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Girls Who Code

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Re: Girls Who Code

#41

Post by city41 »

gfodor wrote: post #26
city41 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know why you're getting downvoted. The question you ask is a good one, though you are jumping to some conclusions. I think it may very well be that there should be a "male nurse initiative", or at least that the lack of one doesn't somehow dictate the ethics and obligations of our field.

Possibly I am jumping to conclusions. I have nothing against females in tech. I strongly believe anyone should be able to pursue whatever they want.

My local hacker's space hosts coding dojos to teach children how to code. There is no special treatment given to girls in these. Everyone is welcome and encouraged. The dojo organizers are conscious of making sure there is a good representation of female teachers/mentors in the program. That is a different -- and more effective -- approach to this issue. The difference seems subtle, yet it's key.

I'm male and I knit. It's something my Mom taught me when I was young and it's stuck with me. Yet I hate when my gender is made such a big deal here. I'm not a male knitter, I'm just a knitter. I don't want to talk about my gender and how great it is I have pursued this hobby, I want to talk about the hobby. I can't help but think females would feel similar to programs like this.

Re: Girls Who Code

#42

Post by crassus »

lkrubner wrote: post #11

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…

FWIW, the startup I was at seemed to have a soft affirmative action for females. They would reject males that didn't do much outside of college work, but would be willing to consider females with the same resume because "it would be nice to have more female coders".

Culture fit was about a modicum of friendliness. You could get rejected for culture fit by, say, looking away from your interviewer and mumbling to yourself. There could have been some great (and disadvantaged!) candidates with Eyeball Avoidance Syndrome + Tourette's that were rejected unfairly by the process, but so it goes.

The company was still 90% men in engineering, because that's what your talent pipeline looks like. I'm sure they were secret sexists, or something. Valleywag would write a scathing article about them.

In your example, I bet IBM was still predominantly male despite the anecdotal hiring of a few women that you mention.

Re: Girls Who Code

#43

Post by tptacek »

gfodor wrote: post #21
lkrubner wrote: post #11

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…

"Culture fit" is a vague enough term to not really be able to say much about it. Are there companies who use it as a way to hide behind discrimination? Sure, almost certainly. But in my past experience the amount of times we rejected a candidate due to "no culture fit" was quite low and was for reasons that were of the flavor: "this person sounds like they totally caused drama in their old workplace" or "this person…

This speaks to how deranged mainstream software hiring practices are.

To wit: take a bunch of practitioners more or less at random and arrange to have them serially interview candidates. Apply virtually no structure to the interviews themselves; most of those practitioners will be free to generate their own questions, and if any guidance is given at all, it will usually take the form of "assess the candidate's abilities along axes X, Y, and Z" (for "X" of the form "Rails" or "Django" or whatever, &c). To that haphazard scheme, strongly imply that those practitioners are not merely expert at assessing the abilities of others (something that does not follow from the mere observation that the practitioners themselves are competent in the field), but also psychologists capable of extracting from a 45 minute adversarial interview the "culture" and mentality of candidates who are so nervous and upset from being judged by hostile strangers in this crapshoot process.

Software hiring is widely regarded by hiring managers as a nearly random process; at best, at savvy companies, the house might have an edge over time. And the cost of that edge is a system that is inhumane to virtually everybody, with the possible exception of a small elite of sought-after developers.

Re: Girls Who Code

#44

Post by philwelch »

owenwil wrote: post #25
gfodor wrote: post #17

I have to thank Valleywag for doing me the favor of helping me prune people who lack reading comprehension from twitter. I'm still kind of amazed how so many people un-ironically cited valleywag in their tweets. It's pretty obvious what pg was saying in this particular "smoking gun" quote: that figuring out a way to get more girls interested in programming at 13 is an incredibly important and hard problem. The willin…

Right, but when he had a chance to comment again to defend his statements, he instead went after the angle of saving himself rather than addressing the issue at the core. He could have talked about the work he's doing to help girls learn to code. He could have talked about others' work to help girls learn code. He could have talked about how he is not biased towards men. Instead, he just attacked journalists in gener…

The root problem is that when he tried talking about the root problem, his words were taken out of context and used against him. There's no way to win with character assassins and tabloids, and calling them out as people who don't discuss issues in good faith is the best you can do.

