31–40 of 397 posts
What great timing. BTW, thanks to all of you who backed my crowdtilt to bring BlackGirlsCode to Brooklyn! https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/no-sleep-till-brooklyn-f...
It sounds like Harvey Mudd's program improves female enrollment but it's just seems like a good idea in general The quick program for Harvey Mudd seems to be 1) Make the problems more practical in application (ie controlling a robot, modelling a disease) 2) Giving students choices in what problems they are interested in 3) Segmenting students according to skill set, thus putting people who have been programming in an…
I think this is a fundamental problem with STEM programs in general. Why have grades and tracks at all? The important thing is to learn the material, and not what grade you got on a test at some arbitrary point in time. This is what is so brilliant about MOOCs like Khan Academy. No grades, and you can repeat the material until you know it.
One fascinating aspect of this is how bad the post 1990 startup culture has been for women. There was something about those big, boring corporations of the 1970s and 1980s that actually gave female hackers more acceptance than what startups have offered. You can see female interest in programming change in the charts on these pages: http://blogs.computerworld.com/it-careers/21993/women-comput... Note that those graph…
To some extent I wonder if the difference between the two environments is the acceptance of more junior engineers into the ranks. Even the original link suggests that female coders need to have the same skills as the male coders in order to succeed in the field, whereas one of the main bullet points for Carnegie Mellon's success was specifically encouraging students with no prior experience to join the program: http:…
Unfortunately, it's true in most field, it's extremely rare to find an ads that doesn't ask for a diploma and job experience (it didn't ask for experience, but I saw an ads where they asked for a diploma in a call center position...)
It sounds like Harvey Mudd's program improves female enrollment but it's just seems like a good idea in general The quick program for Harvey Mudd seems to be 1) Make the problems more practical in application (ie controlling a robot, modelling a disease) 2) Giving students choices in what problems they are interested in 3) Segmenting students according to skill set, thus putting people who have been programming in an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are tons of male nurses. 'iamelgringo, a former top contributor here, is an ER nurse. Back of the envelope: There are ~24,000,000 people aged 18-24 in the US. Assume half are female: there are ~12,000,000 "girls who might code" in the US. Of these, 12.6% are African American. There are ~1,440,00 "black girls who might code" in the US. There are ~400,000 people who live in Tulsa. There have probably been several…
9.6% of all RNs are male [0] Why is there not a male nurse initiative? Or male elementary teacher initiative[1]? I have to admit, I am strongly against things like "Girls who code". If there truly are issues in our culture that prevent girls from looking into coding, then absolutely let's get rid of those as best we can. But a girl can look into and explore coding just as easily as a boy can. There's really nothing s…
More women than men graduate from college and women have flooded into traditionally male majors in the sciences. There are plenty of female biologists and doctors. But they have not penetrated the most mathy majors, like engineering or Math itself.
Maybe men and women aren't interchangeable cogs, and some combination of difference in interest and average ability will always mean that the way to get females into your tech company is by having a big non-software department.
[1] http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-hug...
One of that impresses me, and kind of amuses me, is how PG will talk these issues out, even though the danger of being misquoted or misinterpreted is much higher than the chances of being appreciated, especially for someone in his position. The phrase "God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers?" , as a standalone statement, is ripe for ripping apart. But I think in its context, it o…
Once again: after establishing bona fides by saying "fuck Vallywag and everything they stand for", I feel like I need to say that Graham wasn't hugely distorted. He was asked whether YC discriminates against women. The obvious subtext of that question is that there's a large imbalance between men & women among YC founders. He could have said "no, we don't discriminate; I don't know why the imbalance among YC founders…
> If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us.
In the very next sentence pg states that the lack of interest in young girls at age 13 is an actual problem. If he had some inherent belief that "girls just don't like computers" thing (ie, the great "male tech misogyny" strawman) he wouldn't cast it as a problem to be solved.
One of that impresses me, and kind of amuses me, is how PG will talk these issues out, even though the danger of being misquoted or misinterpreted is much higher than the chances of being appreciated, especially for someone in his position. The phrase "God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers?" , as a standalone statement, is ripe for ripping apart. But I think in its context, it o…
Once again: after establishing bona fides by saying "fuck Vallywag and everything they stand for", I feel like I need to say that Graham wasn't hugely distorted. He was asked whether YC discriminates against women. The obvious subtext of that question is that there's a large imbalance between men & women among YC founders. He could have said "no, we don't discriminate; I don't know why the imbalance among YC founders…
> I'm almost certain that we don't discriminate against female founders because I would know from looking at the ones we missed. [...]
OK, nothing bad here, assuming that the implication is that there aren't many female founders for him to discriminate against.
> The problem with that is I think, at least with technology companies, the people who are really good technology founders have a genuine deep interest in technology. In fact, I've heard startups say that they did not like to hire people who had only started programming when they became CS majors in college.
No argument here.
> If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13.
OK, so this is the statement that reeks of privilege. And I agree, except if you don't consider what immediately follows:
> What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us. If we really wanted to fix this problem, what we would have to do is not encourage women to start startups now. It's already too late. What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that. God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers. I would have to stop and think about that.
So my interpretation of this was that PG implicitly acknowledges that boys have a privilege here, a privilege to explore computing at the formative age necessary to become a great hacker. For whatever reason, girls do not have that privilege in today's current society, and so PG proposes, as an example measure, to overhaul middle school curriculum.
OK, so PG didn't have any great revolutionary ideas on how to fix the problem of privilege, but it doesn't seem that was his expectation for the interview. What he said wasn't full of hope and sunshine too: for women who are at the entrepreneurial age right now, they've missed the optimal time to become a Steve Wozniak or Mark Zuckerberg. OK, that should raise objections of ageism, but it's not sexism, it's a statement of the shitty situation that girls have when it comes to exploring tech at a young age.
And what PG says is of course biased towards the importance of technical prowess, and frankly, I agree. Would Steve Jobs be anywhere if Woz wasn't the batshit-amazing young engineer that he was? Not at all. And so when PG says the problem of few female founders cannot be solved by just encouraging women to create startups -- without the necessary tech acumen...I think what he argues is reasonable from a technical standpoint. In terms of tech startups, it's not just ideas, but technical execution, and Apple is the very best example of that.
So I think PG is right to point out that "encourage more female-led startups" is more of a feel-good band-aid than a solution. We want more female-led startups and we want them to succeed. In PG's opinion, that kind of success -- which is a major longshot for men -- can only come from expanding the early opportunities for girls to get more interested in tech and science.
The owner of this site appears to be a woman. Again, 20 males: http://www.bestcomputersciencedegrees.com/author/2admin/
And there is a preponderance of white males in the annals of computer history: http://inventors.about.com/library/blcoindex.htm
Even among software professionals, there is divergence in the types of roles women take vs. men. Search LinkedIn (3rd & everyone else) for SQA, and you get about 25% women. Search "Full Stack" and you get about 10% women.
Is this really YC's problem to solve?