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Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

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Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#21

Post by mjevans »

droidist2 wrote: post #10
neilwilson wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Instead of focusing on solving the clear, heart rending, abject poverty around them" That requires ensuring everybody that wants a job has one unless exempted by age or infirmity. Having more jobs than people means that the workers have the upper hand in wage negotiations. They always have another option. And if there is one thing business hates, it's having to compete - particularly for workers. A society that cann…

> Having more jobs than people means that the workers have the upper hand in wage negotiations. They always have another option. Businesses would never let this happen though, they would just lobby the government to let them bring in more workers from other countries until they have the upper hand again. The third world has virtually an endless supply.

Isn't that exactly what 'fixing' the visa situation about? (Also, this is why I'm for giving those foreign workers on visas an easier route to becoming /citizens/ instead; and getting rid of indentured servitude visas.)

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#22

Post by nl »

civilian wrote: post #8
ktRolster wrote: post #2

Harvey Mudd had some good success getting their enrollment up: https://qz.com/730290/harvey-mudd-college-took-on-gender-bia...

Harvey Mudd is just performing selection bias. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

Only if you consider someone coming and telling people who are already accepted that they should consider CS as a form of selection bias:

I went to Harvey Mudd. What you are saying is flat out wrong. Harvey Mudd does not have "schools", it's a single 800 person college for godsake. Maybe you're confused about the claremont colleges as a whole? You apply to the claremont colleges individually, of which Harvey Mudd is one. That's it. You don't even know what you're majoring in until the end of your sophomore year, just like MIT.

The reason Mudd has so many female cs majors is actually quite simple: the president of the school is a computer scientist and personally talks to individual female students to try to push them towards computer science.

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6sia2q/gend...

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#23

Post by tepe1 »

toomchsauce wrote: post #16

The number of women studying computer science rose dramatically during the tech bubble and dropped off after the crash. I think we're going through a similar cycle. When programming is lucrative and viewed as high status, it becomes a target for feminists and they push for more female coders. When it's not high status anymore (when the funding environment contracts again), girls will stop enrolling in CS as much and…

> It's my opinion that most women don't want to be programmers/ICs deep down, but in a bubble environment many women will gravitate towards CS because it's where the action is in the economy, and feminists pave the way with aggressive affirmative action campaigns that make programming an artificially attractive choice for women.

Why is this your opinion?

Have you spoken to a lot of women? Have you conducted any kind of surveys or polls? Or are you just making up whatever fits your biases?

> It's like James mentions in his memo, from a logical perspective it's completely arbitrary to want to move women into software because it's mostly men

The naivete of HN never fails.

It's perfectly rational for any business to want more women. Or minorities. Or even more children. Every business in the world wants the deepest and biggest talent pool possible.

And of course, this is the real issue. Once programming is demystified and women do enter the field in force it'll be pretty hard for deeply mediocre javascript monkeys to command six figure salaries, won't it?

All the fuss, all the whining -- it's completely self-serving. The idea that women can thrive in law, medicine and hard sciences but they can't master CSS is laughable.

But here's the thing: it's not mastermind feminists who are driving this. It's capitalism. People can whine about feminism and uppity women taking their jerbs -- this is absolutely nothing new. Still, despite pervasive discrimination, the market is going to produce that talent. There was a time when people thought programming was difficult. Only eleet hackers could thrive in Sillicon Valley. Now middle schoolers build Android Apps in a couple of days.

In the end businesses are going to search endlessly for more and better talent, people will gravitate to the jobs that produce the most stable income streams, and everybody is going to strive to keep the market open and fair. You can fight this or whine about fantasy feminist schemes or you can embrace a future where the field has been dramatically opened to all comers.

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#24

Post by tomp »

evangelista wrote: post #4

This is going to be somewhat long and heartbreaking but I promise it will converge on an intelligent point at the end. Every time I visit San Francisco, the heart of America's tech economy, I walk down Market Street and view dozens of adult human beings, many with traumatic brain injuries and psychological problems, living like animals, sleeping in tents, defecating directly on the ground and begging for help. In the…

That's feminism for you. Focusing on things that barely exist (social differences between sexes), instead of what really matters (differences in wealth and class, i.e. "the 1%"). Deplorable, but I guess it makes sense in a way, because they know they'd be completely ineffective trying to attack the elites...

