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To my daughter's high school programming teacher

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Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#321

Post by kunil »

ryanx435 wrote: post #3

my theory is that there are not a lot of women in tech jobs because the men in tech jobs generally don't know how to interact with women. any woman that shows an interest in tech is not disuaded by the material, but rather by the inability of her male coworkers to treat her normally. I would not want to work or study in an environment surrounded by social akwardness and harassment either. the problem lies with the me…

I don't want to sound sexist but could be, just could be, is it possible that women are not as capable as when it comes to programming. waits for flames

I was a student assistant. I gave lab courses (lots of different types, cs 101, ai, graphics etc) and there wasn't a single girl that can actually do good. Sure there was some who can memorize a whole textbook and get A in grades thanks to exams but that was it. They were at best average for my case. And In my school, girl ratio is not that bad either. Even when I was a student, there was a single girl that applied and graduated as same year as males, all other females failed and prolonged their schools.

I am sure most of you met exceptional woman programmers, I am not denying that there might be exceptions. But from my personal experience women is not as capable as men in tech. That is pretty much my reasoning why there are so low interest in tech related courses/jobs for women

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#322

Post by flog »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #138
lmartel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. While gender-related issues in the software industry are important and worth talking about, this article seems to have pretty little justification. I was in high school a few years ago. Put that many teenagers in a room and of course they're going to fuck with each other. I've heard sandwich jokes made in liberal arts classes, biology classes, even a badminton class--which also had only one girl in it. The t…

> the takeaway is that high schoolers are dicks. // Sure. But not exclusively [which I know you weren't claiming]. I had some pretty degrading and misandrist remarks made about me in situations with lots of women in; where I've been the only man (mothers, women of an age to marry and more mature women too). I think these things are a lot about group dynamics.

> I think these things are a lot about group dynamics.

I think that's right, particularly male group dynamics.

I'd say all guys are bullied, except most of us wouldn't call it such - it's the establishment of hierarchy, and bonding.

Is that right? Is that right when they don't differentiate their bullying towards girls? I'm not even going to wade into that. However, I feel (through personal experience) masculinity is being more and more removed from young men, and at a high cost.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#323

Post by brokenparser »

Tycho wrote: post #302

I think VB is a good choice for high school programming. As well as being closer to spoken English than most languages, it has excellent GUI development tools and also the by useful IDE features like Intellisense and auto formatting. But the best thing about it IMO is that it's the only programming language that most people might find useful later in their careers - via Excel's VBA. That shouldn't be underestimated.

VBA is almost universally the wrong tool for the job. MS-Office applications are COM servers, so you can interface with them from almost any programming language and throw useful frameworks into the mix such as Qt or wxWidgets. The sort of things that make a programmers life easier, in stark contrast to the abomination called VBA.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#324

Post by lutusp »

kunil wrote: post #321
ryanx435 wrote: post #3

my theory is that there are not a lot of women in tech jobs because the men in tech jobs generally don't know how to interact with women. any woman that shows an interest in tech is not disuaded by the material, but rather by the inability of her male coworkers to treat her normally. I would not want to work or study in an environment surrounded by social akwardness and harassment either. the problem lies with the me…

I don't want to sound sexist but could be, just could be, is it possible that women are not as capable as when it comes to programming. waits for flames I was a student assistant. I gave lab courses (lots of different types, cs 101, ai, graphics etc) and there wasn't a single girl that can actually do good. Sure there was some who can memorize a whole textbook and get A in grades thanks to exams but that was it. They…

> I don't want to sound sexist but could be, just could be, is it possible that women are not as capable as when it comes to programming.

It's a flawed argument. In a group of male programmers, fully half of them are below average (yes, I'm sure). Should the less accomplished 50% be subject to ridicule as intellectually inferior? No, they should be given equality of opportunity, and let the cards fall there they may.

All women want is the same equality of opportunity that every male programmer gets without question.

> But from my personal experience women is not as capable as men in tech.

I'm sure you've heard of "confirmation bias", but, in case you haven't:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Quote: "... a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses."

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#325

Post by rorrr2 »

This whole situation is such a huge WTF to me. I've been in the programming industry for more than a decade, and I have never seen this happen. It's the lack of women that always sucked, and most of my dev coworkers agreed.

Any time we had a girl interview for a programmer position, it was like a breath of fresh air.

I'm not saying it didn't happen or doesn't happen in general, I believe this story. I just find it strange. We live in 2013, it's unbelievable this shit still happens.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#326

Post by vickytnz »

simias wrote: post #318

When I read articles like these I often get the impression that we don't have the full story. How do we go from "After she finished, she'd help classmates who were behind or struggling in class" to "my daughter emailed to tell me that the boys in her class were harassing her"? Those two statements are one sentence apart. I was in a technical cursus in high school, there was exactly one (1) girl in the class. And not…

I was at a girls' school. As a straight-A student in a rough school, helping fellow students was a tactic for not being bullied. But all it takes is one kid to decide to take an exception to you and it can all go horribly wrong. And you might have done absolutely nothing (I know I didn't, many years later the bully apologised and admitted exactly that) but it's the one wave that can turn a tide. And that was with all girls!

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#327

Post by Tichy »

eru wrote: post #314
Tichy wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but care about the right things, and not construct a gednder issue where thete isn't one. Do you think gender issues are the most important problem schools are facing?

There's a gender issue in the balances of sexes as reported in the article. I don't know how American schools work, so I can't comment on your question.

Just because not every subject has gender parity does not imply that there is an issue.

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#328

Post by kunil »

lutusp wrote: post #324
kunil wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to sound sexist but could be, just could be, is it possible that women are not as capable as when it comes to programming. waits for flames I was a student assistant. I gave lab courses (lots of different types, cs 101, ai, graphics etc) and there wasn't a single girl that can actually do good. Sure there was some who can memorize a whole textbook and get A in grades thanks to exams but that was it. They…

> I don't want to sound sexist but could be, just could be, is it possible that women are not as capable as when it comes to programming. It's a flawed argument. In a group of male programmers, fully half of them are below average (yes, I'm sure). Should the less accomplished 50% be subject to ridicule as intellectually inferior? No, they should be given equality of opportunity, and let the cards fall there they may.…

>In a group of male programmers As I said, male-female ratio is not that bad. Maybe 25% of total class? I am not sure about the numbers though.

I am not trying to ridicule people, It is just some facts I encountered before.

"confirmation bias"

It is not like I can be biased now, because there is no longer a data set for me. There is like 2-3 women (out of ~50) in the department I am working and they are not directly related to my area, weird huh?

Re: To my daughter's high school programming teacher

#330

Post by Tloewald »

irahul wrote: post #270
acjohnson55 wrote: post #143

I feel for the daughter who (like many women before her) had a crappy experience in the male-dominated programming world. I feel for the parent who sees her daughter possibly reject a very fulfilling career path after a bad initial experience, when the future could be so much better. But as a former high school teacher, I also feel for the teacher. Giving them some benefit of the doubt, I just want to point out a cou…

> I'm sure they're teaching VB simply because that's what they have experience with, probably making them the most experienced programmer on staff at the school. VB is a fine language to get children interested in programming. Personally, I know many people who weren't able to grasp programming via C but were pretty excited about VB's gui designer and easy database connectivity. Most of the introduction to VB didn't…

I think that if I were going to teach programming to high school kids I'd show them the console in Chrome / Safari, because it's something they all have easy access to (I assume we're talking about a first world country, right).

VB seems to me to be a poor choice because it doesn't intersect with the kids' lives. They likely won't go home and build VB apps (on their Macs...) The console is like lifting the curtain and revealing the motor underneath something we all use every day.

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