I would be very surprised if there truly were any normative studies showing differences in the way women vs men learn. Maybe individually for this woman it didn’t suit her style. Personally I think everyone deserves individualized instruction but in the US at least we don’t value education that much.
Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
41–50 of 136 posts
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#42“I also, as an ex-Googler, know that the company places a high value on internal open dialogue and personal expression”
That’s only true as long as your “open dialogue” and “personal expression” aligns with the prevailing liberal dogma. Step off the officially sanctioned path and the same thing will happen to you as happened to Damore.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#43> The ’80s were also the era of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the rise of the archetype of the lone, antisocial hacker in a garage spending all-nighters building machines that were at many times ambiguous and without a clear path to success. Without going into too much more detail because this essay is already longer than it needs to be, this can be seen as the linchpin in which computer science took a hard turn toward…
What's strange here is that the 1980s and 1990s were the period of the "lone coder". This was when Microsoft advertised in recruiting that every programmer got a private office with a door they could close. That's in the past. Facebook now has one of the largest bullpens on the planet in Menlo Park, so people can collaborate. Between office layout, "agile", Slack, Github, and StackExchange, programming is more of a s…
maybe the 'women are social and men are loners' trope is the wrong mechanistic explanation for gender disparity among coders. FWIW/anecdata: I know way more women than men who are self-claimed 'introverts' that would stay at home if they could get away with not working, so I would not be in the least surprised if this explanation were a dud.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#44The article makes numerous assertions that school/work do not cater to the ways women learn/work best. I was on the edge of my seat expecting the author to hint at the ways women do learn/work best, but it never arrived. Was I just not reading closely enough? Edit: I wasn't reading closely enough. So my next question is, what would it take to have more women teaching CS and software development?
It's odd, because girls outperform boys in school in every subject, in every grade, and have for decades. Schools already conform very well to girl-centric learning - perhaps because the majority of school teachers are women.
Arguments like this always start from the assumption that inequality is a result of failed education. It's like the people making these arguments have never met a boy or a girl. Boys and girls behave differently, think differently, and value different things.
Of course, we should strive to make environments inclusive as possible, and everyone should be free to pursue their (legal) ambitions, but why do we have to assume that any gender imbalance is a result of bias? Women become pediatricians more than other types of doctor. Is that because pediatricians are less sexist than other subtypes of medicine, or because women are naturally more interested in taking care of children?
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#45I think beyond just "educational style" something we should consider is the way we socialize reward in young men and young women. This is a gross generalization (but when your metrics are bulk - as opposed to individual - results, as in number of entrants or number of employees, generalizations matter), but socially and educationally we train boys seek reward for building or doing things and train girls to seek rewar…
I think there is a lot to be said for the way a good deal of men and women are raised. I'm not even that old, but my parents treated their sons and daughters differently in some subtle and some not so-subtle ways. I've also heard from many of my friends and family that despite believing that men and women are just as capable, they will likely coddle their daughters more than their sons.
Even in my family, in many instances the girls were "taken care of" more. If my or my brothers' cars broke down, it was 'figure it out on your own, get rides from friends, get a second job till you can afford to fix it, etc.' If my sisters' cars broke down, parents were immediately helping pay to get it fixed ('we can't have their cars breaking down on the side of the road! they could get raped/kidnapped/etc')!
Whether or not you think this is a valid way to parent, there's no question that this will force boys raised in the manner to be more self-sufficient that girls raised in this manner (and obviously, not all men and women are raised in this manner...and not all men and women raised in the manner will act like this...I'm looking at probability distributions of the population). It's not a matter of capability, it's a matter of all humans being lazy and we often don't learn to be independent and self-sufficient until we are forced to.
Another example is the dating market. No one wants to have to approach strangers, put themselves out there, and face rejection. It sucks! But constantly putting yourself out there will cultivate leadership and social skills and it can help build your confidence in the face of rejection. Even though men and women are equally as capable of all of those skills, the people that practice those skills more in their day-to-day lives will be better at them when those skills are needed in a business context.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The key word in that sentence is "lone". The author uses "lone" six times. Look at the rest of the paragraph: > "It was a manner of work utterly unsuited to everything we know about how women thrive and excel." > "(Does the idea of being a lone hacker appeal to some women ? Sure. [...] Population-level differences cannot be used to judge the abilities or inclinations of any individual.)" [Emphasis mine.] The author's…
The author asserts that the hacker scenario is the "linchpin" of her argument. Therefore, it seems to be a flawed interpretation to revise her argument to refer exclusively to one part of the scenario and ignore the other parts. If the author wanted to make the argument solely about the number of folks working on a shared project, why include the remark about "ambiguous" work? Perhaps the author belives that individu…
The author raises several points, but uses the word "lone" six times:
> I was frustrated because the course consisted of lone work...
> Despite the cargo shorts and the loner attitude, I learned like a girl..
> Instead of a lonely computer lab...
> The rise of the archetype of the lone, antisocial hacker...
> Does the idea of being a lone hacker appeal to some women?
> Computer scientists are no longer universally considered to be ‘80s-style loners...
I take this as the emphasis of the piece.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#47It's interesting that a lot of her experiences are similar to what the Google manifesto said - that currently, computer science is more targeted towards the way men learn and work than the way women learn and work. Although she was focusing more on the education side of things versus the work side, the core message seems to be that men and women learn and work differently, and that needs to be addressed to get more w…
I thought the guy's behaviour after he was fired had put this "he's just interested in science" myth.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#48The article makes numerous assertions that school/work do not cater to the ways women learn/work best. I was on the edge of my seat expecting the author to hint at the ways women do learn/work best, but it never arrived. Was I just not reading closely enough? Edit: I wasn't reading closely enough. So my next question is, what would it take to have more women teaching CS and software development?
She "hints" at this in a couple of sentences: > Rather, I was frustrated because the course consisted of lone work on exercises that seemed to have little application to the real world, the expectation that coursework required coding and debugging for hours after school threatened my ability to excel in other classes or in varsity sports (in spite of being a textbook nerd, it turned out I was good enough at rowing fo…
Well that's how courses work you have to know how to add 2+2 before going onto Calculus you cant expect to jump straight in to say a key role writing a Map reduce system for a major telcos billing system.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an interesting way to underscore the point that these courses reinforce a kind of bias.
Definitely. Though not necessarily a bias between male and female. Just a bias for people who can work well [enough] with that sort of learning.
And it's not just courses.
Many types of work bias toward people who are just fine with locking themselves in a room/the library stacks/a lab for a week to work through some problem. It's a completely different mindset from someone who likes doing sales or PR work.
It's not that there aren't people who can do a good job with both. But some things certainly come more naturally to some people than they do to others.
Re: Confessions of a Failed Female Coder
#50The article makes numerous assertions that school/work do not cater to the ways women learn/work best. I was on the edge of my seat expecting the author to hint at the ways women do learn/work best, but it never arrived. Was I just not reading closely enough? Edit: I wasn't reading closely enough. So my next question is, what would it take to have more women teaching CS and software development?
Yes, you weren't paying attention :) She mentioned it a few times - girls like colaborative learning, not lone-wolf learning, and she also put a link in - https://ncgsblog.org/2016/09/12/how-girls-learn-best/
Does this also apply to other branches of engineering, medicine and lawyers.