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#25

Post by PeterisP »

droidist2 wrote: post #10
neilwilson wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Instead of focusing on solving the clear, heart rending, abject poverty around them" That requires ensuring everybody that wants a job has one unless exempted by age or infirmity. Having more jobs than people means that the workers have the upper hand in wage negotiations. They always have another option. And if there is one thing business hates, it's having to compete - particularly for workers. A society that cann…

> Having more jobs than people means that the workers have the upper hand in wage negotiations. They always have another option. Businesses would never let this happen though, they would just lobby the government to let them bring in more workers from other countries until they have the upper hand again. The third world has virtually an endless supply.

It's naturally that they'll lobby the government for that, but it doesn't mean that they should or will succeed in that, after all, the (current) workers have all the votes that politicians want.

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#26

Post by maehwasu »

toomchsauce wrote: post #16

The number of women studying computer science rose dramatically during the tech bubble and dropped off after the crash. I think we're going through a similar cycle. When programming is lucrative and viewed as high status, it becomes a target for feminists and they push for more female coders. When it's not high status anymore (when the funding environment contracts again), girls will stop enrolling in CS as much and…

> When programming is lucrative and viewed as high status, it becomes a target for feminists and they push for more female coders. When it's not high status anymore (when the funding environment contracts again), girls will stop enrolling in CS as much and feminists will stop targeting it as a powerful job that needs more women.

Shhhhh, we're not supposed to mention incentives.

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#28

Post by ewjordan »

nl wrote: post #22
civilian wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harvey Mudd is just performing selection bias. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

Only if you consider someone coming and telling people who are already accepted that they should consider CS as a form of selection bias: I went to Harvey Mudd. What you are saying is flat out wrong. Harvey Mudd does not have "schools", it's a single 800 person college for godsake. Maybe you're confused about the claremont colleges as a whole? You apply to the claremont colleges individually, of which Harvey Mudd is…

I actually think the next comment is more meaningful as an explanation:

One other key factor that hasn't been mentioned yet: Harvey Mudd requires all first-year students to take their intro CS course

I've been arguing for a long time that simply forcing everyone to try CS (the way we force everyone to try math, English, history, etc) would go a long way towards closing these gaps. I think it's fantastic that they're doing that.

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#29

Post by Animats »

caseysoftware wrote: post #20
ktRolster wrote: post #2

Harvey Mudd had some good success getting their enrollment up: https://qz.com/730290/harvey-mudd-college-took-on-gender-bia...

Less than one year after that article, Harvey Mudd's President says the last year was the school's worst ever resulting in a suicide, nearly 10% of the students on suicide watch, and having to simplify the curriculum from hard STEM with more electives. As someone who nearly went there (accepted but opted for one of their rivals), it's disappointing to see. Ref: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/08/02/540603927/a-co…

Harvey Mudd internal report mentioned: [1]

(That's now inaccessable (403 Forbidden), and the page that linked to it, "http://tsl.news/news/6611/", is failing with a Ngnix error (502 Bad Gateway).)

I got to read it before it went down, and it sounded like they'd reached the student workload levels associated with the first two years of any serious engineering school. Their restructured student body wasn't ready for that.

[1] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/content_link/S4gumhMUSUdKB...

Re: Let’s Use Hard Science to Help Tech Companies Advance Women

#30

Post by nl »

ewjordan wrote: post #28
nl wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you consider someone coming and telling people who are already accepted that they should consider CS as a form of selection bias: I went to Harvey Mudd. What you are saying is flat out wrong. Harvey Mudd does not have "schools", it's a single 800 person college for godsake. Maybe you're confused about the claremont colleges as a whole? You apply to the claremont colleges individually, of which Harvey Mudd is…

I actually think the next comment is more meaningful as an explanation: One other key factor that hasn't been mentioned yet: Harvey Mudd requires all first-year students to take their intro CS course I've been arguing for a long time that simply forcing everyone to try CS (the way we force everyone to try math, English, history, etc) would go a long way towards closing these gaps. I think it's fantastic that they're…

Yes, I think there's a lot to be said for that too.
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