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Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

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Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#101

Post by zackmorris »

rokosbasilisk wrote: post #98
zackmorris wrote: post #92

Wow so many negative comments on this thread. I hope that any stereotypically white/male whatever technology professionals reading this remember back to the scorn and ridicule that many of us faced in our formative years due to our interest in technology. Many women, minorities, etc have had similar interests to yours but had few or no peers who shared them. You may have overcome hurdles but now imagine doing it alon…

It sure feels like you are arguing a strawman here. From reading the comments, its seems alot of people want to help but have legitimate, well reasoned and valid concerns.

You make a good point.

I guess what I'm arguing is that the forces against equality are so large that it would take a great deal to shift things into balance in anything short of decades. I feel that taking an opposing or even neutral stance against active measures is a vote of support for inequality.

If anyone is going to take a stand, I would think it would be people who have experienced being ostracized. But reading some of these comments has been an eye opener because they use seeds of truth to support what is unavoidably a position of ignorance.

That trend is appearing all over the media right now and it's a very dark think IMHO.

I admit that it may be the effect of controversy generating conversation that pushes the comments to the top but it makes me uncomfortable that even Hacker News isn't immune to such things.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#102

Post by discodave »

FT_intern wrote: post #39
lemmsjid wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, softw…

> dominance That's not the right word. Interest is the right word. The % of females in tech resembles the % of females majoring in CS

No it doesn't, women leave the industry much faster than men.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#103

Post by tptacek »

drspacemonkey wrote: post #24
geofft wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>But we're arguing that these purely artificial constructs of geeky men bonding over Star Trek are worth upholding I'd argue that letting geeks be geeks is worth upholding, and forcing engineers to not be geeks would be a disaster.

Nobody's arguing that geeks shouldn't be geeks. What they're arguing is that collections of geeks shouldn't be allowed to organize their workplaces to only accept geeks, or to prefer geek culture over other cultures.

And, in fact, no true geek has any trouble understanding why this is important. There are so many branches of geekdom that there is (or was) an elaborate geek code that broadcast ones affiliations. There are Star Trek geeks, and there are vampire LARP geeks. The Star Trek geeks are generally not OK with the idea of a clique of vampire LARP geeks refusing to hire anyone who doesn't look like they enjoy Bauhaus.

It's a common trope --- not among geeks, but among chauvinists of varying stripes --- that efforts to reduce discrimination are really thinly veiled attempts to persecute geeks. Don't fall for that. These really are the droids you're looking for.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#104

Post by tptacek »

toasterlovin wrote: post #100
geofft wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, I totally believe that the minds exhibit dimorphism. The claim I think is extraordinary is that the dimorphism is correlated with tech thinking , which, for starters, isn't a well-defined term. Is it raw programming ability? (If so, there are lots of reasons to believe that women are more suited to it than men, which were common folklore in the middle of last century when programming was low-status.) Is it pro…

This is a hunch on my part, but I think the place to look for dimorphism isn't so much in raw ability as it is in motivation and willingness to take risk. This is a non-PC opinion to match yours (which I largely agree with), but I think the desire to learn how to program is highly related to the desire to tinker and build, something which my life experience has shown to be much more prevalent in males than females (w…

For every male I know that has strong opinions about IPAs and Overwatch, I know two women that spend their weekends working on things we call "maker projects" when dudes do them, but other things when women do them because women have been doing them forever. Have you ever paid serious attention to a real sewing project? It's a lot more like software construction than most of the things dudes do in their spare time.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#105

Post by geofft »

toasterlovin wrote: post #100
geofft wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no, I totally believe that the minds exhibit dimorphism. The claim I think is extraordinary is that the dimorphism is correlated with tech thinking , which, for starters, isn't a well-defined term. Is it raw programming ability? (If so, there are lots of reasons to believe that women are more suited to it than men, which were common folklore in the middle of last century when programming was low-status.) Is it pro…

This is a hunch on my part, but I think the place to look for dimorphism isn't so much in raw ability as it is in motivation and willingness to take risk. This is a non-PC opinion to match yours (which I largely agree with), but I think the desire to learn how to program is highly related to the desire to tinker and build, something which my life experience has shown to be much more prevalent in males than females (w…

I'm not sure I buy the tinkering argument. There are types of tinkering that are stereotypically male, but also types that are stereotypically female: see "old wives' remedies," cooking, sewing / knitting, etc.