Re: Girls Who Code

#45

Post by baddox »

tptacek wrote: post #30
pflats wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by tons, you mean 9%, then yes, there are tons of male nurses. Many are nurse anesthetists, which isn't what most people think of when they think "nurse". (Anesthetists also earn an extra hundred grand a year, on average.) http://www.census.gov/people/io/files/Men_in_Nursing_Occupat...

It is not helpful that "nursing" is an explicitly gendered term. And despite that, the fraction of nurses who are male is climbing steadily.

In what way is "nursing" explicitly gendered? Obviously one of its definitions necessarily refers specifically to women, e.g. "wet nurse," but that's the only one, and that's simply an issue of mammary glands. I was under the impression that the word comes from a contraction of the word "nourish" and doesn't have any explicit gender association.

Re: Girls Who Code

#46

Post by baddox »

danso wrote: post #14
rokhayakebe wrote: post #4

I am a man. These initiatives will simply not work. Imagine "Men Nurse." Many women SIMPLY do not code for the same reason many men do not code. Most of us were not exposed to the science as kids, hence step 1 is to make Programming mandatory. Note I say programming and not C.S.. I am an amateur programmer and I can say wit confidence that this is as fundamental as basic arithmetic. Full stop. I frankly wish they shu…

Your intentions are good, but in practical terms, you are wrong. The creation of things like "Girls Who Code" is not a statement that this is the way things should be but a statement that this is the way things have to be -- for now . Just about everyone will say -- and do so sincerely -- that they are totally for more females to get into programming, if those females want to be involved. But the problem isn't the in…

> The creation of things like "Girls Who Code" is not a statement that this is the way things should be but a statement that this is the way things have to be -- for now.

And I think the response is a disagreement over the way things have to be for now.

Re: Girls Who Code

#47

Post by gfodor »

tptacek wrote: post #43
gfodor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Culture fit" is a vague enough term to not really be able to say much about it. Are there companies who use it as a way to hide behind discrimination? Sure, almost certainly. But in my past experience the amount of times we rejected a candidate due to "no culture fit" was quite low and was for reasons that were of the flavor: "this person sounds like they totally caused drama in their old workplace" or "this person…

This speaks to how deranged mainstream software hiring practices are. To wit: take a bunch of practitioners more or less at random and arrange to have them serially interview candidates. Apply virtually no structure to the interviews themselves; most of those practitioners will be free to generate their own questions, and if any guidance is given at all, it will usually take the form of "assess the candidate's abilit…

Is it the case that you do not screen candidates based upon any other criteria than skills-based assessment in other fields? That assumes people are robots. I don't care what field you are talking about, people are always going to screen for "culture fit", since it can be defined to mean anything you want. It's "can I work with this person", "does this person seem trustworthy and honest", etc. The only difference is that it some places acknowledge this aspect of hiring, give it a name, and try to objectively assess it openly.

Re: Girls Who Code

#48

Post by tptacek »

gfodor wrote: post #37
tptacek wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 not sure this is a fair assessment. The (admittedly likely butchered at this point) quote: > 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…

Once again: misogyny is a specific thing. It connotes an overt bias against women. That bias, while definitely present in our industry (and for some reason especially well-represented on HN) is rare. I would be shocked to find out that Paul Graham was a misogynist: it would not fit the rest of the picture that I have of him from what he writes.

But the absence of bias against women is inadequate innoculation against gender imbalance in the industry. It doesn't correct for bias towards men. That bias is pervasive. It's easy to see why: it involves saying nice things about people who do good work, and then simply generalizing it out a bit. The end result is a system of privilege for people who "fit the mold" for successful startup hackers.

Re: Girls Who Code

#49

Post by philwelch »

sbt wrote: post #9

I hope PG doesn't get too frightened by the press from this and stops being his usual honest plainspoken self. We need more people like him trying to portray an accurate map of the territory, rather than being afraid of how quotes may be spun by cheap journalists.

If he takes his own advice[1], he'd be hard pressed to say anything at all. When people furiously accuse you of misogyny for not repeating the party line, there's no good faith discussion possible.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/say.html

Re: Girls Who Code

#50

Post by EliRivers »

city41 wrote: post #20
tptacek wrote: post #13

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…

Why is there not a male nurse initiative?

Did you actually look?

http://www.gatewayct.edu/Programs-Courses/Divisions-Departme...

http://www.minoritynurse.com/article/man-enough-20-x-20-choo...

http://aamn.org/choosenursing.shtml

Likewise the male teachers of younger children.

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