So you're suggesting sexism as a solution.
Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
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Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#12Every diversity-related topic makes me wish that HN discussions weren't branched/fanned out.
The problem isn't politics. The problem is that the exact same argument replicates itself and occurs about a dozen times in different leaves, and it becomes extremely tedious to pore through it multiple times.
Maybe branching comment forums are a good idea for certain topics, but topics that require an in-depth back-and-forth like this one, are much better served by a single chronological pipeline.
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#13I have two concerns with the ideology espoused in this article; the first is that a majority female program is lauded as "diverse", whereas a majority male program, even by a similarly small margin, is considered problematic. I don't buy the idea that any given subset of students has to either exactly match or disfavor men compared to the general population. My second concern is with the stubborn insistence that we m…
I think that the term "diverse" has many definitions. For example, if a gender split at a tech company was 50/50, but everyone was white, would we still consider that company diverse? What is the right definition of "diversity" and which groups (gender vs race vs socio-economic vs ...) should we spend our time working on? You can see how identity politics become problematic very quickly.
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#14I have two concerns with the ideology espoused in this article; the first is that a majority female program is lauded as "diverse", whereas a majority male program, even by a similarly small margin, is considered problematic. I don't buy the idea that any given subset of students has to either exactly match or disfavor men compared to the general population. My second concern is with the stubborn insistence that we m…
Some people argue that more diverse teams will produce better results but I have yet to see evidence that this happens in Computer Science related tasks. In addition I remember being taught that you ultimately want teams to "jel" much more than some marginal productivity gain you might get from diversity. Wouldn't homogeneous teams make "jelling" easier? Notice that I mean this in the limited scope of programming I k…
Wouldn't homogeneous teams make "jelling" easier?
Homogeneous in what sense? It seems likely to me that things like sense of humor and work ethic would be lot more important than maleness when crafting your measure of homogeneity there.
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#15I have two concerns with the ideology espoused in this article; the first is that a majority female program is lauded as "diverse", whereas a majority male program, even by a similarly small margin, is considered problematic. I don't buy the idea that any given subset of students has to either exactly match or disfavor men compared to the general population. My second concern is with the stubborn insistence that we m…
I'm having trouble reading that Quartz article as arguing that men and women have intrinsically different interests, and I think you acknowledge that by saying that there are social differences. It doesn't seem like they're arguing that there's anything in Star Trek posters that deters people with certain hormones, but that socially, Star Trek posters convey an association with a closed male culture. Thing is, this i…
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Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#16So you're suggesting sexism as a solution.
I suppose the argument you're making is that, if society is treating one sex differently on the basis of sex, ending that different treatment also counts as treating them differently on the basis of sex, and leaving that different treatment in place does not. For instance, if men can vote and women can't, giving every woman a vote and not giving every man a second vote would be a sexist change.
If so, yes, I am in favor of that sort of sexism.
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#17So How did they get to 55%. Are they just refusing to admit more than a certain number of men? Or is the a more organic shift through staffing and support changes?
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#18I have two concerns with the ideology espoused in this article; the first is that a majority female program is lauded as "diverse", whereas a majority male program, even by a similarly small margin, is considered problematic. I don't buy the idea that any given subset of students has to either exactly match or disfavor men compared to the general population. My second concern is with the stubborn insistence that we m…
I wouldn't call the act of attempting demographic balance in a field 'stubborn'. History often teaches us that differences between groups are contextual rather than intrinsic. When I say contextual I mean they are often for reasons that have to do with specific social forces at work during specific historical periods.
For example, there was a time that software engineering was dominated by females. At the time, software development was considered a feminine task. Should we have concluded, at the time, that females were more inclined toward software development?
Any time a particular group dominates a particular field, we should question ourselves as to why. Because history shows that the reason is usually some form of erroneous preconception. Of course that won't always be true, but it is often true and should be questioned until it is obviously not true.
The benefit of continually questioning particular groups' dominance is obvious: once a particular narrowly conceived field is opened up to more people, the talent pool behind that field will grow.
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#19So you're suggesting sexism as a solution.
I suppose the argument you're making is that, if society is treating one sex differently on the basis of sex, ending that different treatment also counts as treating them differently on the basis of sex, and leaving that different treatment in place does not. For instance, if men can vote and women can't, giving every woman a vote and not giving every man a second vote would be a sexist change. If so, yes, I am in fa…
No. You failed to prove that society is indeed making it more difficult for women to join computer science education and jobs.
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#20I have two concerns with the ideology espoused in this article; the first is that a majority female program is lauded as "diverse", whereas a majority male program, even by a similarly small margin, is considered problematic. I don't buy the idea that any given subset of students has to either exactly match or disfavor men compared to the general population. My second concern is with the stubborn insistence that we m…
I'm having trouble reading that Quartz article as arguing that men and women have intrinsically different interests, and I think you acknowledge that by saying that there are social differences. It doesn't seem like they're arguing that there's anything in Star Trek posters that deters people with certain hormones, but that socially, Star Trek posters convey an association with a closed male culture. Thing is, this i…
> It'd be one thing if we discovered that male brains were inherently better at tech thinking (it would be an extraordinary hypothesis that would need correspondingly extraordinary evidence, but it's certainly possible that evidence could be found).
Given that males and females have vastly different reproductive strategies, the extraordinary claim is that male and female minds don't display the same sexual dimorphism as male and female bodies.