I buy the risk argument in theory; anecdotally, friends who are women in tech seem to worry a bit more than friends who are men in tech about long-term career stability. But tech has been low-risk for the last few decades. Even when I was very young I remember being aware that Bill Gates was the richest man in the world, and he did programming, and programming was a thing I could learn. And the number of women in tech has been dropping since approximately the time Bill Gates became the richest man in the world.

I think the risk argument could apply well to high-risk tech career decisions, though, of which there are still quite a few like founding startups. But becoming a rank-and-file software engineer at a big corporation has been a low-risk high-reward career choice for a good while.

See, for instance, this graph of the proportion of CS graduates by gender (from ComputerWorld):

http://core0.staticworld.net/images/idge/imported/article/ct...

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#106

Post by awfgylbcxhrey »

FT_intern wrote: post #60
awfgylbcxhrey wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't homogeneous teams make "jelling" easier? In my opinion, no. It's been my experience that a large portion of programmers are the type to easily lose track of the real goal (delivering a product that generates business value) in favor of relatively unimportant details. To make this short and blunt: I've watched a pair of mega-nerds geek out for a week, over-engineering and prematurely optimizing an unimportant…

Gender and race are orthogonal to shortsightedness and nerdiness. >diversity is a method of keeping this sort of thing in check. The term diversity by itself has no meaning. One needs to specify how groups of people are split up whenever using the word "diversity". Are we splitting the groups up by race, gender, economic class, technology experiences, etc.? There are very valid arguments for diversity in working styl…

I'm not particularly interested in gender and race, I'm interested in culture. Gender and race happen to be pretty easy metrics to break up monoculture on a typical programming team.

The term diversity by itself has no meaning.

Yes it does.

There are very valid arguments for diversity in working styles/technology expertise. The same can't be said for diversity in race/gender.

Okay, thanks for the tautology.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#107

Post by geofft »

FT_intern wrote: post #80
Torgo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on the profession, "diversity" means black people or women. If you are diverse but don't have many women, you aren't actually diverse for the purposes of media hectoring. If you are diverse but you don't have enough black people, you aren't actually diverse for the purposes of media hectoring. Which sports field in the graph below is the most representative of US demographics? Which one would be recognized…

Let's deep dive into diversity further. Why do we want diversity? Because apparently, we want people with different perspectives and experiences. Now with "diversity", we have to specify how we split up the population into groups. We can use gender, race, country of origin, income, etc. The media and general "diversity officers" use race and gender. However, this type of group division is not efficient for the goal o…

> Let's deep dive into diversity further. Why do we want diversity? Because apparently, we want people with different perspectives and experiences.

I don't think that's all of it. People have been pitching that as a politically-correct argument for diversity, since "There are actual racists and actual sexists among us and they have successfully biased the industry" is too offensive to say out loud. But diversity of perspective isn't the fundamental reason.

Absent a solid scientific reason to believe that one gender, one race, one country of origin, one level of income, etc. is truly better at the job than another (as opposed to better thanks to circumstance and existing systems of oppression), a non-diverse candidate pool is an arbitrary subset of a diverse candidate pool. This is both unprofitable for the industry, because you're skipping qualified candidates for no good reason, and unjust to the candidates whom you're skipping.

So, if these candidates truly are qualified and there's no scientific reason why they're statistically worse at the job, why are they being underrepresented? Because we have racists and sexists among us and they're in power.

Which is why it makes sense to look at race and sex and so forth more than other axes like viewpoint or country of origin: first, race and sex are particularly arbitrary, and second, that's what we know people have particularly discriminated on. There is discrimination on other axes, and it's absolutely also worth looking at, but it's a bit less egregious.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#108

Post by FT_intern »

geofft wrote: post #107
FT_intern wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's deep dive into diversity further. Why do we want diversity? Because apparently, we want people with different perspectives and experiences. Now with "diversity", we have to specify how we split up the population into groups. We can use gender, race, country of origin, income, etc. The media and general "diversity officers" use race and gender. However, this type of group division is not efficient for the goal o…

> Let's deep dive into diversity further. Why do we want diversity? Because apparently, we want people with different perspectives and experiences. I don't think that's all of it. People have been pitching that as a politically-correct argument for diversity, since "There are actual racists and actual sexists among us and they have successfully biased the industry" is too offensive to say out loud. But diversity of p…

> is too offensive to say out loud

Not only offensive but also very hard to prove.

