mystique wrote: post #40

It's easy to dismiss the push for diversity by saying that women themselves do not want to go into tech. I used to believe the same when I saw most of my girlfriends opt for non-tech majors - their reason being this is not my cup of tea. Made me feel superior for not only choosing tech, but also being successful academically and later in career. Now that I have kids, I realize how early the push for conformation to s…

Besides your anecdotal evidence, there are strong proofs that the society is NOT influencing a woman's choice too much. A gigantic survey (I could find references if you are interested) has shown that from ultra-repressive environments (Muslim or African countries) to ultra-liberal countries (Northern Europe) the percentage of women going into CS is about the same. It actually decreases a bit in progressive countries…

It doesn't strongly support that at all.

A similarly plausible argument is that despite a lack of overtly regressive policies towards women in the West, there are still a number of cultural norms that influence their behaviour. Which is exactly the point the parent comment is making.

Re: Melinda Gates Has a New Mission: Women in Tech

#74

Post by matthewowen »

fjjrxcbdhx wrote: post #3

Why not more female sanitation workers or more male elementary school teachers? What makes the gender demographics of building websites so much more important than all these other imbalanced fields?

I think a lot of people do care deeply about getting more men into elementary school teaching.

But as for why tech: technology is increasingly a sector where people earn high wages: people care about some getting some share of that. More importantly, tech companies are becoming the center of our lives: they produce the products we spend our time with. Moreover, tech companies today are increasingly oriented around and dominated by technical employees, rather than "business" or marketing staff. If women aren't represented amongst these technical employees and founders, that will have a detrimental effect on society, because these products will be less likely to reflect the needs of women. Case in point: the ongoing failure of Twitter to properly ha for abusive behaviour and harassment, which overwhelmingly affects women.

Re: Melinda Gates Has a New Mission: Women in Tech

#75

Post by matthewowen »

wahsd wrote: post #2

What is it these days (for a couple decades now, actually) that somehow discrimination is totally fine when it's discrimination against many people. Why is an initiative to get women into tech ok (which begs to question how one gets women into tech without girls having been gotten into tech), but if there were an initiative to get more men into tech there would be all out hostility towards it? What happened to equali…

For the most part, people aren't trying to discriminate, nor to offer opportunities to some groups but not others (there are exceptions, but they're relatively few and more powerful for signalling than for direct impact). What they're trying to do is remove currently existing impediments to women entering tech.

Improving CS101 classes is a great example. There are many forms a CS101 class could take. But they're generally taught by men, and they've generally been taught to young men. It's not implausible that they might be unnecessarily hostile to women (or to take another angle, biased towards backgrounds that women are underrepresented in, like "people who consider themselves gamers"); not through malice, but just through habit and happenstance. It seems very plausible to me that these classes could be more inviting and inclusive without compromising academic integrity. That's a win for everyone. It doesn't engage in discrimination: it just aims to remove an existing (albeit unintentional) impediment.

Re: Melinda Gates Has a New Mission: Women in Tech

#76

Post by geebee »

geebee wrote: post #71
tw04 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

"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." As a math major who took on programming later in life than most, I feel a lot of ambivalence about this statement. Data structures and algorithms, and even basic control flow, is more complex than I think you're making it out to be. Zed Shaw made an excellent point about this when he wrote ab…

Too late for an edit, but here's the link:

https://zedshaw.com/2015/06/16/early-vs-beginning-coders/

Re: Melinda Gates Has a New Mission: Women in Tech

#77

Post by MollyR »

matthewowen wrote: post #73
zakk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides your anecdotal evidence, there are strong proofs that the society is NOT influencing a woman's choice too much. A gigantic survey (I could find references if you are interested) has shown that from ultra-repressive environments (Muslim or African countries) to ultra-liberal countries (Northern Europe) the percentage of women going into CS is about the same. It actually decreases a bit in progressive countries…

It doesn't strongly support that at all. A similarly plausible argument is that despite a lack of overtly regressive policies towards women in the West, there are still a number of cultural norms that influence their behaviour. Which is exactly the point the parent comment is making.

There was research done in various nordic countries that when men and women are free from severe economic selection pressure, They naturally prefer different roles something like nurse vs construction worker.

Also area's like India,when men and women are under more economic pressure, there is more gender equal distribution in fields.

I've had this explained to me as the "Nordic Paradox".

Re: Melinda Gates Has a New Mission: Women in Tech

#78

Post by cableshaft »

tw04 wrote: post #56
projektir wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>CS 101 is not basic. Even a high school CS class is not basic. Especially at some places. You're lacking perspective here. 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. If you're claiming it's not basic I guess we're just at an…

My CS 101 class basically consisted of 'What is a mouse', 'What is a desktop' definitions, so I'm not surprised. CS 102 wasn't too bad either (input-processing-output, what is a for loop). CS 103 (here come the pointers) is where the program lost a bunch of people.

And everything after that at my university was pretty tough, although not always because the material was tough, more that some of the professors were there more for research and less for teaching and it was pretty obvious (one even said it flat out in class one day).

Re: Melinda Gates Has a New Mission: Women in Tech

#79

Post by zakk »

matthewowen wrote: post #73
zakk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Besides your anecdotal evidence, there are strong proofs that the society is NOT influencing a woman's choice too much. A gigantic survey (I could find references if you are interested) has shown that from ultra-repressive environments (Muslim or African countries) to ultra-liberal countries (Northern Europe) the percentage of women going into CS is about the same. It actually decreases a bit in progressive countries…

It doesn't strongly support that at all. A similarly plausible argument is that despite a lack of overtly regressive policies towards women in the West, there are still a number of cultural norms that influence their behaviour. Which is exactly the point the parent comment is making.

You didn't get my point.

If women in Sweden are doing the same career choices as in Saudi Arabia, as a matter of fact one can rule out the society as a factor.

Unless you want to believe that Saudi Arabia and Sweden are equally oppressive to women.

It clearly must be something biological.

Re: Melinda Gates Has a New Mission: Women in Tech

#80

Post by projektir »

cableshaft wrote: post #78
tw04 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>CS 101 is not basic. Even a high school CS class is not basic. Especially at some places. You're lacking perspective here. 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. If you're claiming it's not basic I guess we're just at an…

My CS 101 class basically consisted of 'What is a mouse', 'What is a desktop' definitions, so I'm not surprised. CS 102 wasn't too bad either (input-processing-output, what is a for loop). CS 103 (here come the pointers) is where the program lost a bunch of people. And everything after that at my university was pretty tough, although not always because the material was tough, more that some of the professors were the…

Yeah, my CS 101, well, my college CS 101 I actually skipped, but it consisted of programming a robot in Python. My high school CS class was the AP CS AB preparation, i.e., Java with objects.
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