Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Isn't one of the central truisms these days in software is that "monocultures are bad"?
Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
61–70 of 114 posts
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
My theory is that affirmative action gives colleges an excuse to bump up rich, "underprivileged" minorities over poor, "privileged" races so they don't have to give as much financial aid
That's certainly a valid suspicion, given the mercenary nature of university management these days, but is it actually borne by facts?
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#63https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLjFTHTgEVU
I haven't been able to locate many similar good talks, so if anyone can point me to speakers / talks I'd appreciate it.
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#64While they have the best intentions, these kinds of initiatives can backfire badly. 2 years ago, I was partnered on a project with a woman who did not how to code a single line of C++ in a senior-level computer science course. Whenever I would arrange for us to work together in lab, she would call in sick. This happened about 3 or 4 times. I told this to my professor, who was a HUGE social justice guy, and after inve…
>This is all anecdotes NHS did a study on female doctors who drop out of workplace at way higher rate than men and all the social/economic implication of it given the huge cost invested into medical education.
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
My theory is that affirmative action gives colleges an excuse to bump up rich, "underprivileged" minorities over poor, "privileged" races so they don't have to give as much financial aid
That's certainly a valid suspicion, given the mercenary nature of university management these days, but is it actually borne by facts?
From the article I posted above has some details but not the precise metrics you requested. I'd be interested in those too.
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#66> She expected the class to be full of guys who loved video games and grew up obsessing over how they were made. There were plenty of those guys but, to her surprise, she found the class fascinating. So many of these articles seem incredibly sexist to me -- they all boil down to "women are too ignorant to realize that computers are fun".
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#67But with all the thick skin even I have been blown away at the ruthlessness and lack of empathy our industry mandates in a person for them to achieve the upper echelons, much like other male-dominated industries and endeavors.
If there are women out there ready, passionate, ambitious, and intellectually up to the task of really ushering in the future then all the power and over 9000 blessings to them. But if they or anyone else expect me to treat them any differently than my all-male, all-star engineering and design teams then they'd be sadly disappointed. The truth is I'd hire a paraplegic transgender janitor with no high school education if they were able to somehow prove to me they could run with the all-stars or at the very least support us in our cause. Race or gender is really never a factor for a true leader looking to build an all-star team.
My advice to my daughter, if it was true in her heart, would be never to join them - but to instead run over them like an old greasy tank. Don't even need a degree in Computer Science to do that.
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. You failed to prove that society is indeed making it more difficult for women to join computer science education and jobs.
That's my main gripe. Treating people differently based on gender is simply wrong. The default should always be to treat people the same. If you are going to commit sexism with the purpose of "reversing the patriarchy", you first have to prove and quantify the effects of the "patriarchy". Only then can you justify using sexism. Otherwise, you are committing a definite wrong, sexism, to reverse the possibility of sexi…
It is fine if your goal is upholding a moral code where you personally actively committing an act of discrimination is unacceptable, but even unintentionally; you personally passively upholding discrimination is fine; and other people actively committing discrimination and you failing to stop them is not a thing you're super morally culpable for. That's certainly not my moral code, and I think even among the crowds that believe in intrinsically evil actions regardless of context (e.g., Catholic moral theology), they wouldn't agree that passively upholding evil or failing to stop others from doing active evil is fine (e.g., "I have greatly sinned ... in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do"). If we're making a deontological argument, we should nail down what we think about passive wrong or allowing a wrong to continue, and if we're making a consequentialist argument, we're not worried about intrinsic wrongs along the way to a right.
It's a losing strategy because everyone who actively supports sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination have plausible reasons why their discrimination is justifiable. Even the white-nationalist types these days hesitate to say that the white race is superior; they just say they want protections for the white race in white countries (whatever those are). And most of the discrimination in today's society doesn't come from people who are nowhere near as overt as white nationalists. The colleges say, "Oh, we're just trusting these test scores." The standardized test companies say, "Oh, we're just trusting past performance at college." And if anyone had previously introduced bias into the system, they've now successfully laundered the bias; there's a feedback system that keeps whatever biases were present when it was created, and you can quite genuinely say, "Oh, I'm just following this system, which on paper should be a perfectly objective system" and there's no proof that you're actively and intentionally discriminating. But you're upholding discrimination, all the same.
If you want to see this sort of bias-laundering in practice, my favorite recent example is the voting laws in North Carolina that were recently struck down by their Supreme Court:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-n...
Every restriction, on the face of it, was defensible. Voter ID in the abstract is a good idea. Eliminating certain parts of early voting seems fine. But the courts looked at the emails behind this law, where legislators asked which particular voting mechanisms were used by specific demographic groups, and eliminated those mechanisms "with almost surgical precision". You couldn't prove from the text of the law that there was any intention at bias, which was the entire point; it wasn't supposed to look like a discriminatory law.
We don't have the benefit of seeing those discussions most of the time. So waiting until we have a proof of a wrong to fix that wrong is a losing strategy, one that is easily exploited by people who want to discriminate, and one that people who want to discriminate have demonstrated their willingness to exploit.
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#69I 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.
Which sports field in the graph below is the most representative of US demographics? Which one would be recognized for achievements in diversity?
https://i.imgur.com/hbmGgQD.png
It would be the NBA: http://www.espn.com/nba/news/story?id=5267604
because "diversity" means black people, not "representative of America's diversity."
In tech, if your ethnic demographics match the population, you are not diverse. To be diverse you need to hire less white people. Pinterest was not diverse because women were only 27% of tech hires. Ethnically the hires are 60% Asian, white males 35%, but the conclusion was too many white males.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3051659/inside-pinterests-plans-...
"Diversity" is not about accurate representation.
Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You're overcomplicating things. In the ideal if we erased biases in education and staffing, we'd expect the various distributions we measure across tech companies to match a random sampling of the population at large. When we see large deviations from the population at large, it's a clear signal that something is going on. This isn't that obscure, and we certainly don't need to engage in a false, hand wringing, seman…
Has anyone actually proven that, or is that just an assumption?