>Absent a solid scientific reason to believe that one gender, one race, one country of origin, one level of income, etc. is truly better at the job than another (as opposed to better thanks to circumstance and existing systems of oppression), a non-diverse candidate pool is an arbitrary subset of a diverse candidate pool. This is both unprofitable for the industry, because you're skipping qualified candidates for no good reason, and unjust to the candidates whom you're skipping.

There are objectively less qualified under represented minorities and females in the tech industry. Just check CS major demographics, stackoverflow demographics, etc. It's an undisputed fact.

If you want to cry foul on why they are less qualified, citing unequal representation is not adequate proof of sexism or racism.

Sexism, racism and discrimination are useless concepts unless properly and concisely defined before discussion because everyone's definition is different. It is very annoying to have people classify everything as "racism" or "sexism" to lazily avoid the need to justify arguments.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#109

Post by geofft »

FT_intern wrote: post #108
geofft wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's deep dive into diversity further. Why do we want diversity? Because apparently, we want people with different perspectives and experiences. I don't think that's all of it. People have been pitching that as a politically-correct argument for diversity, since "There are actual racists and actual sexists among us and they have successfully biased the industry" is too offensive to say out loud. But diversity of p…

> is too offensive to say out loud Not only offensive but also very hard to prove. >Absent a solid scientific reason to believe that one gender, one race, one country of origin, one level of income, etc. is truly better at the job than another (as opposed to better thanks to circumstance and existing systems of oppression), a non-diverse candidate pool is an arbitrary subset of a diverse candidate pool. This is both…

> There are objectively less qualified under represented minorities and females in the tech industry. Just check CS major demographics, stackoverflow demographics, etc. It's an undisputed fact.

I'm not sure I understand this sentence. It is an undisputed fact that the proportions of sex, race, etc. in tech are not reflective of the population at large, yes. But I'm not sure how this means that certain groups are less qualified.

> citing unequal representation is not adequate proof of sexism or racism

Sure. But it is the simplest hypothesis; other hypotheses have a higher burden of proof. Serious, straightforward racism and sexism are within living memory; FORTRAN, for instance, is older than Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement. There's good reason to believe sexism and racism could cause the discrepancy we see.

There is less good reason to believe an inherent biological bias; citing unequal representation is also not an adequate proof of biological differences.

Re: Harvey Mudd College Attempting to Address Tech Diversity Issues

#110

Post by FT_intern »

geofft wrote: post #109
FT_intern wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is too offensive to say out loud Not only offensive but also very hard to prove. >Absent a solid scientific reason to believe that one gender, one race, one country of origin, one level of income, etc. is truly better at the job than another (as opposed to better thanks to circumstance and existing systems of oppression), a non-diverse candidate pool is an arbitrary subset of a diverse candidate pool. This is both…

> There are objectively less qualified under represented minorities and females in the tech industry. Just check CS major demographics, stackoverflow demographics, etc. It's an undisputed fact. I'm not sure I understand this sentence. It is an undisputed fact that the proportions of sex, race, etc. in tech are not reflective of the population at large, yes. But I'm not sure how this means that certain groups are less…

>I'm not sure I understand this sentence. It is an undisputed fact that the proportions of sex, race, etc. in tech are not reflective of the population at large, yes. But I'm not sure how this means that certain groups are less qualified.

The question you were answering was "On average, do some races/genders make better tech workers than others?". the answer is, yes some races/genders are more qualified to work in tech than other races/genders because on average, they are more likely to spend the time to become qualified (see college and CS major demographics) and to gain CS knowledge. That is why the tech field skews toward a gender or race over others. Because some races/genders are literally more qualified for tech work than others.

No company is "skipping qualified candidates" because female and underrepresented minorities have not spent the time to become qualified to work in the tech field. They are, on average, literally less qualified to work in the tech field, given their current, average CS and programming knowledge.

>There is less good reason to believe an inherent biological bias; citing unequal representation is also not an adequate proof of biological differences.

Denying that sexism/discrimination against minorities is the cause of unequal representation is not the same as saying that the cause is biological differences. Some easy explanations for unequal representation could be society's pressure on men to make money, Asian/White parents' pressure on kids to do well, etc.

Unequal representation is not enough to prove racism/sexism against females and URMs.

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